LW24 | How To Zoom In on Scripture - Brendan McDonough

Leader Weekend Spring 2024
How To Zoom In on Scripture - Brendan McDonough

In this talk, Brendan McDonough shares his passion for studying and understanding the Bible. He introduces a three-step method to help others gain a deeper understanding of God's word: labeling, looking, and learning. He emphasizes the importance of approaching different genres of the Bible in different ways and making observations based on the actual text. By asking learning questions, individuals can uncover the true meaning of the passage before applying it to their lives. The talk highlights the importance of deliberate and careful study of scripture.

Transcript

My name is Brendan. I am on navigator staff. I run a ministry at Northern Kentucky University. I bet a lot of you are NKU students, right? Raise your hand if you're an NKU student, just to let me see you, half of you guys.

Awesome. I'm also a public speaking professor there, so I don't think I recognize any former students, but I'm usually the professor people hate to have because nobody likes public speaking, right? Or at least a lot of people don't. But I spent a lot of my time on campus, and I'm. I'm also a bit of a Bible nerd.

It didn't start that way, but I genuinely enjoy reading and studying the Bible. I didn't when I was 19 or 20, but in my elder age of 31 now I've kind of started to appreciate zooming in on just reading scripture in a certain way. But I remember when I was 19, 2021. I'm guessing that's the age range of a lot of you guys. There were things that I found difficult about opening the Bible.

If I was reading a passage for the first time, a lot of times I'd be like, I don't really understand what's going on here, and I'll just wait until somebody explains it to me in a talk or in a sermon or something. And then there were some passages I'd read five, six, seven times, because I did grow up going to church a little bit, and I would struggle to read those, too, and be like, okay, I know what I learned when I was in 8th grade, but how am I supposed to read anything new out of this? And then I started being a ministry leader. Like, I know you guys are for me, I was leading college students. I know that you guys are leading middle schoolers and high schoolers, right?

Yeah, I remember I was leading people, and people would be like, well, hey, Brendan, you said that you're seeing this in the passage, but how do you know that's what's in the passage? How do you know you're not just, like, making that up? And I remember the first time I was out there, I don't know, they said that I was a leader. I guess we're going to roll with that. And it's kind of.

Of ignored the question for a little bit, but then over time, I kind of dove into that a little bit. I was like, okay, how do I know that what I'm reading is what I'm supposed to be reading in the Bible? And so I've kind of collected some tools. I've created none of these. None of these are my invention, but I've just kind of put them onto three pieces of paper for you guys, or two front back on one, just to kind of offer you, if you want to zoom in on a passage and really spend some time just understanding a couple of verses, making sure you know exactly what God wants you to know from that passage.

Here's some tools I think can help you do that. So that's kind of the goal here today. Hopefully, it'll be helpful for you or for the students that you're leading. Even if there's no way you can lead out of this, maybe it'll just be helpful for your own time with the Lord. Makes sense.

Okay, so there's three steps. I'm not suggesting that every time you open the Bible, you're going to go through all three of these steps. I just kind of offer them as tools, but they do kind of make sense in an order. So I'm going to start with step one on that sheet. And all my steps start with L's because alliteration is fun.

So step one, I'm going to say, is label, which is not something that when I first started reading the Bible, nobody said to label things. But I actually think labeling what you're reading is important. And the question that I have that goes with that is, what is it?

And really, when I say label, what I want you to do. Oh, I got goal under there, too. I had a lot of blanks for you guys in the beginning. I want you to understand how God wants you to read the verse. Let me hit all those blanks again.

Step one is labeling. The question you're kind of asking is, what is it that I'm reading? And I want to help you understand how God wants you to read a verse. And what I'm really talking about here is this idea of genre in scripture. I bet that we don't often think about the Bible as having genres.

When you hear the word genre, what do you think of most often? Actual question. I want somebody to shout out and answer this music. Right. Okay, so let's start there, because that is something in 2024, now that we use that word with.

What are some genres of music? You guys know, hip hop, hip hop, country, folk, classic, classic, rock, rock, country western. Country west western. Yeah, you can get really specific, right? You could say, oh, rock, rap, or you could say, like, indie, christian, screamo, metal.

Like, you could go really narrow into something. Let's take two really popular ones. If you were to take rap music and country music. What tends to be different about those two genres of music? There could be a lot of differences.

But what tends to be different about those two genres of music, or what's something that's true of one that isn't true of the other? On average, beat and rhythm. Beaten rhythm could be an example.

Language could be different, although I'd say both of those can have a decent amount of language in comparison to some gospel music. Right. What else? Subject of the song? Yeah, subject of the song.

I've not heard a lot of rap songs that talk about tractors. Right. But I have heard some country music talks about tractors. Anything else?

There's a couple of examples there, and I think if you've listened to a song, if I played you 10 seconds of the intro of a song, you'd be able to tell immediately if it was country music or it was rap music. Right. How would you be able to tell if that was the case? Instruments. Instruments.

The type of instruments, the type of sound. Sure. You'd just be able to listen to it, and you'd kind of know, like, oh, this is probably genre. Or folk or rock or rap or gospel music. You can just kind of tell just based on listening to it.

It's not like your brain is actively going like, oh, I can identify this chromatic scale. You just can kind of hear it. You can kind of tell. I want to pitch to you that there's actually genres in the Bible, too, and there's genres of all kinds of books. Like, if you harken back to your middle school or high school english class, like, there's different genres of literature.

There's fiction, nonfiction. But even in the fiction, there's, like, fantasy, there's science fiction, there's historical fiction. There's poetry in the Bible. There are different genres as well. And this matters because you're not supposed to read each genre the same.

You don't listen to rap music and hear it the same way as you listen to country music. They're talking about different things. They're using different rhythms and patterns. You don't read poetry the same way you read a textbook. You know that they contain different types of information and kind of have different rules.

In the Bible, there are different genres that are used, and you're not supposed to read them the same way. I would say to you that God didn't intend for you to read them the same way. And most of you do this without thinking of it all the time. Let's start with the idea of poetry. Is there a book of poetry in the Bible.

Yes. Somebody shout out, what's the book of poetry in the Bible? The big one. Psalms. Right.

You don't read psalms the same as you read the book of acts. For the most part, you probably don't think about that, but you don't read it the same way. You're like, yeah, there's some different things going on, but I want to say there's actually, like, more categories than that. And when you start to kind of understand, it can help you understand difficult passages. So let me start with this.

I think that you guys could probably pull some of them out. What are some genres that are in the Bible, if you had to take a guess? History. History could be a genre. Somebody over here said one.

Maybe ethics. Ethics could be a part of it. Parables. Parables, definitely. Poetry is a bit of a guinea.

I already mentioned that one. Revelation. Revelation. Kind of apocryphal stuff is like its own type of genre. Prophetic.

Prophetic. That's a big one. Yeah. You're not supposed to read the prophecies the same as you read judges. Wisdom.

Wisdom. Literature. Yeah. You're not supposed to read proverbs the same way you read Leviticus. You guys mentioned a bunch of them.

I want to give you what I would say are some of, maybe not exhaustive, but some of the main genres of scripture. And then I want to give you guys a chance in kind of your tables to see if you can recognize this. So I'm going to go down this list or says some genres in the Bible. These are, again, some categories, maybe not everyone that exists, but I would say the most common ones. You see that first one, rules and instructions for life.

I would say that that is law. There's a lot of law in the Bible. Can anyone think of the main book of law or one of the two books of the law in the Bible? Leviticus is the big one. Deuteronomy is the other one.

When you read those, you are reading rules and instructions for life. And it says broad, not specific in there. Meaning it's broad to an entire people group. Not specific to one city or one person. Bunch of laws.

The Bible has a laws in it. The next one, personal instructions or responses to specific people and questions. That's letters. There are a bunch of letters in the Bible. The Book of Leviticus was written generically to a group of people.

The letter to the church in Philippi was written to a specific group of people answering specific questions that Paul knew they had. You're supposed to read that differently. Next one is prophecy. This guy mentioned over here, divine preaching. Sometimes prophecy is predictive of the future.

But if you read the prophetic Books of the Bible, you'll often notice it actually just tells people what to do. It's saying, like, hey, this is God saying, this is how you should live in light of what's going to happen next. One, you got stories of people doing things. That's narrative. There are just stories in the Bible.

Sometimes they're meant to be more historically accurate than others. But the authors of the Bible were not collecting information the same way a history textbook was. They're often interested in the purpose of the story. More so than like, at 03:23 p.m. On a Tuesday, this guy moved there.

But the time frames can sometimes be a little confusing. All right, four more figurative literature. That involves lots of metaphor, imagery, and wordplay. That's poetry. There's a lot of poetry in the Bible.

You're expecting to see metaphors and rhymes and things like that in poetry. Now, we don't read it in the original Hebrew, so we miss a lot of the rhyming and stuff, but it's present in the original language. There's wisdom literature. That's the collections of teachings and wise sayings. They offer generic principles about life.

They say, hey, you should be hardworking, a hard working person. Has this happened to them? You shouldn't be blank. It's kind of general wisdom. There's a genre that's pretty unique to scripture, a blend of biography, commentary, and teaching.

That's the gospels. The four gospels are kind of unique to anything else that's been written. For the most part. They are sort of a biography of Jesus, sort of a collection of his teachings, sort of a commentary connecting those two things. They're not intending to be a point by point, accurate date and time frame of his life, but they do collect some of that stuff.

And then the last one, within some of the gospels, you have parables which were mentioned, a type of teaching where you give a hypothetical story to teach a point.

Okay, so I know that's me talking a lot at you for a little bit. Here's what I want to do. I have eight verses where it says, practicing identifying genres in your. In groups of, you know, two to four. You can do your tables.

You can do pairs, however you want to do it. I want you to look at those passages and see if you can match them to the genres you just wrote down. Don't just guess. Based on the book of the Bible, the verses from. I'll tell you, the two deuteronomy passages are not the same genre because you can have multiple genres within the same book.

I'll give you guys. Let's start with eight minutes, and we'll see if that's even remotely enough time, and then I'll give you a chance to share what you think afterwards. Sound good? Okay, go for it.

All right, wrap up what you're sharing. I know. Not a lot of time for a brand new concept on bitching ticket like.

All right, let me see what you guys came up with. I'm not going to say there's only one right answer, but there's some wrong answers. Right. But I bet that you guys did better than you might have thought you did. Let's start with deuteronomy, chapter one.

Somebody tell me, what did you put down for that one? Narrative. Narrative. Why do you remember? Because just saying what was going on.

Yeah. Is a story of people doing things. Absolutely. That's a narrative passage. How about deuteronomy, chapter six, verses six and seven?

This is part of what's called the shama. If you know anything about hebrew culture, every hebrew person would, like, recite this passage daily, which is part of what pastors say to do. What did you put down for deuteronomy six? Law. Why is the law.

I don't remember, but you put it down correctly, I would say, yes, this is law. If you put wisdom, I think that might also be fair. But this is largely a thing that it says. You, my people, the jewish people, the Israelites should do this. Everybody should do it.

That's a law. Right. Next, judges 510. What somebody put for judges, this passage of judges, I should say.

You put poetry. Yeah. If you look at that larger passage, judges is mostly narrative. It's stories of these leaders of Israel before they were kings. But that particular passage is a poem that Deborah puts the song and kind of praise.

It's very metaphorical in the middle of a story about narrative. So, yeah, if you put poetry, you're right. How about ecclesiastes?

Somebody said. I think he said it right. Wisdom. Yeah. The book of ecclesiastes is a wisdom book.

It's Solomon's recordings of, like, hey, here's some things I learned, some general principles that I want to share. It's mostly him saying, everything I've experienced in life sucks, but that isn't a piece of wisdom he wants to share with people. All right, next. Micah.

Prophecy. If you just guess based off the book, you're right. Micah is a prophet. God said, I need you to tell my people something's going to happen, and they need to do something about it. Book of Micah, Luke ten.

Say this one definitely would have two answers. I said, parable. Parable.

It could be narrative ish. And that's the challenge of parables, right? It's like he's usually telling a story of people doing things, but you'd read it differently than that passage of deuteronomy. So narrative is correct. Parable is probably more correct.

And then also, it's in a gospel. So there's lots of different answers to that one. Right, but it is a parable. Jesus said it says that. Jesus said to them a man was walking along the road.

That is probably a hypothetical story. He probably does not know a guy named Bartimaeus that walks down that road and had that exact thing happen to him. Maybe. But he's telling a hypothetical story to teach a point. Kind of like how Asop's fables were, like, creepy children's stories.

If you've read the originals, those are creepy. That, like, parents would tell the kids to get them behave or not behave, misbehave or something. It's a hypothetical story. Now, how about Luke 24, verses 15 and 16? Gospel or narrative?

Yes, exactly. That is a story that we are saying, okay, that probably did happen. Jesus was walking to a place and did a thing. Last one. Ephesians, chapter five.

Letters. Letters. Paul wrote that letter to the church in Ephesus to tell them about some specific things. So again, I'll read all the blanks one more time, in case you didn't get them the first one. Deuteronomy one is narrative.

Deuteronomy six is law. Judges is wisdom. Or, sorry. Judges is poetry. Ecclesiastes is wisdom.

Micah is prophecy. Luke ten is gospel or parable. Luke 24 is gospel and narrative. And Ephesians is a letter. Okay, I got a couple questions.

I'm teaching you this for a reason, and I don't think this is something only like pastors and seminary students can benefit from. First of all, did anybody notice anything that all those verses have in common? They all shared? Depends on your translation. A word or a theme or an idea.

You may not have noticed it because I didn't ask you to look for it. They all talk about somebody walking. Every single one either use walk. Or again, depending on your translation, might have said, move from place to place, but they all talk about walking. But did you notice the Ephesians passage says, you should walk in the light.

You should walk in God's truth. That's different than it saying, jesus walks 3 miles to a location that's different than that deuteronomy passage that says you should pray and meditate on God's word as you sit at home or walk along the road. They're all kind of different. They're really different ideas, but they're all based on kind of this bigger idea of movement.

You are able to determine the difference between, like, a metaphor of walking in a certain way versus a physical walking a certain distance, because you guys all have reading comprehension. But it gets a little trickier when you talk about a concept like justice or anger. There are passages in the Old Testament that are going to describe God's justice or God's anger, and I think it's pretty important to understand, okay, when it's describing this. Is this poetry? Is this using figurative metaphoric language when it talks about how God is angry with a group of people, or is this a story where God acted in a certain way?

You're going to want to lean into that differently. If it's talking about how God carries out justice, it matters if it's a story that happened or someone offering general wisdom or specific laws about how we carry out justice. And I think oftentimes people will read poetry as if it is a law or as if it is a story, and it probably should not be that way, or people will take much more metaphorical takes on what was just a story that actually happened. That's where I think understanding some of this can kind of be important. And the reality is, 90% of the time, you guys are doing this intuitively.

Nobody mentioned the wrong answer, right? You all just kind of can tell when something's poetic and something's narrative. If you're thinking about it, and not everybody is. That's the first tool I want to offer you. If you label things even just a little bit in your head, it might help you kind of understand how God wants you to read a passage.

He wants you to read poetry as figurative and metaphoric. He wants you to read narratives as story. He wants you to read laws as rules for people to follow. The next one we'll spend a little bit more time on, and this is actually my favorite one, and it'll probably make some of you uncomfortable or it'll be a little difficult. Step two is, look, that's the big word there.

And the question that goes with it is, what do I see? This is really where I got the name for this workshop and with my students at NKU. So I run a ministry there that focus on reaching students in dorms and in their classes. I train my student leaders on this, I think, too often. And this is like me.

I read a passage and I immediately jump to like, well, what does this mean for my life here in 2024? And the Bible does tell me some things about my life here in 2024. But it's the first thing I do when I read the passage is try to make it about me, a probably missing what the passage is actually saying. The passage was not first written to me. It's first written to somebody else in some other time frame.

And if I just try to look at it and think about what this means for me, I might accidentally read it wrong. I had a guy in my ministry. He came to the Bible study. We were running, and we were reading, I think, that ephesians passage where it talks about walking in the light. No, while we were reading first John, we're talking about walking in the light.

And I asked him, what do you think this means? He's like, this is all about evangelism. This is about sharing God with other people. I was like, why do you think that? He goes, well, I just love talking about Jesus to other people.

I know Jesus is the light of the world, and so this passage is about sharing God with other people. I was like, great, man. God wants you to talk about him with your friends and neighbors. This passage is not saying that, though. You kind of take in what you want to see, and it's a good thing, but that passage is talking much more about being vulnerable, sharing your brokenness with other people.

Sometimes I'll read a passage and like, okay, I want to figure out how I'm going to teach my students about this. But it's like, okay, it's not first a sermon I can give first. It's something else in scripture. And if we stop and look at a passage, we can. And this is my goal here, we can let the words speak first instead of us, our culture, or our context.

So what I want to do, and if you peeked at the back of this paper, you'll see, is I have 28 blanks. I numbered them one through 30, but I gave you a couple. I got a verse. It's three verses. I wrote it at the top.

You can choose to read it in your own translation. It's psalm one, the first three verses of psalm one. And what I'm going to have you do, I'm going to give you some help. Before we launch into it, is I'm going to have you make as many observations about just those verses as possible. I gave 30 blanks.

Some of you, you might be able to get past that. Many of you will not get to 30, and that's okay. The first time I was asked to do this, I thought this was crazy. I got through about 15 and I stopped. And then the guy who's teaching me said, you're going to keep going because we had fun.

Here's some things I want to teach you about doing this. This is not the only way to read the Bible. You're not going to do this every time. This is a tool to try to get your brain to think in a different way. The goal here is to make as many observations as possible.

It's not about whether they are good. Don't think about writing down observations. That would make a good question to ask a student in your ministry. This isn't for the other students yet. This is just for you.

And reading what you're seeing. Just write down what you see, not what you think it means. Don't try to apply it to your life. Just write down what you're noticing in those verses in that passage. It says here, under helpful rules, observations don't use first person pronouns, and they don't use questions.

If you're writing I in that observation, then you're making it about you. Just write what you see. If you're writing a question, then that's good. But that's not what you're seeing, right? That's you asking a question about what you're seeing.

And they can be stuff that's stated or implied about the text. So you'll notice I gave you kind of two to get started just to show how obvious things can be. My first observation about this passage is the Lord has a law. I saw that because it says the law of the Lord. So you can observe, okay, the Lord has a law.

It can be that obvious. And then I wrote, it is possible to delight in the law of the Lord. Apparently, according to this verse, what I can't write is Jesus wants me to read his law every day, because at no point in this passage is Jesus referenced. Is that true? I think so, but I know that from other parts in the Bible, and that's me kind of putting what I want to see in a passage, potentially.

So what I'm asking you to do is make as many observations about just these three verses as possible. If you think, well, that's too obvious, good, write it down and then move to the next one. Get as many down as possible, and I promise that the spirit's going to show you something. Interesting. If you're willing to put the time into this, maybe you write down 20 and 19 of them feel really mundane.

But there might be one thing that God's going to show you that's interesting when you just zoom in and focus on a passage. You can do this in your tables and partners, too. It's okay to kind of brainstorm. It might help, actually, as you guys are trying to think and read in a different way. I'm going to do at least ten minutes.

We'll see where we're at that point. So take some time in your groups. Let's see how many observations you can make. If you have questions, I'll be around. I can help you figure this out.

All right. If you haven't yet, go ahead and share with somebody or some of the people at your table some of the observations you came up with. See how many more you can get on that list by combining forces, like wearing. All right, wrap up what you're sharing, and then we're gonna go big group.

All right, so I'll be honest with you guys. I put 30 lines there because I like to put the bar high, but I don't think anybody got the 30, which is exactly what I'd expect. That would be very difficult. Your first time kind of being presented doing this in the time frame that I gave you. When I was trained to do this, I was given 30 minutes and I couldn't get to 30.

The other thing, I'll be honest with you guys, and I don't usually say this at the beginning of these sessions, is when I was first trained to do this. I was trained to be a navigator. Staff, this is some high level stuff you are engaging with, but I think that it's helpful, especially in the context of how people read the Bible in America today. So if you found this difficult, congratulations, you're in good company. And I think that it's going to be worthwhile for you if you can kind of have this tool in your arsenal.

Now, here's what I want to do. I don't want to have everybody share everything they wrote down, but I'd love to hear from a couple of people. What's an observation that you wrote down that you thought was interesting? It could be interesting for any reason, but what was something you wrote down that's made you go for it? I wrote down, fruit has a season.

Fruit has a season. There's some interesting applications to that or implications you could say. Absolutely. How about another one? Go for it.

Talks about, like, meditating on the law day and night, I would say. I always just look at it as like once a day, like do it every day, but it's like, do it throughout the day. Sure. Yeah. There's some interesting implications of what it means by that phrase.

Let me jump in really quick. I forgot to say this. How does the line where it says genre right above this? What genre is this passage? Poetry.

Poetry. Right. What does that mean about how we should read it? It means that this is about metaphor and figurative language, not necessarily literal. So is this passage saying literally that someone should not sleep because they are constantly meditating on God's law day and night, 24 hours a day?

No, of course not. But it is saying regularly and rhythmically. So a fair observation is to say this passage is saying that someone should be regularly and constantly meditating on God's law. There's another hand over here about an observation they thought was interesting. Yeah, it talks a lot about positions and movement.

It does. I picked it intentionally to match some of the other verses. There's a lot of. Patrick, you saying that there's like standing and sitting and walking? Yeah, there's a lot of different positions and movement that's going on in this passage.

Going off of the tree and having fruit only in season. The tree still has leaves year round. Like it's still a healthy tree. Yeah. It's not withering.

That's a great observation of you're taking what you see in the passage to its natural conclusion. Yeah. The tree has leaves year round, but fruit in season. There's some interesting implications of that. One more for somebody.

We can't be blessed in the presence of sinners. And mockers. And delight in the Lord. Yeah. I'll give you a quick correction to say a person can't be, but yeah, otherwise.

Yeah. Amazing. It seems to say that blessing only comes when you're not in the presence of sinners. Now, you guys know your bibles more than just this verse. You might be thinking, wait, aren't we supposed to interact with sinners?

We can save them. And that's where you have to take verses and match them together. But this verse is saying that blessings come from people who are delighting in the Lord, not who are in the presence of sinners. We can figure out how those work together at a different time. But this passage is absolutely saying that anybody else that's.

That's feeling like there's something worth sharing. Yeah. One that I thought was really cool is it is a choice like we were talking about. I like the word, but blessed are the ones who does not do these things. But if this person choose to divide.

Oh, that's a great one, man. Yeah, it is clearly saying, though the word choice is not this passage, it's clearly saying that the person, the theoretical person that's being talked about here is choosing the law over those other categories. That feels important. Now I'm not going to have everybody share again, but just raise your hand if you felt like you noticed something you hadn't noticed before. Maybe you just never read this passage before.

Did you get something kind of new from that? Yeah, even as I was prepping this, I didn't want to give you like 1000 observations. I didn't want to cut off your own creativity, but I just wanted to write down a couple. I was like, I don't know that I've ever read this passage. And I have read it a couple of times and thought like, it's possible to delight in the law of the Lord.

Not just read it, not just memorize it, but get joy out of reading it. This passage is saying that I felt that in my life, but I don't think I've ever noticed that the Bible describes itself that way. That's where I think the magic, you know what I mean by that. But the kind of the magic of this is you write down a bunch of observations. Many of them might have just felt mundane.

Did anybody feel like they were just literally rewriting a verse? At some point you're like, okay, it says people are blessed. I'm going to write down. It says that they don't walk in the step of the wicked. Yes, but that's okay.

It's forcing you to pay attention to what's there. Not what you think might be there, not what somebody else told you is there, not what you want to be there. You're just focusing on what's there. And then sometimes the spirit shows you something that's there that you wouldn't have seen otherwise if you were just going big picture. So that I love about this, and I don't think it happens if you only write five.

I think you got to stretch yourself. Usually when I've done this, the first ten I write feels mess. And then somewhere in the eleven to 20 category I write something that makes me go. So here's what I want you to do. And we're not going to have the full time that this step three deserves, but I want you to put a star or a circle or however you want to make note of one of your observations on that list that made you go or was interesting.

Or maybe you can write down one of the ones that somebody shared, but pick one of those observations, and that'll kind of take us into step three. Here's so step three, the l word for it is learn. And the question that goes with it is, what does it mean it. So I think the observations by themselves can be great, but what's really helpful when you notice something in the scripture is when you let that inform where you go next. Or in other words, you kind of put your observations to work for you.

This is where, as leaders, if we're thinking about what kind of questions do I want to ask the people that I'm leading or in a Bible study or a one on one, however, you're kind of guiding people if you're letting the scriptures guide you. This is where it starts to kind of get closer to application. But you make sure it's God that's taking you there. The goal for this section is to learn from the scriptures before you live from the scriptures, to make sure that it's actually the scriptures that are leading you. Yeah, those two blanks are learn from the scriptures before you live from the scriptures.

So I had you guys pick an observation or two from that previous passage from the previous observation list you made. Still looking at psalm one here, this last thing. And really, this is just question generation, but I've called them learning questions because you're still not asking application questions here. We're still zooming in on scripture before we look at the people we're serving or even our own lives. But I think it's appropriate if you were asking questions as you were making observations, and you said, well, Brenda said, I can't put a question mark on this.

This is where some of those questions come in. I want you to take one of those observations and ask some questions that come from it. So I've given you kind of an example down here. I took my observation. It is possible to delight in the law of the Lord.

And I just wrote down a couple of questions that I think anybody could ask if they make that observation in this passage. Here's the first couple, the five that I wrote. What is the law of the Lord? Now, I might have an answer to that, but I think it's fair you read that. You're like, the law of the Lord.

Seems important. What is it? It's a question to ask. Number two, I think a little bit harder for me to answer is, how does someone delight in the law of the Lord? Number three, if someone isn't delighting in the law of the Lord.

What could they be delighting in instead? I think it implies, as we said, that delighting the law of the Lord is a choice, which means there could be other choices. Seems like understanding what other things could be picked could be helpful. Number four, is delighting the law of the Lord different than following the law? There's a difference between just knowing and following it and delighting it.

The passage seems to make it seem like there is a difference. That's a question that they may ask. And then finally, what makes the law the Lord? He's given possession of that in this passage. Is that special?

Is that unique in any way? Notice that none of these are talking about me in 2024 yet. But can you see how it's like one step before application? Clearly you have some application questions that would come from these questions, but this is still making sure I understand what God is saying through these three verses of poetry. You guys wrote observations and I had you star one.

So with the last couple of minutes, we have, and I'll just be straight up, this workshop really deserves 90 minutes of time, and we only have 60 ish, but I would. Or give you the steps and then some blanks that you can work on this later or rest after this giant retreat and then take it out next week or something. But pick one of those observations and we'll just start in your group so you guys can talk with each other. Stay awake. The Starbucks drinks are gone, which means the caffeine levels are going down, right.

Mine, too. I had to throw mine out right before they started. I want you to take one observation from your group and everybody come up with some questions that could come off of that. Again, we're still not applying them to our lives. But what are questions that observation makes you ask that gets you closer to the right application questions that come from the passage?

A couple of helpful rules that I have listed out here. Learning questions can be ones you already have an answer to. If this passage doesn't answer it, a lot of the Old Testament should make you ask the question, who is the messiah? You and I and the gospels know the answer. The psalmist does not.

It can be a question that helps you pull up general principles. Even though we're not focusing on application, it's okay if it kind of leads you there, but it can't be a question that's unanswerable. So why did God let Joe Burrows risk get hurt against the Baltimore Ravens? Is a question I've asked myself frequently. But the Bible's not going to help me answer that so it doesn't help me here.

Right. Okay. We'll give you about five minutes so that you can get to your next session on time. But go ahead and turn to your neighbors. Come up with some questions off of somebody's observation.

All right, we're out of time. Like I said, very much out of comment. I bet that last part felt the easiest for some of you because you're using questions to ask your people. But, man, when you let the scriptures inform those questions, it can change a lot. So I hope that was helpful for you guys.

Hope your next works.