Episode 3.01: That You May Understand
Amazon Music
Apple Podcasts
Audible
iHeartRadioEpisode 301: That You May Understand
Join Angela as she begins Season 3 by exploring why we can trust God has made it possible for us to understand His word.
Take a look at Deuteronomy 6:1-3; Ephesians 3:1-7; Ephesians 5:15-17; Hebrews 11:1-6 and Psalm 119. Angela references these as places to go to learn how that trust in God can be built. 2 Peter 1:5-11 is a blueprint for walking diligently and it takes understanding God’s word to take each step!
Join our email list and receive spiritual and practical encouragement every week. Enjoy these FREE scripture cards you can use for study, prayer, or encouragement.
You can find other studies in The Diligent Woman Shop
Learn how to study the Bible to grow in God’s will:
To Be a Handmaid of the Lord Bible Study Guide
31 Days of Women from Scripture Volume 1
31 Days of Women from Scripture Volume 2
Learn how to study using Scripture Writing here:
Connect
You can follow The Diligent Woman here:
website – www.thediligentwoman.com
YouTube – The Diligent Woman Channel
Join the community on the Locals app – The Diligent Life Community
Facebook – https://facebook.com/thediligentwoman
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/thediligentwoman/
Gab – https://gab.com/DiligentWoman
Transcript
S3 Ep 1 That You May Understand
[00:00:00] Angela: Hello, welcome back to the Diligent Woman Podcast. We are starting season three and today I want to dig into something that’s really at the core of everything else that we talk about. Whenever we’re talking about Bible study and diligence, there’s always in the background this question of maybe why, or maybe even how.
[00:00:28] And does God give us all of that? This season we’re going to spend each episode looking at ways to understand God’s word better. But today I want to establish that we can understand, that we’re supposed to understand God’s word. Over in Deuteronomy chapter six, this is kind of a favorite passage for me because it’s a great place to go if you’re a young parent or if you’re just a [00:01:00] parent trying to figure stuff out,
[00:01:01]it’s a good place to go to create a method for how you introduce God into the lives of your children or into the work of your day. And how do you make it where every day is more than just getting up and stressing? Kind of like Solomon talks about over in the book of Ecclesiastes, how everything seems like vanity until you add God and God’s the reason for that.
[00:01:32] Well, in Deuteronomy chapter six, Moses tells the people that God’s given to him, him these commandments to give to them, and he tells them why. And I’m going to be reading from Deuteronomy chapter six verses one through three. Now this is the commandment, the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it so that you
[00:02:00] and your son and your grandson might fear the Lord your God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you all the days of your life and that your days may be prolonged.
[00:02:11] O Israel, you should listen. And be careful to do it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly just as the Lord, the God of your fathers has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. The premise is the people should know that God is going to take care of them because he has been faithful.
[00:02:32] He has made promises to them and he has kept them. you and I might get a little distracted from that. Thinking that, “well that was then”, and you know, God spoke directly to Moses. There was a little more one-on-one interaction. And now there’s just a whole lot more that we have to figure out on our own.
[00:02:52] And so it’s harder for us to have confidence about such things. And while that may be true, [00:03:00] that it may be harder, it doesn’t change the fact though, that we should still be able to have the confidence because what was true for Israel- it is true for us, and if we can see it through the example that has been given of them, then we know that it can be true for us.
[00:03:17] And we know this over in Ephesians three, Paul is giving a good reason for the Ephesians to trust him, that he has been given a message and that he has been faithful in the way he has given it to them. That he even wrote it down. And he said the purpose for writing it down in Ephesians three, in verse four is he says, I would, in verse three, he says, I was given a mystery, but then I wrote it down.
[00:03:45] And in verse four he says, by referring to this, the things that he wrote down, when you read. You can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ. They needed to be able to understand, and he gave it to them in writing
[00:04:00] for the purpose of their understanding. And then if you go over to Ephesians chapter five, he gives a command to them.
[00:04:10] He tells them in verse 15, after a long list of things starting in chapter four about the way you go about your daily living. In verse 15, he says, therefore, be careful how you walk, not as unwise men, but as wise. So you’re being careful how you go about your day, right? He tells him in verse 16, making the most of your time, because the days are evil.
[00:04:33] You need to be purposeful with what you choose to do minute to minute. And then in verse 17, he says, so then do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Paul is clear. He expects that the Ephesians should be able to understand what God wants for them and not only understand it, but understand it in such a
[00:05:00] way that they can live it.
[00:05:02] And my friend, this is true for you and me. We need to remember that in John 17, Jesus prayed for the disciples in front of him. But then he also prayed for all of those who would come to know him through the efforts of those men and those who came after them. That includes you and me. He prayed for unity, in truth, in God’s will for everyone.
[00:05:31] Well, the only way we can come to unity is if there is some understanding that can be had. Well, God has made the way clear for us. He’s given us his word. It’s not an instantaneous understanding that you get the moment you realize that God is given a message. It is understanding that comes through walking and living and breathing, and being corrected, and being encouraged, being rebuked.
[00:05:59] All of these
[00:06:00] things that the word will do that brethren will do, that the world will do to you. That are the process of you understanding what the will of the Lord is. All of it backs up what’s in the words that you can read, but my friend at the heart of that you need to trust that you can open your Bible, just your Bible and understand what you need to know.
[00:06:28] God doesn’t tell us that. He has provided his word and then it was going to take scholars to make it clear for you. In fact, he says the opposite. The scholars are going to have what’s wrong. He wrote it for everyone to be able to understand and what’s at the heart of it is where your heart is. Do you want to understand what God has to say
[00:06:55] if you’re not fighting against him? If you’re not kicking against the goads,
[00:07:00] as Paul talks about himself, that that’s, you know, what Jesus said he was doing. If we’re not kicking against the goads, if we’re not fighting God’s truth and we’re listening to it and want it in our lives, he has promised that wisdom will come if we seek it, if we ask for it.
[00:07:17] But faith is very much hinging upon your ability to trust. Who God is and what it is that he is doing over in Hebrews 11, it starts in verse one talking about how faith is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen. And he’s going from talking about, you know, these ways of living and needing to have endurance and he is getting ready to lay
[00:07:49] example after example of those who endured when they couldn’t see the end. All they knew was God was at the end. They didn’t know what that was going to look like in
[00:08:00] between. They didn’t have the hope of the church then, but God was at the end and that’s what they could see. This is where we’re going to get the example of Abraham, who was looking for another country.
[00:08:15] All of the people who live faithfully and trusted God and lived in his way, were looking for something more because they trusted something about God. And in Hebrews 11 six it says, faith. Without faith, it is impossible to please him. And isn’t that what we want to do? Being diligent every day, we’re seeking to be pleasing to the Lord, but it’s impossible without faith to please him.
[00:08:42] For he who comes to God must believe that he is. You have to believe that God is God. There’s no point in any of this if you don’t believe in who God is and that he is a rewarder for those who seek him. I like in the new King James, it says, those who diligently
[00:09:00] seek him,
[00:09:01] he is God. And he rewards those who seek him well, how can I seek him to find the reward if I don’t know what the way is,
[00:09:14] that wouldn’t be possible. But our God is just, he is fair, he is righteous, and he is faithful. So as we go forward in our episodes in our study over the next few weeks. I want to encourage you to build on your faith. We have the recipe for how we strengthen our trust, strengthen our connection with the Lord.
[00:09:39] Really, in 2nd Peter, he teaches the Christians how to apply more. It’s not that you just have faith, faith’s a big deal, but with all diligence, you’re going to apply more to that so that it all builds and encourages each thing
[00:10:00] in our faith, we’re going to supply moral excellence over in 2nd Peter one and five.
[00:10:05] Well, how do I do that? By looking through scripture and seeing how God has shown us other people who showed moral excellence they showed this ability to stand up in the face of the thing that scares them. They kept moving forward even when times were hard moving forward for God.
[00:10:26] And you’re going to add to that moral excellence knowledge. Where am I going to get knowledge from God’s word! And can I get it any better from anywhere else? Is anyone else, even if they are trying to speak about God’s word, are they going to say it better than God did? Is there any man who walks on this earth who can tell you what heaven is and how precious it is any better than God does in his word?
[00:11:00] There’s not a man on this earth who has experienced that. He has no knowledge of that other than what God has said, and he can’t say it better than God can. So while sometimes these things in Scripture may be hard and God acknowledges that sometimes things are hard, sometimes they’re hard because we’re not ready for them.
[00:11:23] You think about Abraham and the journey we watch, he and Sarah go through over the twenty-five plus years, while they’re waiting for a child, his faith grows to the point where. He doesn’t question and fear anymore, but in the middle of the process, he fears for his life, even though the promise can’t come true unless he lives.
[00:11:48] But the same man who told a lie to a king to protect his life because he was afraid the king would kill him in order to take Sarah for his
[00:12:00] wife. That man is the same man who years later. When his promised son who was born to him, who is a proof that God is faithful, when God told him to sacrifice his son, he didn’t hesitate to do that.
[00:12:19] He gathered up his supplies and he walked three days to the mountain and he put his son on the altar with every intention to kill him. The Hebrew writer tells us what he was thinking. He expected that God would raise him up from the dead, that he would not stay dead because the promise still had yet to continue to be fulfilled.
[00:12:39] There were nations that were supposed to come and Abraham trusted God, but he trusted him more than he had with his own life years before where he didn’t trust that God would preserve his life. He thought he had to do it himself. Now he trusts that this life of his son is
[00:13:00] in God’s hands.
[00:13:00] No matter what God says, no matter what he asked him to do, God’s in control. That’s a growth in faith. It’s a growth in trust that Abraham went through. He didn’t get it in a day, and God shows you that example, and that’s just one, one example of over time over learning. Making mistakes, correcting them, doing better, but always coming back to leaning on the Lord.
[00:13:29] God has said, I will show you the way Psalm 119, walks us through all of the ways that God uses words to get his message to us. He has covered every possible avenue. He’s done it through judgments. He’s done it through commandments. He’s, you name it, he’s written law. He’s written stories to tell you what has
[00:14:00] happened and given you examples and every aspect of it touches on the relationship that we have with God.
[00:14:08] We are to trust him and know that God is, and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. There is no way for me to know either one of those things to be certain of who God is except by how he reveals himself to me,
[00:14:26] and I can’t know that he’s a rewarder of those who diligently seek him until God shows us people who followed him and God rewarded them. When they were in the relationship, they got the benefit of God’s protection. They got the benefit of being his people because they sought him out. I can’t know that unless God shows it to me
[00:14:53] and God has taken the time my friend, to show it to you. He has allowed for these words to survive.
[00:15:00] He has allowed for men’s hands to touch them and not mar the message. I find that fascinating.
[00:15:10] The words have continued as they came down, and I can read any part of this book and learn who God is the part that God wants me to know and God wants me to understand. And I really hope that through these episodes that we can build that for you. That you will see that there are ways that you can approach the scriptures and not be intimidated by them, but see them as a door opening so that you can understand God, so you can understand your creation in him, and that you can understand the will of the Lord for you so you can walk in it.
[00:15:49] It is one thing to say that you need to obey the Lord because your soul is in danger. Absolutely. One who has not put on Christ and has
[00:16:00] not been obedient in their faith. To him, what’s the point? If you don’t know who he is? If you don’t know why he did it, just knowing that you need him. That’s only one step.
[00:16:13] Then you have to go, why do I keep living this way? It took the Apostles many years to understand and they had the Holy Spirit helping them directly to understand, to make a context so they could tell more people, but they were walking with Jesus every day. They didn’t get it.
[00:16:31] God knows that we’re not going to get it immediately, but he has promised that we can understand it. But we have to want to, and we have to want to enough that we see it as a pearl. That is something that is worth digging for, worth spending time, making sacrifices to be a part of it, to understand it, to accept it, and see its value.
[00:17:01] That’s our part. God has done the bulk of the work. The information is there. He has banners flying over your head in the form of the sun and the moon and the stars. All of the trees, the clouds that fly by to tell you that he’s here. But if you wanna know, “okay, what is it You want me to know?” God He has said, well, guess what?
[00:17:25] I’ve told you what I want you to know. And he wrote it down and he wrote it down to help you. So as we go forward, I hope you will stick around for the different episodes because we’re going to take a look at how to dive into God’s word to understand God. You know, there’s lots of ways to learn. You can learn through lectures, you can learn through questions and answers.
[00:17:55] You can learn through debates. You can learn through moral tales or [00:18:00] parables. You can study history. You can learn by writing out what you see, making notes, copying things, reading it, listening to other people, read it. These are all ways that you can take in the information and all of them, my friend, are shown to you in scripture, every one, and there’s
[00:18:29] lots of simple ways that we can study just by following the pattern of somebody else who learned about God in a certain way. So, for example, if you’ll stick around for the next episode, we’re going to look at the noble Bereans in the Book of Acts. Why were they more noble, and what was it that they did? But even more so, how can we do that?
[00:18:59] They
[00:19:00] listened to what the Apostles said, but they didn’t stop there. They compared it verifying that it was true. Well, how would they have done that? And we’re going to talk about that in the next episode. That is something you can do. You can study the way the Noble Bereans did with your Bible. With your mind, with the resources right in front of you.
[00:19:25] It doesn’t take a grand library. It doesn’t take a degree. God’s given you the information to do that. We’re going to look at different ways to study and one of them is the way God told the kings to learn the law.
[00:19:42] Do you know that? Did you know that God gave a specific direction for the Kings of Israel for them to learn the law and the way he told them to go about it so they could live it and be a better king? This is a method that we can imitate, that we can do this, so that we can take God’s word and write it [00:20:00] on our hearts so that it is something that we breathe.
[00:20:04] Yeah. Not just something that we touch once a week when we pick up a bound book of papers to carry with us to worship services, but instead to take the words that are printed on those pages. ’cause it’s the message that’s important and put that message on our heart. We’re going to look at ways to study the same way the Apostles taught.
[00:20:25] They looked at the past, what people had done and how God dealt with that. How do I go learn from history to learn about God? You can do the same thing. We’re going to look at the way Jesus taught. If you go study the the Harmony of the Gospels, which is usually a study of Matthew, mark, Luke and John, and just pay attention to the things that Jesus chose to focus on the way he dealt with people
[00:20:57] one-on-one. The way that he
[00:21:00] taught, my friend. That’s the way you can learn. If he spoke to someone about the circumstances they were in, and he brought a focus back to spiritual things. You can come to the scriptures from where you are, whatever it is you’re dealing with right now, and study from that point
[00:21:18] ‘ cause that’s how Jesus taught and he led them to truth and we can imitate that. There’s going to be lots of other things that we’re going to cover through the 12 episodes. We’re going to learn about context, but we’re going to finish up the season with several episodes where we learn how to study using God’s outlines, not outlines that are derived by men because they’ve pulled all this information together.
[00:21:47] That’s one avenue available to us. But our focus for the next few weeks is to focus on what God has given you as your place to start. And it is a lot. You have so much
[00:22:00] information, so much education that God has shown you in how to approach his word, how to glean from it, what to make of it. It’s precious and you can spend a lifetime
[00:22:17] studying the way God shows you how to study and it will not be wasted. But we’re going to dig into God’s outlines where he has given parameters something to focus on. And we’re going to look at how we can use those. if you have family, if you have young people, have children in the home, or even if you are a Bible class teacher.
[00:22:40] You don’t have children of your own, but you teach a Bible class and you don’t know how to set it up, “how am I going to teach these kids? What am I going to teach them”? God’s outlines are definitely a place where you can begin and have just infinite directions to go with ways to teach your kids that way.
[00:22:59] The whole book of
[00:23:00] Judges, book of Deuteronomy, both can be laid out for a new parent. If you wanna know how to parent, go watch how God parented his people. The book of Deuteronomy is full of showing you how God has parented his people, and he gives instructions for how they’re supposed to function, and he continues to be a loving father.
[00:23:21] And if you imitate his methods in your life with your children, it’ll have a huge payoff. But we have to learn to look at it that way. So that’s what I’m hoping with the next few episodes. I hope that you will come along and that you will find that beneficial. Because at the end of the day, for diligence to be something that is in your life and brings value to you, it needs to be something that you know brings value to God.
[00:23:53] Because otherwise, why do it? Do we just be diligent? Because an orderly life is just better. Okay, but if God’s not there and God is not important and God didn’t tell you to, who cares. But if God is and he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him, that makes all the difference, my friend, in applying your diligence from day to day.
[00:24:20] So I hope you will come along on this journey. Spend these weeks with me. And that it will help you to glean some more tools so that you can take your scriptures, you can grow in them, and then you’ll have this confidence where you can share what God has given you with other people, and be certain that what you’re giving him is what God wants you to share.
[00:24:42] Just knowing that God has said this is. And how can I be sure of that? And if I can’t be sure of it going, okay, put that aside. I’m going to try that another day. But to approach the throne of grace with confidence because my confidence is in God.
[00:25:00] God who is, and his desires to bless me, his desires to do what is good for me. I am going to strive to understand what his will is because his will is good for me. That’s where we’re going to go, that you may understand it’s been written out for you so that you may understand. Let’s work on that.
[00:25:26] Let’s grow in grace and truth and understanding, Lord willing, over the next few weeks together. Thanks for being here, and we’ll see you in the next episode.