Galatians 3, one and following. O foolish Galatians, who is bewitched you, it was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this, Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish, having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? How'd you like that?

I'm a little disappointed. I thought you'd get a little better. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm a little disappointed.

I thought you'd get a little better. I'm sorry. Why are you disappointed? What's wrong with it? It's boring, yes.

But some passages of scripture are boring. I mean you go and you read those first nine chapters of first Chronicles and they're just names after names after names. There's not much you can do to make them terribly exciting except pronounce them wrong. So what's wrong with it? Couldn't understand you.

Couldn't understand me? Okay, that's a problem. Why is it a problem that you couldn't understand me, though? We're supposed to be able to at least understand what the words are saying. We don't have a meaning for that.

Okay. So you need to know what the words are. Does it matter at all how the words come across to you? Voice inflection. Voice inflection matters.

Why does it matter? Given the text that I just read for example, why does voice inflection matter? Paul's trying to communicate something, he's using words to communicate. Is everything that he's communicating to them just in the order of words that he's giving. Is that all that there is to it?

We had a very long discourse already on the word oh. He's starting out with that same word again. He's up to the same thing. And then the next word is foolish. He's not being kind and tender to them in one sense.

He is trying to teach them something, but he's teaching them with a lot of emphasis, a lot of emotion here. He's on one hand exasperated. I can't believe you guys are doing this. I was there with you. Oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?

It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this. Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish having begun by the Spirit? Are you now being perfected by the flesh?

He's asking these questions here in a tone where he wants them to actually realize that he was there with them. He wants them to recall what the things he taught them were that they've forgotten. You've got this in your Bible and it's all nicely annotated. It has chapters, it has verses. The first time though that that was read, there's probably one person with the text, probably the text that Paul had written, they might have read it ahead of time.

Somebody might have received the letter, one of the elders might have received the letter and the elders might have read it beforehand. And then they got up and they read it in church. And just imagine the guy who was reading it for a moment. He might have been somebody who agreed with Paul entirely. Who's saying, yes, finally, there's somebody who's saying, what's been going on here?

We've been foolish. We've been bullish. He might have been somebody who's become convicted by the very thing that he's reading right before him. Oh, you foolish Galatians. That's me.

That's what it was like to read this the very first time it came up. So we're going to look at expository reading. I'm going to try and build up a couple of principles for how we should just read scripture. And by expository reading, it's a nice fancy term for something that I, it's not really fancy at all. I just mean reading well.

So the title of the talk is expository reading. We're just going to talk about reading scripture well. And I'm going to stipulate right now, unless you're here otherwise, usually when I say reading, I'm meaning reading aloud. I'm not meaning your personal private study or private devotions in your back prayer closet. I'm meaning the public reading of scripture.

So I'm in college. And those of you who are not too far removed from the university scene, not the seminary scene, the university scene, will perhaps be aware of this type of class that's taught. The Bible is literature. And you're all aware of these classes. We look at these classes and we shake our heads and we wring our hands because what they do is they take the Bible and they treat it as if it's just another book.

And they read it as if it's literature but they don't really care if it's true and most of them are committed to a worldview that explicitly denies that it's true or could be true. Over here on the other hand though we evangelicals commit the mirror image error. We treat the Bible as if it's true, but we forget that it's literature. And one of the things that this conference has been trying to draw out, and you've seen this as we've gone through various workshops, is that the Bible is filled with God's word presented in various times and in various ways. There are types of literature here, but as you go back and you understand what those types of literature are and you understand the context that they're in, it's going to affect the way that you study and read scripture.

The gentleman, if you were here last year, there was a longer workshop on this, but the gentleman who led that workshop said something I really can't improve on and you can take it as sort of the linchpin for everything that we're trying to do here today. He said that the text is a sermon that has been preached and wants to be preached again. A text of scripture is a sermon that has been preached and wants to be preached again. Sometimes you have literal sermons in scripture that have been preached and just want to be preached again. And so what we do is we pull those out and we expound upon them and we exposit them and we explain what they mean and what their implications are for us.

But you can also go back and you can find examples in scripture of times when they just opened up scripture and they just read it. You see several examples in the Old Testament of them taking out the book of the law and reading the book of the law aloud to the congregation. Typically after they had forgotten lots of things that were in the book of the law, and they needed to be reminded of it. These are just public readings of scripture. So we should want to try and imitate that.

We should want to be able to read scripture well. We should want to be able to read it passionately. We should want to be able to read it as it's written. And that doesn't happen in our churches very much. It's not very common in evangelical churches to read large portions of scripture above and beyond the sermon text.

Sometimes not even that. Sometimes the sermon text is not very long. One of the early presentations we had talked about the dearth of expository preaching in the United States. The same thing goes for expository reading. I want you to understand something though that the lack of our understanding of scripture in these kinds of ways is not just a sign of our failure as leaders in churches and as fathers, but it's also God's judgment.

Reading from Amos chapter 8 10 and 11 28 Behold the days are coming declares the Lord God when I will send a famine on the land not a famine of bread nor thirst for water but of hearing the word to the Lord They shall wander from sea to sea, from north to east they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it. 22. Some of you are here at this conference because you've been wandering to and fro. You've gone sea to sea and you're coming to this conference because you are experiencing this famine of the Word of God. It's a judgment that we have this famine and it's our turn to repent.

It's our turn to go back and understand scripture the way God would have us understand it. So there are perhaps a few causes of the general problem of why we don't read scripture very well. And I'm speaking to the men in this room. The first cause would be that we're just not by habit very expressive or emotional when we open up something to read it. We're guys, we're men, we don't do that.

I don't really give that, I understand that as a cause, but I'm not going to give it much quarter because you can go back and you can look at men in scripture who wrote scripture that was very expressive and they were manly men. Moses wrote the song of Moses. David wrote all his psalms. They were very expressive. You have Jacob, right before he dies, gives a blessing to all of his sons in the form of poems.

So I'm not going to treat that one much more, other than to say we just need to get over it. There's not much more you can say about that one, other than We have plenty of examples in scripture of manly men who wrote scripture with a lot of power behind it and we need to imitate them. Second cause of the problem why we don't read scripture very well is we're moderns and we just don't read aloud very much. Augustine, prior to his conversion, this event occurred probably in about 384, and he recorded it in the Confessions, but He went to meet this Bishop Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. And Bishop Ambrose was going to be one of his mentors.

He was going to be one of the people that was very instructive in bringing him out of his paganism to Christ. And he tells this little story about Ambrose. When Ambrose was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. We wondered if he read silently, perhaps to protect himself in case he had a here interest and intent on the matter, to whom he might have to expound the text if it's contained difficulties or who might wish to debate some difficult questions. If his time were used up in that way he would get through fewer books than he wished.

Besides the need to preserve his voice which used easily to become hoarse could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for his habit, this man had a good reason for what he did. And right now you're thinking of all the great things Augustine said in Confessions, why did you read that one? Well, I read that one because in all of recorded history it's the first definitive example we have of somebody reading silently. This is 350 years after the ascension of Christ, when we've got Augustine here who's kind of puzzled over this guy who reads and his eyes just scan the page and his heart perceives the sense.

It was just, it was not common practice. In fact, It was not the common practice in the Western world until about the 10th century to read to oneself without reading aloud. You can imagine libraries were a little different in those days. So I say that's a cause of the problem. It's a difficulty we're going to have to understand, that we have something very different than what the people who originally were reading our scriptures had to deal with.

A third problem, And this is not at all what Jason was talking about when he talked about mining. But I already had this written up so I have to keep it in there. We view the Bible as a place to go mining for aphorisms. Now what Jason was talking about is you open up the text and you have to go through and you have to be very careful and you have to mine out the things God's telling you in there. What I mean by mining for aphorisms is we open up our scripture and we flip through until we find a nice, wonderful, sentimental, sweet verse.

And quite frankly, if that's your approach to scripture, if your approach to scripture is the same as those daily devotionals that make it to the bathroom, then you're going to miss a lot of the way God has communicated his redemptive plan for history. I've had a lot of fun making fun of it with a roommate of mine we would read our Bibles before we went to bed and We would we loved the bloody passages and We would talk about these passages They don't make it onto the pastels scene of some flower garden and a walnut frame to hang on your wall. I mean, not that there's anything necessarily wrong with those. But with that, see, only attitude you have toward scripture, you're missing something. And we would read these passages, and I would tell my roommate, I'd say, you know, those verses will never appear on a coffee mug.

I have a coffee mug here that my roommate made for me. After going through these, we were reading and I was reading one of the imprecatory Psalms and it was just the perfect paradigm of this. That verse will never appear on a coffee mug. So he went out and as a graduation gift he got me this coffee mug. It's Psalm 58 10.

It's actually one of the better verses in Psalm 58. There's some really nasty ones there, but this one says, The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance. He will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.� But the point of bringing up my coffee mug is it really does matter what kind of context we put our scriptures in, because the context in which we put our scriptures sort of indicates the attitude we're supposed to have towards them. And this verse just, it really doesn't fit on a coffee mug. And if that kind of context matters, then the way in which we read scripture, the way in which we communicate the words of scripture also matters as well.

Another cause, the last one I'm going to mention is somewhat controversial. It's like the second one, we just don't read aloud. But the last one is we have too many Bibles. I don't mean by that we have too many translations. I mean we just have too many stacks of Bibles.

Notice when somebody gets up to preach or gets up to read scripture, everybody else has their own Bible in their lap. And because of that, there's no pressure on the person reading to do a really exceptional job of reading. Now, go back to what I was talking about with Galatians for a moment. Remember the first time somebody was reading that in the congregation. Nobody else has the text of Galatians.

They're going to start at verse one where Paul gives his introduction and they're going to go all the way through the end of Galatians And everybody else is sitting there so key and M They cannot read it both foolish Galatians who has bewitched you The people are just not going to understand what Paul's saying if that's the way that they read it. Because they have nobody to help them. They have nothing in front of them to help them. So I say that, I qualify that of course. I don't mean that we should all shut our Bibles up and that be the end of it.

I just say we need to recognize that this is a change in the way that scripture used to be read when it was originally read or go back to those when Christ was reading from Isaiah in Luke 4. Nobody else had their own personal scroll of Isaiah when Christ opens it up. He opens it up, and they were amazed at the gracious things that he had to say. So we have identified a problem. We've identified some causes of that problem, and now we want to try and get over those causes.

But before we do that, there's a couple of errors to avoid, and in avoiding these we will become, be able to understand how to read scripture well. The first one I'm going to call improper humility. When you read scripture you need to avoid improper humility. By this I just mean fear or stage fright. And this attitude manifests itself in a couple of ways.

Oh, I just don't have a good voice. Well, you don't have to be an evening news anchor to read scripture well. Or you might say, I don't have any talent. And again, that's going to be a problem. The way we get over that is by practicing.

Going back to my story about Augustine, the practice in that time, because you read everything aloud, was to spend a lot of time practicing just reading. You would read a text through several times. If you think about it, If you think about what those early Greek texts look like, I mean we have Greek Bibles now, they don't really look like those early Greek texts, the very early ones, because they just had all the letters in rows, rows and rows and rows. And if you are going to read that out loud, you had to practice a lot before you actually got up and you read it for the purpose of edifying the congregation. You had to be prepared.

So You can do the same thing with this. We will do that later. We're going to practice. That's what those of you who got the slips of paper are going to exemplify for us. So the first error to avoid is improper humility.

The other one is pride. Now the first error is a problem that's going to keep you from reading scripture well. It's going to keep you from reading scripture out loud in the first place. The second one is a problem to address down the road. It's a problem to address once you're up here, once you've got the text in front of you and the audience out there and you're ready to read.

Because the expositor of scripture who's reading it, just reading it, is going to face the same set of temptations that a preacher is going to face. They get to go up in front of everyone else, and they get to bring the Word of God to them. And so any set of problems you've got with pride that apply to preachers are going to apply to readers too. These errors have practical consequences. Improper humility will lead, as we've already talked to, about as either an unwillingness to get up and read scripture, or it's going to lead to a tentative approach, a poor approach.

It's going to lead to the kind of approach that I started with, O foolish Galatians, who is bewitched to, where you just sort of run through the text, And the goal is to get it over with and to sit back down. Pride can lead to isogetical reading. We talked about exegetical preaching where you take the text and try and pull things out of it. Isogetical preaching is where you put things in the text that aren't in the text and then you preach them well isogetical reading is when you read something into the text that isn't there and I stipulated by reading I mean reading aloud An example of this might be something like if I read from you the book of Matthew, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac and Isaac the father of Jacob and Jacob the father of Judah.

That's just not there. You can, you can ham it up. You can get up here and act, But that's not proper reading of scripture. This is not about getting up here and giving a performance. In those kind of terms, it's about getting up here and giving a proper interpretation of scripture.

Let me put it another way where I compare both of these. Are there any musicians in here? Taylor plays the piano for church. When you play a piece of music, What's the difference between playing the music and interpreting it? Well the difference, as far as what do you mean between playing and interpreting it?

Exactly that. What's the difference between playing a piece of music and interpreting it? Nothing. I guess what you hear is what you get with music, right? So is it possible to play a piece of music without giving it an interpretation?

No. Okay. I agree entirely. When you sit down to play a piece of music, you are going to interpret it. You will either interpret it well or you will interpret it poorly.

But the act of playing involves interpretation. I think that with music, words like play and interpret are a lot like the words faith and works. The words mean different things but they always go hand in hand and if you get one without the other the first one is dead. You can take the same thing and bring it to scripture. When you read scripture, when you open up the Word of God and you start reading the words of God aloud for the benefit of the congregation, you are giving it an interpretation.

Whether you are just reading a flat line or whether you are going way too over expressive. You are interpreting what God has said. So we need to be careful that we learn how to do this well. And this applies to getting up in front of the congregation. And it applies to just reading it with your family during your family devotions.

Some solutions. Now that we've identified the problem, some causes of the problem, the initial errors to avoid, let's just get down to fixing things. These are the practical, the pragmatic things. One thing you can do is you can reintroduce the reading of Scripture aloud in your homes and churches. If you're involved in a church that doesn't read Scripture, It's time to start.

It was the practice throughout the Old Testament. It was the practice throughout the New Testament Church to open up the Word of God and to read it. I would say here that at a minimum this involves reading the sermon text aloud. Very often it is going to involve reading other texts. Some of you go to denominations perhaps where they read an Old Testament and a New Testament text every week in addition to the sermon text.

At Hope lately, Jason has been bringing us a passage about the Sabbath day. And so that's one of the very first things that we do in worship is he brings us a text about the Sabbath and he just reads it to us. And it helps set the tone for what we're doing. It helps set the tone for why we're doing exactly the thing that we are doing when we are singing, when we're looking up at that screen and singing to God. It gives us some background and some context.

On this note, I would say to those of you who are in positions of leadership at your churches, be sure to include your young men. Be sure to start grooming them for this. This is a way that they can contribute very, very mightily to your church as you start training them to be the elders for someday when you're dead. To put it bluntly, these are the people who are going to stand up there after you're gone and these are the people who are going to be training the next people to stand up there when you're gone. And this is a really good way to start, is to just teach them to open up the Bible and read God's Word as God wrote it.

Number two is reintroduce the general practice of reading aloud in your homes, and I mean by that more than scripture. This is just a subset of practice. You can practice by reading scripture, but if you also read widely, if you read lots of other things, if you read them aloud, It's going to help your general abilities, your general talents at reading. My wife and I don't have a television, so what we do is we read to each other. And it's a lot of fun.

This is another case where I say... This is a National Council of Family Integrated Churches conference, so we'll talk about the family now. Have all reading-abled persons in your home take up this practice. When my folks first started homeschooling us, my mom would have us, my brother and I, follow her around the house while she went about her various tasks with our schoolbooks. And I can remember sitting on the bathroom floor while mom was cleaning the bathroom reading from my literature book.

And mom would say, Jonathan, you need to put more emotion in it. You need to put more and more emotion into it. It wasn't written like that. And she would do this over and over and over. And then finally, She taught us how to clean the bathroom.

But I'm serious. If you start training your children to do this at a very young age, you won't hear your boys especially grow up to be men who are not expressive when they read. If this is just natural, if this is just the way that you've trained them while they're young, when they're old, they're not going to depart from it. A third solution is to introduce the practice of what I will call, in quotes, expository listening. And this is something sometimes, I'm making a confession to my elders now, Sometimes when you tell us to open up our Bibles, if you would open up your Bibles with me to Acts chapter 20, sometimes I don't.

Because if you think about it, with the way that God had scripture propagated to the people who before everyone had a Bible. It was one person reading and everybody else listening. You glean very different things from the text when you don't open it up and you're not following along with your eyes, when what you're doing is all you have are your ears and the words of the person coming at you. Again, I'm not saying that this is something definitive, that There is a rule about this or anything close to that. I'm saying just as a matter of practice, this is really going to help your ability to read and understand scripture auditorily if you just take time to listen to it.

And that will develop as you reintroduce these other practices of just reading aloud in your home. You probably don't have a copy of Ivanhoe for every one of your 11 children. And the last one is practice. So that's what we're going to do right now. We're going to practice this.

And as we practice this, we will see a couple of techniques, a couple of approaches to scripture that can help us with this, with overcoming this problem with basically learning to interpret scripture well. So Taylor has a microphone. I thought what we should do is we should read a whole book of the Bible. But I only had 45 minutes. We've already used some of that up.

But then I thought, we'll still read a whole book of the Bible. That's why God put the little books in there. So I distributed some passages from the book of Jude. And here's what we're going to do. I gave some slips to people.

You are welcome to either read along in your own Bible, or if you want, you can just close your Bible up and listen, and put the pressure on these people that I gave the Bible passages to, to read for our edification. They're the ones who are in a sense being priests before God for us. Now we believe in the priesthood of believers, That's all understood, but in a sense they are standing in they are the ones who are bringing God's Word to us The same way that the judges in the Old Testament did So I have The passage Jude 1 through 4 who has Jude 1 through 4 up here Taylor generally they're gonna move back I want you to read it as it was written. And what I might stop you in the middle of something. We might comment on it.

And I will be nice, I promise. Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who are called, Beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. Okay, so if you're listening to that, what happens?

Just listening to the passage, what's going on? This is not a trick question. You just heard it. Well, how does it start out first? The warning is the second part.

Agreeing to who? Does he like these people? What's he call them? Can you hear? When you read this, make sure you read this so that you know that he likes these people.

It's not just that he likes them, he loves them. They're his beloved. But things turn sour, if you will. There's a warning. There's signs that bad things are coming.

Black clouds are on the horizon. So as you look through these passages, you can start to develop a taste for these things when things go from bad to worse. Who is his audience? What's his attitude towards him? The attitude that Jude has towards his audience is not the attitude that Paul had towards the Galatians.

They should end up sounding different. Jude 5 through 7. Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt afterward destroyed those who did not believe. Hang on just a minute. What kind of word is destroyed?

It's a Powerful word. It's a very powerful word. It's it's just it's it's annihilation. These people are gone God does this it's so put that in there so that the rest of us who don't have our Bibles open Can hear it? Afterward destroyed those who did not believe and the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling he is kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.

Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. I really liked what you did there twice, where you took the word eternal and you made it a long word. Eternity is a really long time. You can draw the word out some. Words like eternal, forever, When you see them in the scripture, try and communicate with your voice what those words are saying.

If I was just having a conversation with you and I talked about eternity, Let's say I'm witnessing to somebody and I'm going to communicate where you're going to spend your life forever. I'm going to say it just like that. And most of you are too. That's just the natural way we talk. Put that into the text.

It's there. Remember the quote that Scott gave us from Whitfield yesterday where somebody came up to Whitfield and said, oh, we want to print your sermons. And Whitfield said, well, that's fine, but how are you going to put thunder and lightning on the page? Well, it's already here. If you're reading scripture, show the rest of us where the thunder and the lightning are.

Next, we have Jude 8 to 13. Yet in like manner, these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. 30. But when the archangel Michael, contended with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but he said, The Lord rebuke you. But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively.

Woe to them, for they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Baelum's error, and perished in Korra's rebellion. These are hidden reefs, at your love feasts as they feast with you without fear. Shepherds feeding themselves, waterless clouds swept along by winds, fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted, wild raves of sea, casting up the foam for their own shame, wandering stars for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever. When he read that verse about Cain and Balaam and Korah, what came to mind? All these books about the mistakes they made.

Yes. So, notice that the author here, he's just assuming something. He doesn't give you any background on Cain and Balaam and Korah. He just assumes that his audience knows these stories. He just rattles those off.

Probably when you read them, you can just rattle them off. By reading your Bible well, by reading it with an expositional attitude, it doesn't always mean that you have to slow everything down and emphasize all the words. Sometimes the writers of scripture are going to go through things really quickly. Sometimes they just start rattling things off faster than you can keep up with them. Sometimes you have to slow down.

And as you get into this text, as you get into the scripture really deeply, you'll run across these. And this is probably a case where you can just read through those quickly. You can make sure you're clear, make sure your audience can understand. But probably the meaning behind a verse like that is one that you just get out. And if your audience doesn't know what those stories are, they should have the question pop up immediately in their head, who are these people?

What in all the earth was Korah's rebellion about? Who's this guy Korah? Balaam we know. He had that donkey thing. But who's Korah?

It's a fascinating story. It's in numbers. The next passage that I had was 14 to 16. It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied saying, Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him. I really liked the behold.

That was fabulous. Behold is one of those words that when you see it, it means wake up. It means that lunch is over, nap time is over, listen to me, this is important. Did you also hear in that one verse, if you were just listening, if you weren't reading along, did you hear ungodly four times? To execute judgment on all and convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way and of all harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against them.

This is really almost too obvious to mention, but if scripture emphasizes a word over and over and over again, you can emphasize it. It means that it's really important. Jude is trying to make a point about these ungodly people. Pretend for a moment that he's Dan Horne and he's fire breathing at you. These are the ungodly.

People. 13 We know that. The next passage is 17 to 23. But dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold. They said to you, In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their ungodly desires.

These are the men who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit. But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life be merciful to those who doubt Snatch others from the fire and save them. 28. To others show mercy mixed with fear. 29.

Hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh. 30. That was really, really good. 31. And notice what we had, And part of it was having two different speakers.

06. But this passage we just read starts with a different word. It starts with a hinge word. It starts with but. 06.

He's been railing against the false teachers up till now. 25, He's been talking about how they're blemishes on your love feasts. 26, He's been talking about their wickedness, their ungodliness in great expressive terms. 27, And He gets here and now he's back to talking to his beloved. But you must...

Well let me back up. I'll read the last verse of the other passage. These are grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful desires. They are loudmouth boasters showing favoritism to gain advantage. But you must remember, must by the way, it's a great word.

Young men, if your parents tell you, you must do something, you know very well what they mean by that. You know that it has an emphasis behind it. You know that it's non-negotiable. You must take out the trash right now. And yet he's being tender with them.

But you must remember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so on. So if somebody gets up and reads this whole letter from Jude, they're going to be going through these really fiery parts against the nonbelievers, against these people who are, as our text from Acts 20 was, these savage wolves among you. And when you read it, make sure that your audience can tell. Make sure that you are bringing out the fact that there's the wolves on the one hand and now I'm back to talking to the sheep. And then the ends, Jude 24 to 25.

Now to Him who is able to keep from stumbling and present you blameless, before the presence of His glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord be glory majesty Dominion and authority before all time and now and forever amen that was really good this is Jude's doxology this is his end he's wrapping things up you can slow down a bit He's reflecting on the grand things, the big things. He's not talking about false teachers anymore. He's not necessarily even talking about his flock, but he's telling them these marvelous things about God. Now to him who's able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. 25 To the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, authority 24 before all time, and now and forever.

Amen. 25 And by the way, don't be afraid to pause. Don't be afraid to put longer pauses in there than you think you need. Let's say you're, the text is a sermon that has been preached and wants to be preached again. Let's say you've just got one of those.

Let's say you have Acts 7 for example, where Stephen gets up and he gives his sermon and then they condemn him and Stephen looks up into the heavens and he says, Behold, I see have Act 7, 12. 12. 12. 12. 13.

12. 14. 15. 16. 17.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. Experiencing right before they stone him.

He doesn't care that they're stoning him. He sees the glory of heaven. Just stop and let that sink in. When you get to a doxology like this, you can just stop a little bit. Slow down.

Let the big words sink in. As you read, you'll realize that there are really great expressive words. There are words that are just packed full of meaning. We've talked about some of them already. Blasphemous is a good one.

Blasphemous just sounds really nasty. Execute. But then over here we've got glory, majesty, dominion. Put the feeling into the words that's there already. You don't have to invent things.

You don't have to be an actor up here. You don't have to be performing it like it's going to be recorded and mass produced for everybody to pop in on their way to work and listen to the word of God read. But you do want to be faithful because when you open up your Bible and when you read it you are interpreting it. And you want to interpret it as best you see it written. There are some consequences of learning to read your Bible expositionally.

One is that Reading aloud produces a greater conviction of the demands of God. Take Nehemiah 13, verses 1 through 3. On that day they read from the book of Moses and the hearing of the people And it was found written. Just listen to the way that it goes. It was found.

They discovered something. It was found written. They knew Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God. For they did not meet the people of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them. 22 Yet our God turned their curse into a blessing.

As soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent. 23 Another place you can look is 2 Kings 22 where Josiah rediscovers the law. They bring the book of the law to him. They read it to him aloud and he is so convicted he tears his clothes apart. Have you ever been sitting in a room where somebody has read scripture to you and you have been so convicted you've ripped your clothes apart?

It was powerful. This one's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but you will have great object lessons. Take Jeremiah 51, 60 to 64. And this is a commentary on what has just preceded it that Jeremiah has written Jeremiah wrote in a book all the disaster that should come upon Babylon all these words that are written concerning Babylon and Jeremiah said to Sariah when you come to Babylon see that you read all these words and say, O Lord, you have said concerning this place that you will cut it off, so nothing shall dwell in it, neither man or beast, and it shall be desolate forever. 28 When you finish reading this book, tie a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of the Euphrates, and say, Thus shall Babylon sink to rise no more because of the disaster that I am bringing upon her, and they should become exhausted.

But really the main consequence that I see of this, given the context of our conference, is that there's a feedback between reading your Bible as it's written, reading it well, and your expository preaching. Pastor Davis told us some of his time management tips and some of his preparation tips, and you noticed one of the first things he does after he's selected the text is he opens it up in several translations and he reads it aloud. By reading it aloud, by noticing these words that have emphasis by noticing that ungodly occurs four times in one verse and that when you read it aloud it sounds very strong. It's going to help you set your patterns for preaching. It's going to help you to be able to divide up the text in natural ways according to the way that the text is written.

It goes back and forth. As you learn to read expositionally, as you learn to read more than just one little aphorism about the righteous rejoicing and bathing their feet in the blood of the wicked, as you learn to put scripture back in its contexts. It's going to help you appreciate larger sections of scripture at a time. Another thing it can do, and this is something I briefly mentioned before, you've got those boring passages. You've got those passages that you read, like for example, the genealogies, Where there's nothing you can do to make them really exciting.

13. Where the author didn't write anything in there to make them really exciting. 14. Where all he did was they wrote you a list of people. 15.

What do you do with that? 16. Well, if you've learned to read expositionally, you run across these passages and you say, why is it that God put this really boring thing in here? In the midst of very powerful narratives, in the midst of very colorful poetry, why do I have a genealogy of the people of Israel? Why do I have a list of all the heads of households?" I'm not going to answer that right now, but I am going to say it's an example of the benefits of reading because it tells you the kinds of questions to ask.

I think there are answers for why these really boring passages are in there. And you imagine that people used to read these boring passages. They gathered all the congregation of Israel up, even the women and the children, even the nursing infants, and they all stood for hours and hours and hours while they read these. And they would read all these names of he was the father of him, who fathered him, and so forth. I will give you a final word on the topic.

Consider Genesis 1 27, where it says, God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created them. Male and female, he created them. Just for the briefest of moments, pretend that your Bible ends at the end of Genesis 1. It says that God created man in His own image.

By the time Genesis 1 is over, what do you know about God? We're created in His image, but what is that image that we've been created in? What's been explained to us about God by now? He's a creator. What else?

He's powerful, yes. He's orderly. He refers to himself in the plural. But there's one very, very important thing that we know. God created everything that there is with words.

God did not snap his fingers. He did not wiggle his nose. He did not click his heels. He spoke and there was light. 0.

0. Pastor Davis gave us the quote from Calvin about the creation being the theater of God's glory. You go out in that theater, you look at giraffes and you look at loblolly pines and God spoke all those into being. We don't know what words he used. We don't know if he had Shakespeare long treatises in order to get a draft.

We don't know if he had a word to create a draft. But we know that everything that he created, he created by speaking. We know that we are his poiema, we are his words. We know that God loves words, we know that God loves words so much that he decided to take it as a name and description of himself. In the beginning was the word.

That's the kind of God that you serve. That's the kind of God that you represent when you get up here with His words in front of you. As you learn to love God and to love His word, capital W, more and more. Learn to love words little w because that's how God has chosen primarily to communicate with us in this age and throughout history. Thank you.

And videos on the subject of conforming the church and the family to the Word of God. And for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website, ncfic.org.