0:00:00 - 0:00:20 Today, we're gonna talk about scripture study and this is quite an applied presentation. We're gonna get into a lot of details of how to do this in practical terms. This presentation is uh the a response to an email I received, you know, I I screenshotted this just to show it to you when you're seeking 0:00:19 - 0:00:39 anything really. And it doesn't matter if it's something you're seeking in prayer directly from God or, or anything else that you'd like in your life, it's extraordinarily important to think about what you want and why and to be as detailed as you can in that. And so this is a uh a detailed email even 0:00:39 - 0:00:59 though it's, it's, it's not short, but it is concise and that all the relevant details are here and that all helps. It's an expression of faith to put in the time to really think about and express what you want. If you're not willing to sit and write an email and, and read over it before you send it 0:00:59 - 0:01:21 and, and try to make it as clear as possible, then you probably don't actually want what you're asking for. At least not enough to get it. So it, it is almost always the case that what we seek has a higher price tag than we know ahead of time. And when we try to short change that and get lazy, there's 0:01:20 - 0:01:45 no surprise. We, we don't end up paying the price and we don't receive it. And even when the person, we're asking whether that's an actual person or, or God, or if we're quote unquote, asking, quote unquote the universe, some people would put it that way. Uh As we seek things in life, we're, we're almost 0:01:44 - 0:02:05 uh always banking on the fact that someone else has paid a greater price, but there's still a minimal price that we have to pay to, to uh connect with that. And so don't try to short change that if, if, what you're seeking for is very important to you and if it's not, you probably shouldn't even bother 0:02:05 - 0:02:23 with it because life is too short. There are plenty of important things to worry about. But if it's, if it's valuable to you, you show that it's valuable to you by putting in the time. So just asking you shall receive, but don't be lazy because you won't get what you're asking for. So, let's start with 0:02:23 - 0:02:44 the basics. Um In the presentation, we're gonna focus on this, this, uh these two verses from Second Timothy three. It's, it's verse 16 and 17. And um this is kind of a meta approach because we're gonna, we're going to use the scripture about what scriptures are for, to demonstrate what scriptures are 0:02:44 - 0:03:05 for. And we're using this system of how to use scriptures in order to get the answer to how to use scriptures. Um And if that sounds confusing, that's just blame it on me, but it'll make sense in a second. So it says all scripture is given by inspiration of God. It is profitable for doctrine, for proof 0:03:04 - 0:03:29 , for correction, for instruction and righteousness that, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. So if you so often answers, getting answers to questions is the easier half of the equation formulating. The question is really where the magic happens. If you have 0:03:28 - 0:03:48 the right representation of a problem, the solution just kind of falls out. So what's the question here? The question is what is scripture for? And the answer is Doctrine, reproof, correction and instruction and righteousness and that's all well and good. And, and you can just sort of pull that out with 0:03:47 - 0:04:12 , with an 8th, 8th grade level education. But what do these words actually mean? And this is a, a key problem that limits I guess that that helps explain the distance between what the scriptures say and what we think they say. We, we, we glaze over these words that we are familiar with in terms of having 0:04:12 - 0:04:30 heard them many times, but we can't actually define them. And that's a problem. But we think we know what they are, but we don't stop and actually look at, look them up. Now, you can use a regular old dictionary. If you, if you just type into a Google search, define colon in the word you'll get, you'll 0:04:30 - 0:04:52 get a definition. But I'd like to use the Webster's 1828 dictionary. It's, it's a very old one and it's, it's probably the best resource we have to get as close to what the King James translators intended as possible. And, and of course, that doesn't mean that their translation is correct. And many times 0:04:52 - 0:05:16 it's uh it's severely lacking but short of looking it up in Greek and Hebrew, which is actually usually a pretty good idea and, and you can do that again very easily in, in our day using Bible hub or some other tool. Bible hub is free. It's just a website. So, um what do these words mean? Well, we're 0:05:16 - 0:05:35 gonna get there, but I'm just gonna tell you up front the purpose of scripture is to understand what God would do, why he would do it, why you should do it and to notice and feel bad when you do less than that. And I'm confident that some part of that is something other than what you would have said 0:05:35 - 0:05:57 before this presentation. So that's good. That's learning. But let me make a case for, for these before we get there. One of the other thing that we have to mention and, and like so many points I'm going to make here and so many points I just, I make in general, um, just because I make them briefly that 0:05:57 - 0:06:18 doesn't indicate they're not massively important or that they aren't excruciatingly expensive to learn or that they don't have a whole boat, boatload of additional information and, or evidence. Um But so often we can only just barely touch on things if we want to spend the time focusing on what we're 0:06:17 - 0:06:45 after at the moment. So another question that's important to think about even if only briefly who is scripture for. Now, if we, if we try to think about the main reason, what are considered gospel arguments, let's say, but, but attempts to preach the gospel fall flat on their face is because what people 0:06:44 - 0:07:08 do is they already believe scripture and then they just vomit up random verses to people and expect that somehow that's going to persuade those people to change. Well, what would that require? It would require that the people won believe that scripture is God's word, which of course, presupposes that 0:07:08 - 0:07:29 they believe in God and that they're honest enough to yield to arguments that that are sufficient to suggest change. And almost no one is, in fact, most people who quote scripture aren't even open to changing their minds when given a sufficient reason to do so. And so it's, it's really a foolish thing 0:07:29 - 0:07:52 to do. And uh it's no wonder that Christians have such a bad name among those who are not Christian because this is really stupid. And it, it shows a lack of common sense that if, if that same lack were applied to uh normal everyday life, these people would starve to death because that's how dumb it 0:07:52 - 0:08:18 is, right? Or they just stop breathing. So, scripture is for those who believe in it and are honest. It's a small, small set. Now, the good news is some of this presentation uh will will address family scripture study. It's massively important. The good news is that you're dealing with a captive audience 0:08:17 - 0:08:41 . If you believe in scripture and you are willing to be honest, then you can have all the benefits of studying scripture. And if you can persuade your family to do the same, then they can have it too. But short of that, the direct application of these things to others will be limited to the principles 0:08:40 - 0:09:06 you extract and live. So in other words, if scriptures are the sun, you, you are the plant and plants can use the energy from the sun directly. But a lot of times that that energy can only get transferred to other parts of creation through eating the plant. And so you become the plant that gets eaten 0:09:06 - 0:09:32 and how do you do that? Well, you live the principles you extract and you also learn the principles so sufficiently that you can explain them to other people. Without quoting scripture. Now lately, I've been very aware that my um I, I guess the, the my count of scripture cited in these videos that I've 0:09:32 - 0:09:54 been doing has been quite minimal and uh I'm not happy about that, but it has been intentional because like I said, I've been trying to maximize the value of the time by explaining things directly rather than appealing to scriptures, which is something I do extensively in uh the books I write, except 0:09:54 - 0:10:20 for joy on purpose, which is written to a general audience. And therefore all the principles in that book are explained without directly appealing to scripture. But um that, like I said, that that is intentional and everything I say with sufficient time and and modulo something I might just, you know 0:10:20 - 0:10:41 , blather out without thinking about it. But I believe that everything that I've said can be backed by scripture. If, if you had the time, if I had the time I could look up and cite scriptures supporting every single point I make um a lot of times, one of the reasons I don't always do this is that a 0:10:41 - 0:11:08 lot of times I realized that if I quoted that scripture, uh I would also have to take a lot of time to explain why it is saying exactly what I'm saying. And um that's not always the best use of time. So if, if there's a uh a significant distance between the common understanding of a passage and what 0:11:08 - 0:11:32 I'm saying, um it, it's probably not worth the time anyway, an analogy to cement what this point that I'm making that scriptures are for those who believe it and are honest, but are limited in value to those who do not believe it or who are not honest to what you extract and live an analogy to help better 0:11:32 - 0:11:53 understand. This is if I were to ask you why, why would anyone care what you do in your life and why now they would care if, if it directly affects them. But I'm saying someone in China, why would they care about what you do and why? Well, the, the only reason they would care is if they believed that 0:11:53 - 0:12:17 you were better than them and they wanted to be better. That's the only reason and it's the same thing with the scriptures. Uh They're only valuable for the, the reasons listed to those who, who believe that they're presenting something that's, that's better. And so this is really important to understand 0:12:16 - 0:12:35 and remember even in our own individual study, we'll get to this in a minute. But there are quite a few people who say, oh, I don't have time to study the scriptures and I don't enjoy it. It's a, it's a chore to me. There are a lot of people who feel that way. Well, why? Because you don't actually believe 0:12:34 - 0:12:55 that they, they contain what they purport to contain the, the contents of the scriptures are their instructions for better life. And if you actually believe that that'd be like saying, you know, if someone said here's a machine where if you push a button, it just spits out free money and you're like 0:12:55 - 0:13:17 , no I don't have time for that. Uh this is just a chore pressing this button and getting massive sums of money who has time for that. You're you're doing it wrong. Ok? So if that's you stay tuned, we're gonna, we're gonna unlock this and, and give you, give you the DEETs. All right. Alright. Uh The 0:13:17 - 0:13:33 first thing we're gonna do here is go through each of those purposes of scripture. We're gonna talk about the definition of the word very briefly and then uh we're gonna get into some applications of how to do this in your life and also in your family. So for Doctrine, scriptures are for doctrine, what 0:13:33 - 0:13:54 does that mean? The Greek word here is uh forgive my pronunciation. Did a Scalia which um if you just had to pick one English word, maybe instruction would be the closest one, but this is the same word used in Matthew 15 9, which is a popular verse, but in vain, they do worship me teaching for doctrines 0:13:53 - 0:14:17 . That's this word, the commandments of men. And so here's a link between commandments and, and this word doctrine. So their instructions, but maybe just putting it into plain English it. Doctrine is what you should do and why? So when we talk about what, that's what God would do under your circumstances 0:14:16 - 0:14:37 and that's quite a doctrinal leap for some people. But hopefully, if you're watching this channel, that's, that's not any kind of a far fetched connection to make that what you should do is whatever God would do under your circumstances. So that, that rest assured this is not how the majority of professed 0:14:37 - 0:15:02 Christians believe. They think that Christianity uh is an excuse or uh a way to, to not do what God would do and still feel ok. And a lot of them actually celebrate this and that is staunchly anti-christ. It is very evil. So what you should do is whatever God would do under your circumstances. And that's 0:15:02 - 0:15:21 a great example of a gospel principle that I mentioned in my videos. And I'm not taking the time to prove that point to you because that could be a whole presentation. And it is, I've, I've done it several times and then here, I'm just gonna remind you of the end of, of that passage that we quoted, which 0:15:20 - 0:15:42 is that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. That's, that's what God would do under your circumstances. What about why you should do it? Well, there's two forks when we're talking about why the first fork is why God would do it. And the second 0:15:41 - 0:00:00 is why you should do it now, ideally, those are the same, but it doesn't start that way. It's something that has to become unified. But here's the long story short, what you're building here is what we call in today's parlance, a predictive model. It's a system of predicting the future in this case. 0:00:00 - 0:16:29 What you're predicting is what you should do. Your model tells you what you should do and the model is what God would do in your place. This is a huge topic that deserves a lot more attention. But we'll just nestle this in, uh, because we're, we're talking about scripture. Moving on. What about reproof 0:16:28 - 0:16:50 ? That's a funky word. You'll see it all over the scriptures. But again, no one stops to define it. And it's unfortunate because this is actually a point of contention that that many people will bristle at. So I know that there are churches that, that explicitly teach that guilt is not an effective mechanism 0:16:49 - 0:17:16 for teaching the gospel, they're wrong, they're wrong. And, uh, Jesus himself said so. So if you, if you read The New Testament actually read it, not just glance around it at the, the small subset of verses that are actually brought up at church, but actually read The New Testament and try to use it 0:17:16 - 0:17:41 to understand the character of Christ. You will see that again and again, Jesus says things to make people feel bad. He's very intentional about it. Why? Because they are doing evil and not feeling bad about it. And that's a problem. What's that caused by guilt comes from conscience? And your conscience 0:17:41 - 0:18:06 is a function of the spirit of God. And so if you don't feel guilty while doing evil, it's because your conscience is weak. How did it get there through wilful sin, through doing less than your best? Reproof means to generate feelings of guilt by revealing a fault. It means to help someone see that they're 0:18:06 - 0:18:32 doing something that's less than their best and that, that's not good. So if you need, if we have to just point to one scripture to prove that this is in fact a function of what God does and what his servants should also do. We turn to John 16 7 and eight where Jesus is speaking of the Holy Ghost. He 0:18:32 - 0:18:49 says, nevertheless, I tell you the truth, it is expedient for you that I go away for. If I go not away, the comforter will not come unto you. But if I depart, I will send him unto you. And so I pause here and I ask him, what's he gonna do? Verse eight? And when he has come, he will reprove the world 0:18:49 - 0:19:15 of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. And it goes on and you can turn to that chapter John 16 and read the rest. But one of the functions of the Holy Ghost is to reprove the world of sin. It's to show you your faults and to cause you to feel guilty about them. What about correction? Correction 0:19:14 - 0:19:38 is not the same as reproof, although sometimes they're used interchangeably. That's a simplification. Technically speaking, reproof is pointing out the fault and correction is persuasively, illustrating the improvement. So fault is, hey, you got a problem. Correction is, hey, here's the solution. Now 0:19:38 - 0:20:07 , correction has to include reproof unless the person already knows it's a problem. So oftentimes they're, they're linked in that way. But here's the question, correction answers, what net benefit would, would the proposed change yield? And what is the worth of that? It's a, it's a funny thing. Again 0:20:07 - 0:20:31 , this isn't normal. People don't think about this. Uh They're not, they don't think in technical terms of net benefit. First off, that's unfortunate. And, and second, they don't tend to uh realize that that relative and absolute benefit are two different things. So I, I could tell you, you know, what 0:20:31 - 0:20:58 if you, if you stood on your head, um I'd give you $100 million. And that doesn't mean that if we told that to 10 different people, the value they found in $100 million would be the same, right? So it's both the, the net benefit and also what it's worth and that's very important, right? Coming back to 0:20:58 - 0:21:20 the people that say, uh I don't have time to read the scriptures or this is a chore. I don't enjoy it. Well, that's, that's a problem of worth that's a problem of, of misunderstood value and we're, we're picking on those people because it's, it's pertinent to the presentation at hand. However, this is 0:21:20 - 0:21:48 a general human problem and it's a big deal. We part of human nature is to get value all wrong by default, what we value and by how much is absolutely abysmally different than how God sees it. That's really the crux of the Gospel in a sense is to correct our abysmally inaccurate value. So uh appraisal 0:21:47 - 0:22:09 of value, what we value, not just the value in us, although that's, that is part of it. The final piece of this passage is that the scriptures are to instruct in righteousness. What does righteousness mean? It's how God is. This is one of the easiest definitions in the Gospel. But again, people don't 0:22:08 - 0:00:00 stop and think about it, righteousness is how God is. So one of the purposes of scripture is to reveal how God is. That's what it means to instruct and righteousness. It's to help people understand what he would do and why he would do it. So then the question becomes, and we're gonna get to this in, 0:00:00 - 0:22:54 in gross detail in the remaining five slides. The question becomes, how do you use the scriptures to learn what God would do and why he would do it? And the rest of this going, going back now to this summary, what God would do, why he would do it, why you should do it and to notice and feel bad when 0:22:54 - 0:23:15 you do less than that. Is that how you study the scriptures? And to the extent you do something differently, you will experience massive improvements as you orient to this instead. All right, let's get to some applications. That's one of the last five. So we knocked that out real quickly. So we got four 0:23:15 - 0:23:34 left. So first, let's start with your, your scripture study as an individual. Remember the purpose of scripture study is to understand what God would do, why he would do it, why you should do it and to notice and feel bad when you do less than that. And we again, we pull that right out of this is what 0:23:34 - 0:23:56 second Timothy three would say if Paul were writing today, he'd say all scripture is given by inspiration of God to teach you what God would do, why he would do it, why you should do it and to notice Him feel bad when you do less than that. Isn't that wonderful? We just unzip that and put it into plain 0:23:56 - 0:24:19 modern English and that's what he would say. All right. So we already made the, the reference to the people who say, I don't have time for this or I don't enjoy it. The next point I'm gonna make is that in your individual study, be careful about focusing too much on people, stories, dates, et cetera 0:24:18 - 0:24:45 . Now, you have to be familiar with all of those things to see past them to the actual principles you have to, but there's a balance here and almost everyone is on the wrong side of it. All of those things are just trivia except as far as you use them to understand what God would do, why he would do 0:24:45 - 0:25:02 it, why you should do it and to notice and feel bad when you do less than that, you know, how many years were between these two events or what? You know, how, whether this person was this other person's second cousin or how many people were at the foot of the cross. When Jesus was crucified, all these 0:25:02 - 0:25:25 things, they don't matter unless you're using them to figure out what God would do, why he would do it, why you should do it and to notice and feel bad when you do less than that. If you look at a pie chart of how people spend their time in the scriptures and how churches teach the scriptures. My goodness 0:25:24 - 0:25:51 . It's, it's like you, you gathered the 10 most intelligent people in the world and said, hey guys, I want you to, to contrive a way that we could waste the greatest possible amount of time studying the scriptures. And that's basically what, what, what people do today. All right. So it's all about applying 0:25:50 - 0:26:22 these things to your everyday life and your life as a whole. This is um in a recent talk I gave called the weightier matters. I mentioned how when we try to increase or grow, let's let's go with that. When we try to grow our spiritual life, we think that the way we'll do that is by spreading the churchy 0:26:21 - 0:26:42 stuff all over our temporal life. You know, I gotta spend extra time in the scriptures in the morning or I better fast a little more or pay more tithing or, you know, whatever, spend more time in the church building. No, I mean, all those things are fine, but they're probably not actually what you're 0:26:41 - 0:27:03 after. You have to strengthen the bridge between the churchy stuff and the temporal stuff. You need to bring your religion into your real life, not just expand the chunk of the pie, that's the churchy stuff. It's, it's learning how to better transmit that and apply it in your everyday life. There are 0:27:03 - 0:27:25 some really good scriptures about likening the scriptures to yourself. That's what you need to do better at. If your idea of religion is quoting scripture, you, you're on the wrong boat. It's about living scripture. It's about having it so deeply carved into your soul that you can put it into everyday 0:27:24 - 0:27:51 English. In fact, you could explain it to a six year old if you had to. Um I have a nine year old son and the other day uh we, I took him with me to town to run some errands and um we were sitting there eating some lunch and I asked him, oh, he, he had been studying the question of what does it mean 0:27:51 - 0:28:13 to follow Jesus? And I asked him that and he had an answer and we talked through it and in about two minutes flat, I took his answer and helped him understand something 100 times better. And it was just in plain English, it's to do what he would do in your place for the same reasons he would do it. That's 0:28:13 - 0:28:32 what it means to follow Jesus and he understood it crystal clear and that's what we're after. Um, now that was one person to another and here we're talking about individual study, but what we're after is to improve our understanding of what God would do, why he would do it, why you should do it and to 0:28:32 - 0:28:58 notice and feel bad when you do less than that, you're building a model of God in your own understanding so that you can live that model in your own being and help others to do the same. So breaking this down, if you read Joy on purpose, a book that I recently released, you're gonna see that one aspect 0:28:58 - 0:29:20 of that system is character qualities. When you're designing your life, you can think about what kind of person do I want to be? Where should you get that information from? Well, you could use the scriptures to fill that out. You can find character traits to develop through studying the scriptures, you 0:29:19 - 0:29:42 can look at what you do and compare that to what you're reading about. Now, there are plenty of examples, negative examples in the scriptures. People you don't want to be like, you know, do you want to do what Peter did when, when he denied Christ three times? Do you want to do? What? Um I believe their 0:29:42 - 0:30:03 names are Ananias. Sara did that the husband wife pair when they lied to Peter and, and said that they had consecrated all their wealth to that group and they were lying and then they were killed. Do you want to be like Miriam and Aaron Aaron and challenge Moses when you have absolutely no reason to 0:30:03 - 0:30:28 do that and so on, right? But there are also many examples of positive character qualities to develop things that we should emulate. And the best example of that is Jesus himself. But all the people who ever understood anything about him and who loved him acted like him to some extent. And you can use 0:30:28 - 0:30:47 their examples to fill in all the gaps. It's, it's a, there are way points in your path towards Jesus so you can find out what you should be like. And then as you're reading, you compare and you say, hm, if I was in this situation, would I do the same thing, would I say the same thing? Would I feel this 0:30:47 - 0:31:10 way? And should I, what should I do and say, and feel and what's the distance? How do I change? Another thing you pull out of the scriptures is what is valuable and why it's valuable. We talked about how our appraisals of value are terrible. They're terribly off now. That doesn't, there are two aspects 0:31:09 - 0:31:39 of this. One is how you feel about what you believe is bad. So one facet of sin is desiring what you believe is bad. But another facet is, is a failure to understand to, to see good as good. What you see as good and evil is wrong. It's incomplete and incorrect. That's also part of our journey is to fix 0:31:39 - 0:32:04 that or at least to grow and and to make that more accurate. Another thing you could pull out of scriptures is um a better understanding of reality. Now, value is very much tied to your understanding of reality. But there are other aspects of this like the laws of cause and effect. These are the if thens 0:32:03 - 0:32:28 right, if you do this, this is what will happen. If society does this, this is what will happen, right? And then another example because this is not an exhaustive list is you can also use the scriptures to learn better ways of persuading people. Now, you have examples of teachings from some of the most 0:32:27 - 0:32:50 persuasive people who have ever lived and and the best kind of persuasion, persuasion towards improvement. Those aren't just limited to general principles, although you'll find lots of those you'll also find specific arguments that you can use for specific things because human nature is constant, the 0:32:50 - 0:33:11 devil doesn't have new tricks. He's just always rehashing the same exact strategies. And so when you see those arguments made by ancients, and you see spiritual giants slaying them, slaying those arguments, you can use the same approaches and then you don't have to think them up for yourself. You could 0:33:10 - 0:00:00 just reuse them. So in your individual study, you can do all of that. You could also find and trace links between concepts, words, principles and so on. Now, much of that is greatly facilitated by modern technology because you can do things like word searches. And if you use Bible hub, for instance, 0:00:00 - 0:34:04 um I'll just show you this real, real quickly. So if I just type in Bible hub, Titus 21 into Google, then I'll get this. And if I go to the site, here's all of the translation versions that they have there, you could read through those. But this is, this is where I most often go, I'll click on the Greek 0:34:04 - 0:34:21 if it's New Testament, if it's Old Testament, this will say Hebrew and then you can see what it actually says in Greek. Um And then this is the strong's concordance. I know I'm going through this quickly, but it's a video so you can go back if it's too fast and oh, here's our word doctrine, right? Click 0:34:21 - 0:34:45 on that and now you've got every single time this word was used in the New Testament. And if it's more than say 20 times you, you click this and you get the full listing, they'll only show so much on that summary page. Now, you can very quickly read the King James snippet that uses the word for each 0:34:45 - 0:35:08 reference, right? And so in about a minute and a half, depending on how fast you read, you can go from the original citation to reading every verse. And, and depending on how popular the word is, every verse that uses it in The New Testament. And this is an explosion of understanding at your fingertips 0:35:08 - 0:35:32 and it just doesn't take very long. Isn't that wonderful? That's just one example of the many tools that we have. Now, some of these take a lot more work if you want to translate things into principles it, I mean, that's gonna be a body of, you know, lifelong learning, which raises my next point. Every 0:35:31 - 0:35:58 single one of you should absolutely have some system for capturing what you learn. That's not just your head. OK? Your noggin is good, but it's only so good and some Noggins are better than others. Mine wouldn't be an example here of the weirdest shaped head in the world. So, um you want to have something 0:35:58 - 0:36:22 typed up, right? Maybe you wanna use a three ring binder and three hole punched paper, but you're gonna find that you waste an enormous amount of time writing and erasing and rewriting things and there's no way to do a search on that. Um I've, I have used many different systems over the years but there's 0:36:22 - 0:36:44 software out there that if you use a Mac, maybe this free program that comes with it, notes, maybe that works for you. Uh I don't do that, but there's all kinds of functionality in that program that might be useful to you. Um Because of what I am tasked with most of my recording, I've gone into detail 0:36:44 - 0:37:10 about this system in another video, but I have a general notes file where I'll try to summarize the note with a heading and then from there that will get moved around and mixed with other ideas which I organize in files with uh more general topics and then those files have chapters because they'll eventually 0:37:09 - 0:37:34 be books. And so what, what I have done, which is what actually I recommend that you do is that I've attempted to write up everything I believe with all the evidence necessary for someone else to believe it. Now, you might say to yourself, why would I take that on? That's an immense amount of time. Well 0:37:34 - 0:37:58 , sort of, it's actually not terribly more time than it takes to just do due diligence and actually think through and prove to yourself that you believe what you say you believe. And we started on this earlier at the beginning when we were talking about this, this email I got when you convince yourself 0:37:58 - 0:38:17 that you believe something without having sufficient reasons to believe it. And if you can't write out why you believe it in a way that's persuasive to someone else. You don't have sufficient reasons. This is, there's so many things. If we replayed this video where I could highlight most Christians don't 0:38:17 - 0:38:34 believe this. Most Christians don't believe this. What I just said is one of those most Christians define faith as what you believe without having sufficient reason to believe. It's actually quite the opposite. Faith is believing what you have sufficient reason to believe. Nothing more, nothing less 0:38:33 - 0:38:59 . So if you can't define what you believe and couch it in evidences that are sufficient for anyone else to believe it, you don't actually believe it or at least you shouldn't. Right. So writing out what you believe and why is not some huge burden. It's actually just due diligence and you're fooling yourself 0:38:58 - 0:39:19 . If you think you believe something without being able to do that and you will find out when you're tried that you don't actually believe it and you'll conveniently forget what you said you believed or even argued very vehemently that you believed just before that you'll throw it out the window and 0:39:19 - 0:39:37 say, well, I'm just gonna do this because I feel like it, it's very important. Ok? Now, the benefit of doing that is that you can hand it to someone else you can hand it to your kids. You know, there are people out there who spend a lot of time journaling and I think that definitely has its benefits 0:39:36 - 0:39:59 . And uh in, in some cultures, it's quite a big deal to hand down your journal to your kids when you die. Um In, in our family, my, my wife gave me explicit instructions that if, if she goes before I do, I am to burn all of her journals without looking at any of them. So slightly different culture, I 0:39:59 - 0:40:20 guess. But um why not write up what you actually believe? Like maybe that's more important than your little account of how you lost your socks when you were at the laundromat today or whatever the heck you're writing in your journal. Who cares compared to this? Who cares? It's important. I'm not trying 0:40:19 - 0:40:40 to minimize it. But relative to this, it's not, this is much more valuable. And then AAA final tip here on individual study before we move on to family is to ask questions and find the answers. It's good to spend time. You know, people say, oh, I have this goal. I'm gonna read one chapter a day. Well 0:40:40 - 0:40:59 , that's probably not a good goal because different chapters are different lengths. Maybe it's better to read for a certain amount of time or even a certain number of pages per day. Although I don't subscribe to any of those goals because I, I think it it's too structured. It will cause you to be less 0:40:59 - 0:41:19 inclined to heed, promptings to dive deeper into something or go somewhere else and do something else. But if that's what it takes and the, the alternative is nothing, then yeah, it's better than nothing. If it works for you and it's what's best for you, then go for it. But you really should ask questions 0:41:18 - 0:41:34 . Now, I've already given you examples of kinds of questions you can ask. You could stop and say, what does this word mean? Can I describe this to someone else? Would I do this in this situation? If not, what would I do? How can I change this? Which one's better and so on. How would I explain this to 0:41:34 - 0:41:57 an eight year old? Um Why did they say it this way instead of this other way? And, and there are a lot of questions you can ask. Of course, there are very specific questions you could ask. Um What do these candlesticks represent? Why are there seven of them? Is this the same as this other thing that 0:41:57 - 0:42:24 I think is related? But I'm not sure where else is this talked about, right? You get as, as specific as you'd like and remember that, that the time that you take and the precision you use in something is always connected to how important it is to you. And here's a golden rock solid tip for getting more 0:42:24 - 0:42:49 answers from God. Focus your questions on what you care about the most. If what you ask God about is what you care about the most. You are much, much more likely to get a response. And here's a clue. You're not gonna ask anything flippantly that's actually important to you. Let me help you understand 0:42:48 - 0:43:15 this with, with an example, many of you have prayed for the poor and unfortunate around the world. Maybe something specific like, you know, the people who are suffering in the Ukraine Russia war right now, would you pray with the same fervor if your own son or daughter were there? I can predict that 0:43:15 - 0:43:37 you would have a little bit more fervor if it were your own son or daughter or what if it were you? There was a, a video recently terrible video of a man being chased by a suicide drone and he turns around and you can see his hands and he says a prayer before the thing blows him up is your prayer for 0:43:36 - 0:43:56 these random suffering people as fervent as his was before he got blown up. And so focus your, your requests on the things that you care about the most. What we do is we throw up all these garbage prayers for things we don't really care about and we live our lives that way too. Most of what you do in 0:43:56 - 0:44:16 the day is just a garbage activity that you don't actually care about. And then you completely ignore the things that you do care an awful lot about when that should all be inverted as you should be giving your, your most intense attention to the things that are most important to you. Now, let's pivot 0:44:15 - 0:44:36 and let's talk about how to do this in your family. So I've ordered, I've arranged what we're going to talk about here in order of importance and the order might shock you do. You know what the, the number one thing you can do as a parent to help your kids be more scripturally literate. It's to help 0:44:36 - 0:45:02 them just be literate in general. It's an amazing thing to me that to compare how much parents care about their kids getting into the scriptures, which admittedly they should care a lot more. But most Christians would say that they would like their kids to love and be familiar with scripture and yet 0:45:01 - 0:45:26 those same parents don't do a dang thing to help their kids love and appreciate books. Now, how do you get a kid who hates to read, to magically love reading the scriptures? That's usually not the way it works, right? How do you get a kid who can't even read to somehow be able to read scripture? Which 0:45:26 - 0:45:45 is not easy reading? Do you see where I'm going with this? How do you get a kid who's got the attention span of a net? Because he had a tablet put in front of his face when he was six months? Old and it's never left. It's now surgically attached. It's, it's grown into an extension of his hand. How do 0:45:45 - 0:46:09 you get that kid to spend hours and hours and hours combing through the scriptures? Good luck. So you see this touches a lot more than you. You might think the number one thing you can do as a parent to help your kid love and know the scriptures is to get them to spend more time reading. Now, the bad 0:46:09 - 0:46:32 news is how big of a deal. This is the good news is how easy it is to fix. This doesn't take, you don't have to have three phd S from MIT to figure this one out. There are many studies have been done that that show a strong correlation between get this the number of books in your house and dramatic outcomes 0:46:31 - 0:46:56 for your kids. I'm talking about academic success, development of vocabulary, critical thinking, math proficiency, uh career success, long term economic success as an adult. All that correlates very highly with a number of books in your house. Now, correlation is not causation. Parents who have a bunch 0:46:56 - 0:47:17 of books in their house are probably not doofuses themselves, right? There's probably other things going on, but this is a very easy thing to fix. You might say, well, we don't really have the budget for that. You can go to any second hand store, yard sale, whatever and pick up tons and tons of kids 0:47:17 - 0:47:40 books for almost nothing. Check out the online classifieds, you could probably buy boxes of books. Now, you should definitely vet those books, especially with every passing day. However, you know, libraries have sales, whatever you can get books for, for almost nothing. And you train up a kid to enjoy 0:47:40 - 0:48:01 , to read through mixing in plenty of books that they actually want to read. So figure out what they're interested in and then find a way to tie books into that. And that, that really isn't that complicated. You know, kid starts talking about airplanes. Hey, let's go to the library and find a book about 0:48:01 - 0:48:28 airplanes, right? Or a bunch of books about airplanes, feed that feed, that use books to feed their interests and then magically they start loving books, right? We can't really tiptoe around this. I'm just gonna give it to you straight. Most parents today are abysmally lazy and they just put the, they'd 0:48:27 - 0:48:44 rather sit there scrolling through their phone than spending time with their kids. Now, maybe you don't know what to do with your kids. Right. And that's maybe one of the inhibitions to spending time with them. You're like, what the heck am I gonna do with these things? They don't come with instructions 0:48:43 - 0:49:03 , right? Maybe you didn't have the best parents yourself to use an example. Use as an example. Well, guess what if you sit down and read with a kid, you don't have to be creative. You don't have to be, you know, Mr Rogers or Blues Clues or whatever the heck they have today. You, you just have to sit 0:49:02 - 0:49:23 there and read and this ties directly into the rest of what I'm gonna say in a minute about family scripture time. You don't have to be some whiz at the scriptures to help your kids learn the scriptures. It's really predominantly just about the time you spend. That's the number one factor is just putting 0:49:22 - 0:49:41 in the time. Ok, we'll, we'll get back to that in a minute. I just want to finish my point about getting your kids to spend more time in books. It's not the easiest thing in the world to teach a kid how to read. But it's one of those things that everybody and their brother has done since the dawn of 0:49:41 - 0:50:04 time. It's not rocket science, right? You point at words and sound them out. That's all you do. It's very easy, right? It just takes time. Um So putting in the time is really all it takes. Now, here's why you should do it. I don't know of anything you can do as a parent that has a higher roi I'm gonna 0:50:04 - 0:50:23 say that again. I don't know of anything you can do as a parent that has a higher ro I maybe getting them adequate nutrition from birth until seven. You know, if they have child malnutrition, they're gonna be seriously jacked up. But as far as positive things go teaching them how to read the time it 0:50:22 - 0:50:42 takes to do this versus what you are going to get out of it. It's just enormous. I don't know what investment you could make. That would be better than this. Let me give you some examples. Once a kid knows how to read, if you want them to learn something, all you have to do is hand them a book. That's 0:50:42 - 0:51:07 your time commitment is order, book off Amazon hand to kid, ask question at conclusion of book. If you do this right, it really becomes that easy. OK. Now long lifelong Roy is also immense. I I mentioned the these things are immensely coupled to basically every measure of success and your life as a parent 0:51:07 - 0:51:35 will be infinitely more meaningful and easy. The more successful your child is, however you define that. Um I wanna give you an example of how reading changes kids for the better and their ability to think. I have two stories from my own kids with um something that, that kids who read lots of books do 0:51:35 - 0:51:57 is they learn, they coin words. So um you can tell a kid that reads a lot because their pronunciation of words is horrifically bad because they, they read and learn words much faster than they hear them and learn them in the world. And so they have to just kind of sound it out and, and go with it and 0:51:57 - 0:52:21 they'll learn the meaning of a word before they learn its pronunciation, which is kind of crazy. But here's two interesting stories. One of my kids didn't know the word copper. And so he coined this phrase penny gold for copper and he used it as if that were the appropriate phrase, the name of the, the 0:52:21 - 0:52:37 metal. It was just a fluent thing in his brain. He had created this phrase and he had used it in his brain many times. So it was fluent. But you didn't realize that no one else called Copper Penny Gold. But it's actually quite a clever name. I think it's probably better than copper. And then another 0:52:37 - 0:52:58 child of mine, she called Ice Water Glass. She was, she, she learned to read at like three or something and uh it was insane. It was freakish. Um but she called it ice water glass and again, it just, it came out, she's like she was talking about something and said, I don't know what you're talking about 0:52:58 - 0:53:21 and she's like water glass. I was like what I was like, oh ice. Um But a rule of thumb here to get back into the practical applications is that Children should absolutely spend more time in books than they spend on screens just like they should spend more time outside than they spend on screens. This 0:53:20 - 0:53:49 is a simple little heuristic that, that creates a massive rift between modern kids and everything wrong with them and functional successful Children. Of days of old, there are simple little things you can do differently to have radically different outcomes, radically better outcomes. Ok. Enough of that 0:53:49 - 0:54:12 , um coming back to just putting in the time, if you've ever looked at a boxer's training regimen, most of what they do is just putting in the time. So yes, they might study some technique or learn a different way to punch or whatever. But for the most part, all they're doing day after day when they're 0:54:12 - 0:54:33 training for a fight is doing a whole bunch of running, lifting a whole bunch of weights. It's all on a routine. There's nothing novel about it. It's hours and hours and hours of this every day. It turns out that if you just put in the time that's going to make an enormous difference. So let's talk about 0:54:33 - 0:54:56 what that looks like with family scripture study every single day. You or your spouse should be sitting down with all your kids for, for a specified amount of time and just plowing through the scriptures in whatever form that parent decides to do for the day. You really don't have to do much more than 0:54:55 - 0:55:21 that to get an enormous payout. Now, there are good ways and bad ways of doing this. It's one of those things that you can continue to refine forever and never have it perfect. But what you're trying to do is just develop a general fluency in again, what we keep coming back to this. Understand what God 0:55:21 - 0:55:39 would do, why he would do it, why you should do it and notice and feel bad when you do less than that, an absolute minimum for this is just reading the scriptures, right? So you sit down and each person reads a verse and you go in a circle until time's up. Even if no one has anything profound to say 0:55:39 - 0:56:02 , even if you just feel like you're wrangling them the whole time, even if you know everybody's rolling their eyes and yawning, whatever, just get in the time. Ok? Now we're going to go advanced with this for the next two slides, but that's the basics. Um And I'm gonna say something that'll ruffle some 0:56:02 - 0:56:23 feathers. I don't care in any couple. There's going to be one person who's more spiritually advanced. The less spiritually advanced person is the one who should be doing this with the kids. Now, why shouldn't both parents be there because the other person has better things to do this. This is like uh 0:56:23 - 0:56:45 having a soldier watch over the captives that that's not where you're gonna put your, your master marksmen who has to be out in the field doing what only they can do that. There's no need for more than one parent to be here during this. Ok? And it should be the parent that has the least to say that's 0:56:44 - 0:57:01 gonna ruffle feathers, but whatever that is the greatest contribution that they can make. During that time, the greatest contribution the other person can make is gonna be different things. Now, I used an analogy for this, which is a pastor versus a prophet. It's just a figure of speech, but prophets 0:57:01 - 0:57:20 make very bad pastors. Why? Because when people go to church week after week, they're not going to get blasted by some radical new thing that's gonna tear apart all their foundations that they rested upon before they want to get a little of that. But mostly they just, you know, they're putting in the 0:57:20 - 0:57:43 time they want to hear the same thing they heard 500 times before with maybe a little Sprinkle of new. That's what they want. That's what a pastor does. Right. That's not what a prophet does. This is a pastor responsibility. And so whichever parent is less advanced spiritually, that's the one that should 0:57:43 - 0:58:07 be doing this, ok? And we'll get into what the other one does and this isn't necessarily so cut and dry, but I'm, I'm just trying to make it uh kind of a polar argument for clarity. And you, you find what works the best with your situation. Coming back to read this yet again, to understand what God would 0:58:07 - 0:58:24 do, why he would do it, why you should do it and to notice and feel bad when you do less than that. If all you're doing is pounding through the scriptures, there are going to be other ways you can do this better. Right. If that's, there are better things that you could do with your kids. But that's the 0:58:23 - 0:58:48 foundation is to get the time in. Ok. Um, anyone who's done this is like herding cats, getting everybody up. I am strongly in favor of doing this first thing in the morning. You know, it's so hilarious to me. Side note slash, get off my lawn moment. It's hilarious to me how many parents raise their kids 0:58:47 - 0:59:07 in patterns that are different than what they, they want their kids to do as adults. And then they think magically that's gonna change at some future date when they're outside the house. You know, if you want your kid to be able to do their own laundry and cook their own food, guess what you need to 0:59:06 - 0:59:32 do before they move out, you need to get them to do their own laundry and cook food. Right? May rotate them into cooking dinner one night a week or something. Uh, uh, this, this, um, this parenting as creating a never ending feast of what adults would do if they didn't have to work for a living and were 0:59:32 - 0:59:57 independently wealthy. That, that is an atrocious approach to parenting. So do get your kids to do as kids, what you want them to do as adults. So, if you want them to have a habit of waking up early and doing the most important thing, first, guess what they need to do while they're still in your house 0:59:56 - 1:00:19 . So, what's the most important thing? Probably scripture study? So, do it. First thing in the morning, wake up earlier than whatever. The next thing you have to do on your schedule is, get them all up. And it's funny a lot of parents let their kids stay up late and then they're always wrestling with 1:00:19 - 1:00:38 them to get up in the morning, just make them go to bed early and then they get up naturally early or, uh, you know, it might be really difficult to get them down to scripture study and you got the tired ones and you got the hyper ones, right? Why not get them to work out right before that? And, and 1:00:38 - 1:00:57 people are like, oh, you can get a 12 year old to work out. Yeah, even a six year old. Like, if, if mom's doing yoga at whatever time in the morning, you know, this solves multiple problems. Mom says I don't have time to work out because I'm so busy. Well, guess what? Get up with the kids, the little 1:00:57 - 1:01:15 kids and they could do your little stretches too, or at least, you know, kind of, sort of do them. That, that's not gonna stop the train. Two birds with one stone. Right. Older kids can work out on their own, doing their own thing and then they're not hyper or tired, everybody's alert and you're not 1:01:15 - 1:01:34 wasting your energy, hurting cats. It's just part of the routine. All right. So as you're reading here are some tricks to make it less putting in the time and more understanding what God would do, why he would do it, why you should do it. And to notice and feel bad when you do less than that as you read 1:01:33 - 1:01:58 , you will be prompted to pause and dive deeper into something or mention another verse. That's just, uh that's the same principle from another angle or to specifically show, you know, your daughter how she did differently than this last night. You know, that's the role of the parent, you and you teach 1:01:58 - 1:02:14 your kids to do this for themselves by doing it for them, just like you taught them how to eat by feeding them. And then eventually it's time for them to grab the spoon and pretend to feed themselves while they were just making a mess and you're feeding them and then eventually they start shoving the 1:02:14 - 1:02:34 spoon in their own mouth and that gives you two free hands. Life is good. See how that works. So there's nothing new here. It's just we do this in the most retarded way possible. And no surprise, the kids don't learn. This is exactly what Jesus was saying when he said, you know that when the sky is red 1:02:34 - 1:02:52 , the weather will be bad. And yet, where's your logic? When it comes to the spiritual things, you throw it right out the window and pretend it's different So you pause when the spirit prompts you, you teach your kids to do the same or when there's a question, you teach them to ask questions by asking 1:02:51 - 1:03:11 them questions. It's so easy guys. When you're reading the verse, you just pause and say, what do you think it means when it says now, what if you don't know, it doesn't matter all the, all the more reason to ask the question and then you write it down and then you can look up the answer or get them 1:03:11 - 1:03:33 to assign it out and then, and then have them report on that the next day or a week later, right? And then take it from there, maybe pass it off to another person if they, if they don't figure it, excuse me, figure it out. You can identify if, then statements that's the laws of cause and effect. If then 1:03:33 - 1:04:02 , right, you'll prosper in the land if you keep the commandments, right? And again, just, just driving home when, when you realize that what you're reading has application to your house and to their lives, pause and make it explicit, you're training them to do the same thing. OK. Now, this is a great 1:04:02 - 1:04:31 time to mention another reason people don't do this because they don't actually live the gospel themselves. It's difficult for a parent to do this when it requires them to be a hypocrite. You know, are you gonna read about being born again and you haven't been born again. How does that work? You can't 1:04:31 - 1:04:52 underscore you, you can't do enough to underscore the importance of living what you're teaching. And this is why, you know, it's a great blessing that kids are born as babies because you get exposed to the fact that you have no idea what you're doing and you're not ready for this a couple of years before 1:04:52 - 1:05:13 they notice. And if you play the game right, you fix yourself before they notice. And this is the same thing. So if you've got a bunch of kids of varying ages and they're already aware and you're gonna start doing this all the more reason to repent right now. Now, the good news is it doesn't take time 1:05:13 - 1:05:40 , you can push the button and you're done. The bad news is it doesn't make it easy. Just simple, simple and easy are different things as you come to understand the gospel. You get example, after example, after example of the fact that there really just isn't much you can do without doing the basics first 1:05:39 - 1:06:02 . This is I just uh had an email exchange with another person yesterday last night. I, I believe who said, oh, you, you glancingly mentioned gathering and that, that we should be forming little groups of people and, and you know, studying, worshiping together, studying the scriptures together, whatever 1:06:02 - 1:06:26 . And I said, no, I did not say that I said eventually I will show you how to do that. But there's no point doing that until you're living the gospel yourself. You have to actually repent of your sins yourself first. Or else that's just wasting time and pretending you have something when you have nothing 1:06:25 - 1:06:47 and, and, and wasting your valuable time, which should be spent on individual repentance first till you figure that out till you're willing to do that. Everything else is just a pantomime. So just to call that out explicitly. Yeah, that's a huge obstacle. It's like people want all the benefits of their 1:06:47 - 1:07:13 kids believing in living the scriptures when they don't believe and live them first. Yep, you're gonna be absolutely limited in that. Sorry. There's no way around that. All right, practical tips for managing kids of different ages. This is another Roy argument when you take the time to teach your first 1:07:12 - 1:07:40 child how to read. Not only do you gain all these um residuals with residual benefits on how you can further help them with relatively little additional effort, like say, oh, you like planes? Here's a book about planes. Sa right, dad, I'm bored. Go read a book. See you right. There are other residuals 1:07:39 - 1:08:02 . For instance, when the next kid has to learn how to read, you don't have to teach them. You know, I only taught one of my kids how to ride a bike, the rest of them. I said go talk to so and so he'll, he'll teach you right? Why? Because, because not only is that save me time, but it gives that person 1:08:01 - 1:08:24 an opportunity to add value and that provides meaning in life. Right? Delegation is not an issue of being lazy, it's an issue, it's a, it's a tool to maximize value for all cause the person who receives the delegated task gains greater meaning in life through providing more value than they otherwise 1:08:24 - 1:08:50 . Would the the value you add as you do your job as a parent, it shifts more and more to being uh to giving direction. It's, it, it shifts more and more to being informational away from being based on resources and you're inspiring people and directing them in, in paths that are better than what they 1:08:49 - 1:09:19 would have chosen. It's like God's greatest glory is not creating the heavens and the earth. Although that's massive, it's actually in persuading people to know and love what is good. That's much greater. It's much harder, but it benefits us much more. That's a side note yet massively important information 1:09:18 - 1:09:44 . So um as you teach kids how to read, as you're going around in your little circle, everybody read a verse or two verses or whatever. When it comes to the, the kids that, that don't know how to read yet, you just skip them, the kids that are starting to learn how to read, they can sit on your lap and 1:09:43 - 1:10:05 you can point to each word and try to get them to sound it out and then you correct them as they get it wrong. You can teach a kid how to read 100% just from that brief interaction. In scripture study. You also get them to point to the words when other people are saying them and that you have to avoid 1:10:05 - 1:10:20 this. I'm staring off into space until it's my turn business. You have to correct that when it happens. But the kids who are learning how to read should be pointing to each word. And that's what you're doing is you're paying attention and helping them get their finger in the right place as they're doing 1:10:20 - 1:10:43 that, right. That alone can teach a kid how to read. It doesn't necessarily require any extra time from the parent other than what they're doing in scripture study. But the the young kids that don't know how to read yet they learn have to learn how to sit still and be quiet. This is very important. Now 1:10:43 - 1:11:07 , back when I used to go to church, people would marvel at how quiet and still my kids were and said, ho how do you get your kids to sit through church? I said, well, when they don't, I smack them and they had this horrified look on their face. Right? No, but the truth is at home is when you learn to 1:11:07 - 1:11:28 sit still, if a kid doesn't sit still in church, you can guarantee 100% that they're not sitting still at home. Now. Why does this matter? Is it some abusive thing of just some freak control parent, parental control stuff? No, a kid that can't sit quietly for five minutes or 15 minutes or a half hour 1:11:28 - 1:11:48 . How is that kid eventually going to learn how to pray on his knees for five minutes or 10 minutes or a half hour? Or to look someone in the eyes and pay attention to them when they're in a lecture, when they're in school, in a class or to just sit and work through a problem when it's hard without pulling 1:11:48 - 1:12:11 out their phone every three seconds. All of these things are the same thing. So as long as you're gonna spend the time doing scripture study, you may as well get as much out of it as you can, right? So we're, we're stacking the benefits here and all of these have lifelong returns on the investment. So 1:12:10 - 1:12:36 , and then if one of your kids knows how to read, they can sit with one of the kids that doesn't and do all the things I already described when you do parenting, right? It just gets easier over time. Now there's caveat to that because you get old and tired. So what you have to input in that sense, in 1:12:36 - 1:12:58 raw energy, it goes down. But these things they, they, they grow legs and they start walking on their own. I'm not talking about kids. I'm saying that the skills that you impart the culture, you impart those things, develop momentum on their own and it gets easier over time. You know, if, if you have 1:12:58 - 1:13:17 to fight a 15 year old and what they're eating like you would, a two year old, you did something horrifically bad. You, you failed somewhere and, and the best time to fix that is today. Right? Because it's just gonna be worse with time. That's one benefit of parenting. Is that anything that's going wrong 1:13:17 - 0:00:00 ? You have the greatest possible motivation to fix it right now because it is going to just fester and get worse for the rest of your life. All right. So I talked about encouraging them to ask and find the answers to questions there. I've talked in other videos about explicit ways of doing this. Um, 0:00:00 - 1:14:08 our, our current go to is every Sunday, there's a child assigned to come up with a question and find the answer to it and they theoretically have a whole week to do that. But usually that's what they do on Sunday morning and all morning. And, uh, our, our kids again presently, they do normal scripture 1:14:07 - 1:14:33 study as a family on Sunday mornings and then, um, they do individual scripture study until noon. That's how they spend their Sundays and then they're off the hook after that. They are, um, responsible for finding Sabbath appropriate things to do until dinner. And, uh, you know, one kid's gonna go off 1:14:32 - 1:15:00 and do art and so on and so forth. So in case you're curious, um, but, but every family is different, you find what works for you. And, uh, then on Sunday at dinner is when they have to write up their question and the answer and they, they're instructed to write it as an essay to someone who does not 1:15:00 - 1:15:27 believe what they do. And then I read that silently as I'm eating and I'm a quick reader and I will mark up their essay. So we're double stacking writing skills with this. And then I pass it back to them and I talked through the corrections or suggestions that I made and then they have to read it. So 1:15:26 - 1:15:53 they practice public speaking, they have to read it to the family and then we talk about it as a family. Thats what we do, it sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. It's like 10 minutes tops over what we would do anyway. But just sitting there and eating and talking. Right. So, um each of them has a 1:15:53 - 1:16:18 way to write notes and to keep that digitally, that's what they work on on Sundays. And also during the week they do individual scripture study and they do that. The older ones do it before family scripture study, the younger ones do it as part of home school and it's not some huge chunk of time, but 1:16:18 - 1:16:44 that's, that's what they do. Um So the last thing I wanna, I wanna touch on here before we talk about some of the do not. These are the dues is that it's very important probably the the after just putting in the time, the next biggest bang for your buck is going to be rec as a parent recognizing the 1:16:44 - 1:17:06 impromptu moments of when you can teach out of the scriptures. Now, this is your opportunity to leverage your familiarity with the scriptures and hopefully the advanced nature of your ability to recall that information and apply it to real life. Again, you can't give someone else something you don't 1:17:06 - 1:17:26 have. So you can't just make this up. You have to actually learn how to do it. And the best way to do that is with whatever we talked about under the individual scriptures section of this video. But ideally every single thing that you do in your life, you could cite a scripture to back up what you're 1:17:26 - 1:17:46 doing and why you're doing it. Ideally, that's the goal. And so when you're speaking with someone, your kids, I mean, or your spouse and you're trying to help them understand what God would do, why he would do it, why they should do it and to notice and feel bad when they do less than that. Every single 1:17:46 - 1:18:17 thing that you say should, you should be able to cite a scripture ideally to back up what you're saying, it doesn't mean you're going to, but you should be able to, that's, you should be actively querying your understanding of scripture as evidence that your position is what God would do. So sometimes 1:18:16 - 1:18:40 you will explicitly refer to those scriptures as a father or a mother. There are going to be times where you sit everybody down and you pull out the scriptures and you read a specific passage and you say you all need to be better at this because you're not living up to what this says or here, here's 1:18:39 - 1:19:03 a reason why you need to be better on this one thing because read this story and see what happens when people don't do better at that. And that's completely appropriate, right? There was a uh a principle that my family was, was really struggling with at one point and I printed out a set. I can't remember 1:19:03 - 1:19:24 . It was three, something like three verses and I printed them out and I cut them up and every day for like a week at dinner, I got somebody to read one of them and we talked through it and we cycle through this because it was a real issue that we needed to work on. And uh as I'm saying that I'm thinking 1:19:23 - 1:19:50 of something else that we need to do this again on uh that, that's continuing problem in my family. So this is the point is that this person who wants to take up the, you know, archetypal prophetic mantle in the family, you need to be thinking on a regular basis. What's the story with my family. I mean 1:19:50 - 1:20:15 , think about as a whole and as individuals, these people and what, how can they all or each be more like God and what scriptures might help them to understand what he would do, why he would do it and why they should do it or what scriptures might help them feel a little worse for being less than, than 1:20:15 - 1:20:46 what they should. Right. All right. So, I, I talked a little about the prophet pastor dichotomy. The pastor, one was on the previous slide, but this takes a lot more input to do what I just described. It's not just putting in the time, ok? You really, it takes a great deal of sacrifice. And so having 1:20:45 - 1:21:07 one parent handle the pastor stuff and just putting in the time of scripture study, it frees up the other one to come in and do these lightning strikes, right? These uh angelic drop kicks to the face. That's, it's a different thing and it, it can't be every moment of every day that's gonna overwhelm 1:21:07 - 1:21:32 people. You have to take advantage of the fact that hopefully you have time with your Children, you don't have to rush it, you do it strategically, it's all aiming at the greatest long term benefit. And so you have to be strategic about that. So finally, I just briefly want to mention that I am not a 1:21:32 - 1:21:58 big fan of children's scriptures. There's a lot of like comic book versions or just oversimplified text. These are treated like baby food. But the thing about baby food is it's at least the good kinds. It's just raw, simple ingredient food, like it's boiled carrots or boiled peas. And that's all there 1:21:58 - 1:22:25 is. The comic books and the children's stories are more like donuts. The problem is instead of creating the foundation of good habits, you're actually imposing barriers to those good habits because reading the scriptures is not like reading comic books and some artist's impression of what happened is 1:22:25 - 1:22:54 going to imprint visual images that probably aren't true and that are going to supplant what the spirit could teach you from the text. And so a lot more could be said about this. I'm just trying to be brief, but it's much better to subject them to the mountain of climbing up general literacy than it 1:22:54 - 1:23:16 is to think that you're doing them good by bringing it down the mountain and giving them a golden idol to worship. And maybe it seems like I'm blowing this out of proportion. But I, I spent two years with around 200 young men and women who were brought up in this way and they were grossly illiterate 1:23:15 - 1:23:40 in general. If any of them are watching this, I'm not talking about every single one and scripturally illiterate in general. They just had no clue what was going on. And I, I just, I don't think that's a good idea. Rather spend the time teaching them how to actually read and had to enjoy actually reading 1:23:39 - 1:24:07 and don't sit them in front of cartoons about the scriptures and don't put them in front of comic books versions of the scriptures and don't give them these children's Bible over simplified things. Um The, the furthest I would go is to get a Ce V Bible Common English version and um like all translations 1:24:06 - 1:24:30 , there are limitations with that, especially in particular verses, but it's easier to read and it's not dumbed down to the point of harming people because once those things get lodged in their head, it's really hard to get them out. I'll give you an example. I mean, who over 40 who can think of Moses 1:24:29 - 1:24:53 without seeing Charlton Heston in their head, right? And, and we pick up things from the stories that are really hard to get out of our heads that might not actually be in the text or certain things are overemphasized when the more important parts aren't. So these things are never put together by profits 1:24:52 - 1:25:16 . It's always some artist, no offense against artists. And I'm not saying they can't be inspired, but it's someone getting a paycheck for making pictures or dumbing things down. You know, that's those aren't sufficient credentials to create a highlight reel and no surprise were the powers gone for the 1:25:15 - 1:25:40 people who learn that way. Similarly, I am not a fan of memorizing scripture that's gonna rub people the wrong way. But unless you have a gift for memorization, which I've known people who have, and that's awesome. And I wish I had it. OK. It takes so much time to memorize the scripture for one where 1:25:40 - 1:25:59 you could be familiarizing yourself with and extracting principles and, and there's much more relative value in what you would do in the same amount of time. But two, in order to memorize, you have to reduce something to wrote that you can't separate those two things. It is literally what you're doing 1:25:59 - 1:26:23 . You have to pull yourself out of critically thinking about what it says. And and in some way, you're kind of creating barriers to the kinds of thought that you want to get out of scripture study. And so familiarity with verses is not the same as memorizing them. And II I, I'm not saying people shouldn't 1:26:23 - 1:26:45 memorize scriptures, but as with all things only do what has the greatest value. So there's one exception to this and that's a little game that I came up with that I I call prove it. And the idea of this game is very simple and you for sure should run with it in your own family. If, if it strikes your 1:26:45 - 1:27:10 fancy as you read the scriptures, you notice examples of principles, you write that principle down on a card. If you could do this, do this digitally too, there are a lot of flash card programs and then you find references or the best reference to prove that principle. So you're finding scriptures that 1:27:10 - 1:27:36 prove scriptural principles, gospel principles, you could also call this game axioms and evidences, but that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. So I I already mentioned one, you keep the commandments, you'll be prospered in the land, right? So these are helpful because if you happen to uh be in a moment 1:27:36 - 1:27:59 of temptation, maybe this comes to your mind or if you're trying to persuade someone else. But even this is of limited utility because the only people you're gonna persuade with this, we come full circle now are the ones who already believe the scriptures are God's word and are honest. And if they're 1:27:59 - 1:28:22 both of those things, they probably don't need you to persuade them of anything anyway. So I wouldn't waste time with memorization. But that's me. I know there are some huge fans of it. That's about all that I've got for you today. I've given you a lot. I hope that you apply this in your life. I think 1:28:21 - 1:28:45 this is the most important way to uh foster a stronger relationship with God for you as an individual and also to begin to um it's the biggest bang for your buck as far as helping your family draw nearer to and become more like Jesus.