1430 - "Q & A, Lessons from Ezra-Get in the Book!" Ezra 7:10

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1430. Today is Friday. That's Question and Answer Day. And today I want to talk to you about Bible reading plans and why we need one. You see, if you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time. And so if you're going to read through the Bible, which is a wonderful thing to do, then you need a plan. And so I want to talk to you about plans in just a moment. But before we do that, I want to say just a word of gratitude to God for the movement that I'm seeing among God's people, not among lost people, but among God's people to read and study the Word. People are hungry to know what God says. And one of the reasons I believe, especially throughout the southern United States, for decades there has been a tendency for churches to believe that the reason they come together is to preach evangelistic messages every week, get saved, get saved, get saved. And you have people making decisions two, three, five times, being baptized two, three, five times throughout their lifetime because the people who are in the pulpits are not teaching and preaching the word of God. One of the reasons is they've not been taught themselves. And many times our seminaries are teaching more about the word of God than they are teaching the word of God and teaching men of God how to read and study the Bible for themselves and then to teach their people. The Church of Jesus was designed for discipleship, for God's people who are called out to come together, to assemble themselves together, to exercise the gifts that God has given by His Holy Spirit who lives within us, and also to understand the great treasures of Scripture. And for the first century that was what we call the Old Testament, the Tanakh, the law of the prophets, and the writings. Yes, with just the Old Testament, and I say that not flippantly, but without the New Testament, they turned the world upside down. They turned the world upside down, the Greco-Roman world of the first century. And they saturated themselves with scriptures. And the reality is, as I've traveled around the nation in my own limited experience, I have seen a great drought for teaching of the Word of God. And for those of you men of God who are listening to me right now, and you women who are teaching women, especially younger women, how to read and study the Word of God, may your tribe increase. And men teach the people the Word of God. They will stay with you. They will listen. They will learn. And then they'll be able to teach their own children and grandchildren, and men will be raised up that will have a desire to teach their families and lead their families in the way of God. I want to motivate you. I want God to motivate you. I want us to motivate each other to stay in the scriptures because the word of God will never change. The prophet Isaiah said that the flowers will fade, the grass will wither, but the word of our God shall stand forever. And it will. He wrote Ezra and Nehemiah, and he lived in a time when there was a great falling away. The exile had come and gone, the people of God had been restored back to Jerusalem, the temple had been built, but the walls of the city of Jerusalem had been broken down and never rebuilt. But not only had the walls of the city not been rebuilt, so therefore it wasn't even officially a city, as far as ancient city criteria was concerned, but the walls, the spiritual walls, had been broken down. And Ezra made up his mind that he was going to study the Word of God, he was going to do it, he was going to teach it, and bring discernment back to Israel, where they would never have to go through what they did again. In the book of Ezra, chapter seven and verse ten, it says, For Ezra prepared his heart to seek the law of Hashem, of Yahweh, and to do it, and to teach the statutes and ordinances in Israel. It's fascinating. Ezra prepared his heart, he readied his heart, he got a plan together and said, I'm going to do this. He did it ritualistically, and not only himself, but in doing it himself, he designed a program that is still with the Jewish people today. It's called the Torah portion. That was not known until the intertestamental period, where the Jewish people all over the earth read the same passages out of the books of instruction, the books of Moses, what we call the law. The word Torah doesn't mean law, primarily, it means instruction. It contains the law. But this is what Ezra sought to do is to proportion it out to where every year the people read the same thing over and over and over again. Why? Because repetition is the mother of learning. We learn it when we go to bed in the evening, when we rise in the morning, when we walk by the way, while we're sitting at the table, while we're eating. It is a way of life, and Ezra understood that better than any of his day. And so he designed what later became known as the Torah portion. It has been expanded. It has been, I think, somewhat improved, but the basic structure was there. And don't miss it. We need structure. We need intentionality. We need to read the word of God on a regular basis and with a plan in mind. That's why a plan is so important in reading through the scriptures. For Ezra had prepared his heart, his very innermost being, to seek the law of the Lord. The word law there is the word Torah, it's the word for instruction. But not only that, but he said he wanted to do it, he wanted to keep it, he wanted to observe it, and he wanted to teach it, enact it, to see that it was observed. You see, that's discipleship in modern day terminology. But Ezra was the one that knew that in order to do that you had to have a plan. And so this is why I'm going to recommend two plans to you. There's so many out there, and everybody wants to do things digitally. If you have to do it digitally, fine. But I want to tell you, God made print on purpose. I work with proofreaders because I work with editors. I'm doing a lot of writing right now. And let me just tell you, every editor that I have worked with, they ultimately want to see it on paper because in print you will catch things that you will not in a digital format. So I want to encourage you to get a Bible and read through it. I mean, you're not that busy. Come on. Let's put our schedules up beside each other. And if I can take time to read the Word of God, and the greatest men of God that I've ever known take time to read the Word of God in print, and great saints of God down through the ages have taken time to print, you're not that important. And especially you pastors, listen to me. It's easier to get a hold of my national senator or even the White House than it is to get a hold of some of you. Some of you have an assistant who has an assistant. You're not that important. You're really not. You may think you are, but you're not. And I know about organization, I know about time, I know about those things. I've studied that not only in my life experience, but professionally, and I have a terminal degree in that. I understand about that. What I'm saying to you is that you and I need to humble ourselves and spend some time in the Word of God. And I'm talking about the printed word. Why? Because that'll get in your heart. Now, back to the plans. Since the late 90s, my wife and I have read through the Daily Walk Bible by Tyndall House. I think it is the greatest daily Bible reading plan that there is. And it was originally edited by David Wilkinson. Many of you know him from Walk Through the Bible, but Tyndall House created this, and it's in several versions. I read through the NLT, the New Living Translation. I do that personally. I'm working in now, I'm working in editing a Bible for Tyndall House, and we're using the NLT. And the reason that I went with Tyndallhouse and my partners and I did that is because we were just wanting that translation, and then it worked out that they wanted to publish the particular study Bible that we proposed. I believe that for our day, the NLT is one of the greatest translations. It's a dynamic translation, and people say, Well, I want a word for word. Well, there's nothing that's word for word, honestly. Because there's some words that you have to take two or three words to translate from Hebrew or Greek into English. That's just the way it is. And so all, even word for word, formal equivalence, whatever you call it in a scholarly way, all translations from one language to another involves interpretation. And I would debate that with anyone, because there are many words, for instance, in English that will translate a single Greek or Hebrew word. And so don't get caught up in this. This is not the Living Bible, which is a paraphrase, and nothing wrong with a paraphrase, but it is just that a paraphrase. But the New Living Translation is dynamic translation and dynamic equivalence. In other words, it is spoken and translated in a way that we speak today. Very, very good translation. And so that's why I encourage you. But Tyndall House has many of these Bibles in various translations, but I believe the Daily Walk Bible is the best format that is out there because it gets you through the Word of God without a long period of reading. And that's where we lose people. And so I want to encourage you to do that. The other one is the 365 Bible reading plan, and I'm not just saying this because it's mine. This is 365 key chapters that I chose, prayerfully chose throughout the Bible that help us to understand the great story of redemption. Now, this is so important. What I have found out that people that read through the Bible on a daily basis and just read a portion of it. That's why I designed these key chapters, and I chose these to get you reading at least one chapter a day. It takes about three to five minutes, depending upon the day. And if you want more, then I have written a four to six hundred word commentary that just gives you the heart of that passage and the key thoughts. But then I do a 15 to 20 minute podcast if you really want to know that what that chapter is, and I deal many times with the linguistic, the language, Hebrew or Greek. I deal with the historical, geographical context, I deal with the cultural aspects and cultural context. What I'm trying to do with the 365 is just get you in the Word of God every day to form a habit, a routine that will last you, a ritual that will last you the rest of your life. And you say, Well, I don't want r ritual, I don't want well, you better. Jesus had rituals that he kept, and this idea that all rituals and all uh routines are bad, that's just a lie from hell because they can become an end in themselves, but that's our choice. But ritual and routine is good. Shabbat, worship every week, and recognize God as the creator. And for those of us who are followers of Jesus, recognize that he rose from the dead on the first day of the week and come together to celebrate that and to meet with God's people, those are good rituals. You're gonna get some freaky person sometimes that will say, Well, I don't need anything. Well, he's a liar and he's deceived himself because God knows that he made us for community. We're not Lone Rangers, and we need more than Tonto, just a sidekick. We need one another, and so I want to encourage you to do that. And so that's why I created that. But what I've found out now over years of people doing that is the second time through they do it or the third time through they do it, they read all the way through the Bible because they want to read the passages in between. And so, every how you do it, I want to encourage you to get into the Word of God. Now, the 365 Bible reading plan, it doesn't come with a Bible. But Karen and I have bought over a thousand now in the last 30 years. We have bought over a thousand given to people of these NLT Daily Walk Bible from Tendle House. You can get them brand new for$42. You can find them used on Amazon for eight to ten dollars. All I'm saying is get in the Word of God. And those are the two plans that I would recommend. There are many out there, and I'm not trying to toot my own horn. I get no money from that whatsoever. I'm not saying it's the best. I'm just saying it is another alternative plan, and it doesn't cost you anything, and I've provided hundreds of hours of teaching that goes along with that, and I want to encourage you to do that. And so all I want you to do is get in the book of God, and you need to do it on a regular basis, and there is no greater sense of fulfillment and accomplishment than when the child of God reads through the Bible for the first time or the fifth time or the twentieth time. My prayer is that you'll get in the book of God, and when you do, the book of God will get in you. For on the way, this is Tony Crisp.

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Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org. Then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.