Bobby Bosler: All right, I'd like to go ahead and get started here, if we could.

So I've got some stuff on my heart, and I want to say this session here is a session that on the one hand, this is going to sound really bad, okay, especially since there's so many people here.

This is a session I've not done a ton of work on.

But on the other hand, this is a session that I've actually been working on for about eight years, okay?

Here's what I mean by this.

There was a period of time in my life, again, I've been doing my devotions for a long time, and I recognize doing your devotions can mean a number of different things to a number of different people.

And I would say for me, probably the starting point for spending time with God was, you know, definitely on the light side, read a few verses, maybe read a proverb, something like that.

It probably wasn't until I came to Bible college that I started doing something much more structured than that with an actual Bible reading plan, okay?

And that was a good thing.

Probably it wasn't until maybe it was upper high school, definitely when I came to college, that I read through the entire Bible, right, in a year.

And that's great.

And I recommend that for everyone, especially for those that have not done that yet.

Because if you don't have a plan like that that gets you through the entire Bible, there are going to be some parts of the Bible you are literally never going to read, okay?

There are going to be some verses you're just never going to encounter.

And all of the Word of God is profitable and it's important for you and for your spiritual health and growth and development.

But I have to say, after many years of reading through the Bible every year, I was in 1 Corinthians, actually, at that point in time in my normal yearly Bible reading schedule.

And I hit a point in that book where I thought, I feel like sometimes I'm going at such a pace of reading through the entire Bible every year that there's just so much that I'm missing.

And I had an urge, a craving in my heart.

There was a certain sense in which I thought, why do I have to do this reading through the Bible every year thing?

I just want to know my Bible thoroughly.

I want the privilege of being able to just, you know, stop and spend time on a verse, dig through these verses and these chapters.

And then I came to this idea, wait a minute, I guess I could do that right now, couldn't I?

Like, who's to say that I absolutely have to read through the entire Bible in a year?

Now, let me just pause and say this.

If you've not done that, I really strongly recommend you do that.

And I really want to strongly recommend that, because again, if you just study certain things, God wants you to know and to have read and to know His Word.

But, for me, at that point in time, this would have been 2015, at the end of 2015, I believe it was.

Really, I would say the thing that really started me on this journey with this thirst to thoroughly study my Bible, I was preparing for a trip to Kenya.

And I was going to be going and teaching at IBCM, International Baptist College of Ministry in Nairobi, Kenya.

We've got some folks who know about that.

Independent, thank you, thank you, very good.

Independent Baptist College Ministry there.

And I was supposed to be teaching a class on the Book of Romans.

And so in preparation for that class, I took a couple of months and I just dug in to the Book of Romans.

I had a couple of resources that I used in the process of that study.

But at that point in time, I didn't really have a method like I have now.

I didn't really have a good process like I have developed, like I have now.

And at that point, it was a lot of reading, a lot of meditating.

And I kind of went into that class and pretty much puked my guts out, okay, as far as all the stuff that I'd put in, just like many of you felt like doing during that skit a little bit earlier.

I just kind of just let it all come out in the class.

Sorry to remind some of you of that, okay.

And so after that class, though, having dug in deep, having thought about every sentence, every phrase, and at times just about every word in these passages and thought deeply and studied deeply about that book, I came out on the other side of that study with such a hunger, a taste for deep study of the word that I knew I could not go back to just a surface level skimming of the Bible.

Now listen, I want to just say this.

I'm trying to give some caveats because the last thing that I want, I do not want anyone to leave this session thinking, Mr.

Bosler doesn't like reading through the Bible in a year.

No, listen, do not quote me wrong.

I know who you are.

I'll hunt you down.

And I'll do something, all right?

Okay, so just don't do that.

But the thirst and the craving, that taste that God put in my heart is something that has not been entirely quenched even to this day.

It's been something that I've been pursuing in my life.

And I've had the privilege over the years of a few people here and there.

They say, Mr.

Bosler, I heard about your Bible study method, that thing that you do, can you sit down with me and kind of walk me through it?

And oh, yeah, sure.

I remember Johnny Gilmore and I, we sat down in a Dunkin' Donuts.

We just talked about that last night again, and I kind of walked him through the method that I use in Bible study and really dig it in.

And he said it has affected the way that he views his own personal Bible study to this day.

And so again, a number of other people, I've walked through them with that.

And so I want to take you on a little bit of an explainer.

Again, I want to make this clear.

This is not the only way to study your Bible.

This is not, in fact, I would argue this may not be a good fit for your daily devotions.

Okay, it may, but it may not.

I'm also going to say this.

Some of the things that I do, you may not yet be equipped to do it in the way that I do it.

Okay, there is a sense in which, and I don't want to say this in any way to make you think that this is inaccessible to you, because it's not.

Anyone can study their Bible.

But at least the depth that I've gone into some things, I'm thankful that I've had a Bible college education and even a seminary education.

But again, you do not need a Bible college education and seminary education to study your Bible.

You have the Holy Spirit.

He can help you understand the Word.

But, okay, and so some of this is going to be, you could say in a certain sense, a philosophy of Bible study.

Some of this is just going to be a practical approach.

And some of this is going to involve some tools.

I don't want you to think that you need these tools in order to do this method, but I just want to show you what I do.

So let me give you a little bit maybe of a history of the progression on how this happened.

So like I said, after I went through, and I really had devoted those months preparing for that class to Romans.

Like my Bible study was all about Romans, and I read and I read and I read and I read and I thought, and I wrote a few things down here and there.

Again, I'm a nerd.

I did some diagramming when there were sentences that I didn't understand, and I just wanted to understand it and master it.

But what happened is after I was done with that class, I went back to my regular Bible reading schedule.

And at that point in time, I believe I was getting ready to go into 1 Corinthians 12.

And I thought, let me try something.

So at that time, our church had been developing some resources and some approaches on discipleship.

This was actually before even kind of the Christ Walk Journal had been fully developed.

The hour of prayer, I think the Lord was kind of stirring us at that time about the hour that changed the world.

And there were a number of things like that.

But one of the things that Pastor Gilmore released, it was a little yellow book.

Does anybody remember the yellow book around here?

Okay, there may be a couple that remember that.

There's one aspect of that yellow book that I remember transformed me.

And that aspect of the yellow book, essentially, it was part of a guide for doing a DBS, but part of that was you take a text of scripture and you write it out, and then you write it out again, and then, and here was the thing that for me changed everything, you put that verse in your own words.

Now, that may not sound revolutionary to you, but here's the thing, And some of this may just be because I have a weird way of thinking.

I don't know.

Maybe I don't.

Maybe I do.

Maybe I don't.

Maybe you all think totally different and you don't think like me.

But I found sometimes when I was studying a verse, I'd heard people talk about meditation.

But I'll be honest with you, kind of like Mr.

Reed talked about in that session, you could talk about abide, but what does that actually mean, right?

And meditation, I thought about meditation as just kind of sitting there and just thinking.

And oftentimes I would get to a verse of scripture and I want to meditate.

And so I would just sit there and, and as is often the case in guys and in their heads, you know what was happening up here?

Nothing, nothing at all.

There was nothing happening.

Meditationists didn't even know what that was and what it meant.

And I discovered something when I started trying to take the put it in your own words and put this into my Bible study there in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians.

I wanted to slow down and I just wanted to put this chapter in my own words.

And in fact, I'm going to put some things on the screen.

And I can't promise to you this is all, this is not like a nice PowerPoint or anything like that.

this is actually kind of a little bit of just a raw presentation that's my son Jude he always makes faces like that he gets it from his father all right so there's a couple things that I want to show you here I have I have an app you don't have to have an app and oh all my personal devotion stuff don't look at those all right so I do journal that is one thing that I do and again kind of one of the reasons why

I didn't just want to have a nice PowerPoint presentation.

I just want you to see practically what, and I'm sorry for you, Laura.

I told you to sit in the corner.

Now you can't see the TV.

All right.

And you've got some out there too.

So listen in, lean around the corner.

I really, you're allowed to sit here if you want to.

Okay.

Right here in the front, you're allowed to do that.

So way back at the beginning, this was probably the very first entry that I put down here for my Bible study method, 1 Corinthians 12.

It has to do with the body, body parts, different things like that, right?

And I just sat down and I was just reading through the chapter and I just thought, okay, I'm just going to summarize in my own words, kind of what's going on here in this chapter.

And so for verses one through three, and maybe I'll pull up the text also here, verses 1 through 3 of 1 Corinthians 12.

And this is Logos Bible software.

You don't need Logos Bible software to do what I'm talking about.

1 Corinthians 12, he says, Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant.

You know that ye were Gentiles carried away into these dumb idols, even as you were led.

Wherefore, I give to you to understand that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed, and that no man can say that Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.

So I just wrote down Paul's concern that they don't get swept up into the same realm of misunderstandings regarding spiritual gifts as they did regarding idols before they were saved.

There is a clear litmus test.

Jesus.

And all I wanted to do was I just wanted in a way that made sense to me, in a way that I understand, I just want to regurgitate this in my own words.

And so, let's see, this would have been January 28, 2016 at 1117 a.m.

Okay, I got to tell you, I was off.

Okay, I wasn't, okay.

I actually probably spent probably most of the morning working on this.

I didn't have meetings at that moment in time.

I was probably, oh, let's see, where was I?

I'm just curious.

Yeah, I was in New Jersey with my folks out there at that time.

So I just wrote these things down.

All the gifts, though diverse, come from one source, God.

And I'm not going to read all the verses these gifts are given.

At this point, I would say this was what I would call third person.

Do you know what I mean by third person?

Okay, there's, when we talk, right?

There is first person, that's I and we.

There's second person, that's you.

And for some of you, y'all, right?

Okay, and for third person, that's he, she, it, or they, right?

So this is third person.

There's a certain sense in which right here, the way I was restating these things was essentially me making observations on the text.

You could say, I'm just looking at this, trying to understand it, put it into my own words, like I'm writing my own little commentary, okay?

That's essentially what I was doing here.

And so I went through this chapter, and I got to the end of the chapter, and I thought, dude, this is kind of cool.

Like, I feel like I have a grasp of this chapter because what happened was, in the process of trying to output, I, in my inputting, in the reading of the text, I had to think about it in a different way than I do just reading it.

When we just read, we are often passive.

The information comes in right here and out right here and hopefully something sticks in the filter of your brain along the way.

But the thing that I started stumbling upon was, oh, whoa, okay, if I stop and if I slow down and if I read these things from the standpoint of I am going to restate these things in my own words.

I found out it engages a different part of my brain.

I think about this differently.

And when I got to the end of this first day of doing this, I realized I just meditated.

That was so cool.

And for me, not only meditating, but writing down the things that I meditated, I had a resource.

that I could go back to at any time.

Now, again, I'm not claiming that my resource is right in everything that I said, in every position that I take about even tricky things along the way.

I'm not saying this is the authority.

You know what the authority is?

It's the Bible.

It's the words that God inspired and preserved for you in your Bible here today.

But in the process, listen, this was of immense value to me.

So I continued on in this little journey.

I did 1 Corinthians 13, And I kind of got into a little bit of a different way of doing it.

Like things started to morph in my approach.

I went from saying it more in a third person standpoint, which I did.

And again, and this was probably still third person.

I talk about love.

You know the love chapter, right?

By the way, he might take some pictures.

Just ignore him, all right?

The love chapter, right?

You can have this, this, and this, right?

But if you don't have love, you're fooling yourself, right?

And I started writing down things like, oh, man, it's possible to suppress all others the exercise of spiritual abilities and to miss love.

It's possible to know all about what God's doing and to depend on God for great things and to miss love.

It's possible to sacrifice oneself and one's resource for the good of others and to miss love.

And I'm just, again, I'm just trying to regurgitate it, right?

Think about it and just spit it out again.

To miss out on love is to have sound without substance, to feel important, but be nothing, to feel successful, but to have to succeeded in nothing.

And in the process of doing this, what I started to do in addition to, and again, I'm just telling you what I did.

Whether you agree with it or not, I'll leave that up to you.

But in the process of this, I started sometimes hitting a word I didn't understand, right?

In the process of studying, thinking I'm not sure I understand that phrase.

In the process of trying to put it in my own words, I realized I can't put this verse on my own words because I don't even know what it means.

And I started taking resources and using those resources to better understand the text.

And what I started using is I had a few commentaries available.

There's some great things.

In fact, if you are writing anything down, you might want to write down Wearsby.

He's a great accessible ground level commentator.

Not that everything that he says is true, but I would encourage you, if you're kind of getting to that stage where you're looking at this and you're trying to put things in your own words and you're feeling like, I'm not sure I even understand what this is saying so that I can put it on my own words.

Talk to your pastor, talk to your parents about some trusted commentaries that they might let you get.

You say, oh no, do you have devotions out of your commentaries?

No, I had my devotions out of the Bible.

In the observations of others to be able to better understand the text.

And so in the process of doing this, I started finding a few commentaries in this instance, for instance, instance for instance, anyway, I ran across this guy, Thistleton.

It's a highly technical commentary.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for everyone, but here he made this statement.

I thought this was really good.

Love, Paul, just waits patiently, not only because it deals patiently with the loved one, but also because it recognizes that the right timing plays a huge part in securing the welfare of others.

That was something he talked about when he talked about the fact that love is patient.

And I started, like my brain just started grasping things and I started realizing, whoa.

And in the process of just studying these things in this chapter, and again, my purpose is not to exegete this chapter here for you, but I started expanding my understanding through these resources, but always coming back to putting it in my own words.

Okay, and again, in this, again, I didn't really settle on a method here quite yet.

I just, it was kind of stream of consciousness as I'm discovering things.

I'm trying to put in my own words and I had kind of at this point here included some quotes in the process and again, I don't want any of you to sit down and think, oh no, he's talking about writing a paper.

I hate writing papers.

No, no.

But the process of regurgitating and putting in my own words, And it was changing me.

In the process, again, sometimes I got a little creative with things.

Okay, like maybe this right here.

Okay, what is love?

What is this?

It's like potty training.

I don't know.

Okay, you got to understand at this point in time, we were right in the middle of potty training my daughter, Eva.

So there were a lot of things going through my mind.

And again, listen, here's the thing with putting it in your own words.

If there's an analogy that makes sense to you, that helps you understand things, And it kind of, as you're trying to put it in your own words, you're kind of thinking, oh, it's kind of like this.

Well, sure, throw it in.

Nobody has to see these things.

Except if you do a workshop on it eight years later.

Okay, it's like potty training.

These things, again, we're talking about, you know, maybe here in the context, some of the sign gifts and so on that he was talking about.

There are things that serve their purpose until the goal is reached.

Potty charts, M&Ms, special potty seats, and special pull-up vipers.

Brother, we are potty training.

That is, what we are after hasn't happened yet.

Our training is incomplete, but there will come a day when it will all be over and our purpose realized.

And again, I'm not saying this is right.

I'm not saying you have to agree with necessarily my position on the passage, but I was meditating.

I was thinking and in the process of meditating as I actually output what I was inputting, the process of trying to understand that and outputting it helped me understand my Bible in a way that I have never understood it before.

And so I got through to some other things.

And again, what started happening is I went from, notice here, in the first chapter, an entire chapter, right?

And then here I went down to like maybe a paragraph, five verses, maybe seven verses, something like that.

To then I went down to here, you know, maybe a few more verses.

And then, oh, I'm down to four verses.

And slowly by slowly, as I continued doing this stuff, it started getting narrower and narrower and narrower.

And it kind of got to a point where I was sitting on a verse, one verse, and mining the depths of one verse every day.

I'll be honest with you.

There were times when I would spend several days on a verse thinking about it.

I've got some entries along the way where I've got, you know, chapter 1, verse 2a, chapter 1, verse 2b, chapter 1, verse 2c.

And there were some days, like when I went through the fruit of the Spirit, that was like a couple of weeks just trying to regurgitate and put these things out.

So I say that to say that I got through 1 Corinthians here.

And don't be confused by this.

I did come back because I thought, I didn't do the first part of 1 Corinthians.

I want to come back and do that.

And I actually just started doing that earlier on here this year.

But in the process of things, I think the next book that I went into and did was 2 Corinthians.

And when I got to the beginning of 2 Corinthians, in the process, I started doing it in two sections.

My first section, initially, I called it exposition.

And again, sometimes I wrote like a summary to kind of summarize what was going on.

But I started shifting from the third person perspective into what I call the second person perspective.

And what I did was essentially I tried to imagine myself as Paul if it was a Pauline epistle, not if it was James.

That would be dumb for me.

Imagine myself being Paul with James, right?

I imagine myself sitting down, and again, I was studying epistles here at this time, the letters in the New Testament, and I started imagining myself being the author and asking questions like, okay, if I was writing in this setting and writing to this group of people, why would I have said it this way?

What would my burdens, what could my burdens have been behind using this set of words?

Why would I even bring it up?

Why would I order the things that I'm saying in this way?

And I just found the more I was writing it out, putting it in my own words, and the more I was imagining myself in Paul's shoes as he's writing these letters, the more I found just the meaning began to come alive to me, and I shifted into what I call the second person perspective here.

Notice here, even at the beginning of the letter, right, this letter is from Paul, who's an apostle, not by his own choice or his own mission, speaking his own message, but as one who is on the direct commission of God himself.

I'm under the authority of God, and therefore I'm an authorized representative to speak for the King of Kings.

This letter is from Timothy as well.

He's serving as a fellow witness to all that I'm about to say to you.

It's for you there in Corinth, your church.

I kind of shifted from just saying, here's what Paul said about this, to as I'm putting it in my own words, I'm kind of, please don't misunderstand me here, I'm kind of pretending like I am Paul so that I can, as best I can, understand Paul.

And so as I went throughout this process, as you can notice here, that's a lot to write about one little verse.

But my burden and my desire there was for every shred and ounce of meaning here in this verse, I wanted to represent that in the way that I was restating it in my own words.

Again, you look here, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God.

Here, I'm saying, listen, this letter's from Paul, who's an apostle, not by his own choice.

Okay, this here, it says it was by the will of God, not by the will of Paul.

It wasn't by my choice.

It's not my own mission.

I'm not speaking my own message, but I'm under the direct commission of God himself.

Again, this process of putting in my own words was helping me understand my Bible.

So as I continued, and the more I went and began to develop this, eventually I started writing down application statements.

So here, again, I've not screened these.

I've not pre-selected which ones I'm doing.

I'm just grabbing stuff, okay, out of this.

Here, again, I don't even remember what these verses are, but an application statement was, in my mind, not so much an I will statement.

An I will statement is really good.

But I found sometimes in the process of just trying to understand the text and just trying to understand these verses, I just wanted some sort of a short phrase or sentence that I could hang all of what I learned on there.

It was like a summary of the summary, just a very brief statement of what I learned from the text.

And again, sometimes it's a helpful thought, a helpful thing that would help me.

And here I put a confrontation that's not primarily votive needed to help the individual is a confrontation that should not have happened.

Then I learned from this and I don't even remember what it was about the text that led me to make that kind of an application statement.

But what I started finding as I was doing these, in fact, I think it was around when I was in chapter four or five here, I was getting my team ready to travel.

And again, I don't remember specifically where it was, but I was training my team, okay, for a war.

I do the war, I do the cola clash also, many of you have been to some of those things.

And as I was sitting down with my team, I thought, you know what, I'm going to share with them some of the things that I'm learning here.

And I started sharing some of those things in my training week.

And then as we went throughout the semester, I started just sharing stuff.

And what I started to find is, this is crazy.

Like as I'm going verse by verse through these verses, like the stuff that I shared with my team this morning, we needed that this afternoon.

And I started finding that there were times when I would be coming in in the morning and I'd study my study and I come in and I start saying this and I realized, dude, he thinks I'm sharing this verse because of an issue in his life, right?

And I, this is, this is the thrill the pastors get, right?

They work through something expositionally and God just so happened to choose that this passage is going to be on this day and it's perfect timing.

That started to happen to me in my life and with, with my team and people that I was ministering to and with, and it was like, whoa, this is amazing.

This is awesome.

And then, okay, and this is going to be a few steps beyond, I started finding as I was studying, again, I'm a preacher, I think you know that, but as I was studying, what I was finding was not only was this having direct impact on what was going on today and with my team, I started finding that as I was communicating the Word of God and preaching, it was like there was this whole backlog of stuff that I had been discovering, that I was finding

that was now available to me, not only in my head, but at times, if I was burdened to preach on this text because I'd studied a while, I could go back to the stuff that I'd written down and it's like, I got a sermon.

Like I didn't prepare it to be a sermon, but I was like, wow, I've already got the front work done for this.

I've got the study.

I know what this text is talking about and I could do sermon prep in sometimes five minutes, just make it ready to go for the crowd that I'm preaching to here today.

And it just started changing things.

And I'm going to say something.

I don't want you to misunderstand me here, but I would say prior to this method and this approach in my life, I viewed my devotions as transactional.

Which, listen, you need to have a transaction with God every day.

And what I mean by that, you need to have something where God speaks to you, where God gives you instruction for the day.

But so many times I would come to the text, whatever my reading was, and my only concern was I need something for today.

And what would happen is there was stuff in there for next week.

There was actually stuff in there for a year from now.

There was stuff that may not necessarily have applied that day, But because I was just skipping past understanding my Bible, I was sacrificing, I suppose you could say, well, let me put it this way.

This is probably, if you take anything away from this, take this thought.

Your devotions should not just be about a transaction.

They should also be about an investment.

So as I've been studying, I've been investing.

taking time and studying for the sake of me understanding the Bible even stuff that I may not have to use today but listen there's stuff I've studied and there's stuff as I've been studying I realized you know what not everybody looks at that passage that way but that is like totally what it's saying and I've been building this uh repository this this repertoire this this bulk of just Bible knowledge that has been shaping my framework of understanding my world.

Listen, friends, if I wanted to tell you the outline of 1 Corinthians, I could do it like that.

I know what 1 Corinthians is about.

I know what the flow is throughout the letter.

Since I've started this, I have done this basic method of just sitting there and again, not having any sort of external schedule dictating how much I got to get through today.

I'm taking it as slow as I need to because my goal is not getting through a bunch of stuff.

My goal is understanding the next thing in my Bible.

And what has happened is I have now gone through, again, I'm going back through 1 Corinthians, but I've gone all the way through 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon.

I'm partway through James.

Let's see, I have done, I'm actually still kind of stuck in the middle of Romans chapter 9.

Don't ask me why.

I have gone, and again, I'm going back through 1 Corinthians, and I feel, and I've actually gone through almost like the last third of Acts as well in this way.

which narrative is even a little different in the way that's handled.

But what I've got now is I've got a pretty good handle on most of Paul's epistles.

And I don't say that to brag.

I don't say that to say I'm the authority on these things.

No, I'm going to continue to learn about those things till the day I die.

But if I needed to preach out of Titus 2, I could go back and I could look at that.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Oh, man.

Oh, okay.

I'm getting this.

This is coming back to me now.

And because of a thoroughness, I have invested in my own understanding of the Scripture.

And I know I'm going to continue to reap payoffs from that, not only in my walk with Christ, but in my public ministry, in my private ministry, with my family.

What happens is when you're going through these things verse by verse and you hit a tough verse, well, guess what?

You're not just going to say, I don't understand that, move on.

You're going to stop.

You're going to meditate on it.

You're going to study up on it.

You're going to talk to people about it, perhaps.

Say, hey, what do you think about this verse?

What do you think is going on here in this verse?

And again, I have been going through this in this way since the beginning of 2016.

Again, kind of the stuff before I actually started recording stuff was in 2015.

But as a result, I have, and let me just see if I can find these.

I have got, let's see, let me get the actual folder of this.

Okay, I've got now documents here of all of these letters that I've gone through.

And I'm probably not going to publish because I've not been super great with citation of some things.

And I don't want to be one of those authors that gets penalized for plagiarism.

This was not done for publication.

But I've been able to put these things through into documents where I can go back and reap from my study.

Now, I know I've probably left a lot of nuts and bolts.

I will just briefly show you kind of the setup of what my study setup looks like.

And this is going to be different for everybody, okay?

But I have typically, I've got my Bible open and I've got a panel over here where I can write my stuff out, right where I can see the text that I use over here.

I do have a bunch of commentaries.

You don't need commentaries to do this.

I've got some Bible study lexicons and so on open down here.

In fact, my Greek text isn't open, but I don't want to scare you with that, okay?

I do typically have a Greek text open down here on the bottom where I'm looking at that.

And again, I know Greek, I teach Greek.

You don't have to know Greek to know your Bible, okay?

But in the process of doing this, again, I'm looking at the text and honestly where I'm at right now is in 1 Corinthians 1 and what is it, verse 9, 8, 9, no, it's 1 Corinthians 2, sorry.

And I'm working through this right now.

Again, just the last time that I've done this, this week has been a little crazy.

And by the way, let me tell you this too, don't feel like this is the only way you can have your devotions.

Okay?

You may want to have a Bible reading schedule and this.

this Bible study thing may not be the only thing that you have going on in fact if you've been getting involved in the hour of prayer you might want to do that too you say that sounds like a lot a lot of hours well you know what do you love your Bible I hope I hope you do and if God has given me anything through this he's given me a love not just for what I can get out of the Bible he's given me a

love for the love letter that God gave to me.

Don't just get enamored with what it means to you.

Get enamored with what it meant back then.

Because what you will find is as you get enamored with what it meant, you're going to have a much better understanding of what it means.

Does that make sense?

Again, I think so often, and me as an evangelist, I love application.

I love to say, thus saith the Lord, here's what you need to do with it.

But that ought to be based on what it meant.

And when you thoroughly understand what it meant, then you can faithfully get to what it means.

Have you ever heard a preacher stand up and give some application point and you're looking at your Bible thinking, don't be critical like that, okay?

I've done it.

You'll do it.

Other men have done it.

It could be you just don't understand this part right here, okay?

But personally, my philosophy of preaching and application, and Mr.

Reed is going to talk more about application if you choose to go to that session there coming up here.

I want my case to be a locked case.

In other words, like a lawyer seeks to prove his case in a way that no one could argue with.

I want my application to be like that.

And I found the best way to do that is to thoroughly understand the Bible, the text itself.

So anyway, that being said, I hope that's been a help.

I know I haven't gotten into all the nuts and bolts of everything, but essentially I just wanted to give you my heart on this.

And maybe this will pique some curiosity in your heart and your mind to approach your Bible study a little bit differently.

So again, hopefully that was a blessing.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for all coming.

It's been very humbling for all of you to be here.