Curt Harlow [00:00:00]:
Hello. My friend Curt here from Bayside Church, one of the pastors around here. And you've gotten a special episode of the Bible Study podcast. Normally, what we do is we take the passages that every Bayside Church is teaching together on the weekends, and we do a deeper dive on one section of those. So, for instance, we'll go all the way through the Book of Mark, or we'll go all the way through the Book of Acts. We're going all the way through the Book of Psalms right now. And we're. We'll study it verse by verse and bring out the right ways to get the original meaning.
Curt Harlow [00:00:34]:
Exegetical integrity. Hermeneutical integrity. Okay, so what I wanted to do, and we're gonna have several Bayside pastors do this, I wanted to answer the question, when I'm studying the Bible for a sermon or for my own devotional life, what do I do? How do I go about studying the Bible? So we're not gonna look today at a particular text. I'm gonna tell you the principles I use to approach the Bible. That's going to be really, really simple. In fact, it's a acrostic. I know that sounds cheesy. I grew up with acrostics.
Curt Harlow [00:01:05]:
When people taught me how to study the Bible before I went to any seminary classes or anything, they taught me the pro apt method, which is P for pray, R for read, O for observe, P for pray again, and T for tell. So no, A for apply, pre for I see. Okay, this is the problem. It's too long of a word. So I've gotten it instead of pro apt. And sometimes you'll. People way back in the 70s, and they were like pro apt with two t's. Instead of the pro app method, I've gotten it down to P A, R, T.
Curt Harlow [00:01:37]:
What's my part? P A, R, T. What's my part in coming to the Bible? And whether I'm getting ready for a sermon or I just get up in the morning and I'm reading my Bible, I will often just use this little acronym, P A R, T. What's my part? To make sure that I'm getting the original meaning of the text. I got a little secret for you. When I'm reading science fiction, I do the same thing. And when I'm reading sweeping histories, I do the same thing. Because often I find that there's part of the story I don't understand. And if I don't slow myself down to become a faithful reader of the passage, I will not get the right meaning.
Curt Harlow [00:02:16]:
Of the text, whether it's the bible or James mishner. So here it is. Without further ado, the first one P. You probably guessed it, it's prayer. What does it mean to say that we are exegetical or exegetical? You hear that word all the time. Exegetical is best defined by its opposite, eisegetical. Eisegetical is when I have an agenda and I bring that agenda to the text. I want to prove that God loves blueberries.
Curt Harlow [00:02:48]:
Where is the passage that proves God that you. You. I know he loves blueberries. And I'm going to find that passage and prove that God loves blueberries. And we do this with all sorts of. We do it with sexuality, we do it with divorce, we do it with tithing and money. We already have an agenda and we go to the Bible and try to find the verses that prove what we already believe. That's the wrong way to do it.
Curt Harlow [00:03:09]:
The right way to do it is exegetical. So what I teach the Thrive college students here is that in essence, being exegetical means I'm using the right attitude to get the right original meaning of the text. I have the right attitude. And that starts with softening my heart in prayer and just saying, God don't care what my denial denomination believes, don't care what I prefer. I don't care if it's easy or hard, comforting or challenging. I open my heart right now. What I care about is you. And I trust you and your word for me.
Curt Harlow [00:03:42]:
So I pray and I literally have to do this all the time. I will find that eisegesic old spirit coming into me where I'm like, man, I want my people to get more of this or I want to beat up on this theological camp. And I got, nope, that's not what I'm doing. Holy Spirit, you had this passage, this chapter, this book inspired for a reason. I wanna come and discover that not any of my own agenda. So after praying, I do ask. And ask is the fun part. Now, in the old format that we were all taught in the 70s, it was pray, read.
Curt Harlow [00:04:15]:
But I like to insert ask first. So what ask means is this. The Bible was written for you, but it wasn't written to you. Boy, if you only get anything out of this podcast, you just get that that will help the Bible come alive to you. It was written for you. God had you in mind when he wrote the Bible. He just didn't write it to you. He wrote it to people that had different language than you, different subcultures than you different economic situation than you.
Curt Harlow [00:04:42]:
They didn't have police. No one ever pulled them over. There's so many differences. So it's fun and important to ask questions of the text to understand the context. And this is where hermeneutics comes in. What is the definition of hermeneutics? Well, it's the laws or sometimes I like to say, tools that we use to get the original meaning of the text. So we want to use the tool of questioning. For instance, who is writing this? What was their background? Who are they writing to? What was their background? Where are they geologically? Where are they in time? What conflict is happening all around them? What are the mores or cultural assumptions in each group? And what is the hard question to ask in the, you know, who's the character? I should be in this? I'm not going to be Jesus all the time.
Curt Harlow [00:05:38]:
Who should I be? Who's the audience here and where can I put myself in them? So what I recommend to people all the time in this particular area is to get a good Bible dictionary. Now, I've got like 10 Bible dictionaries on my shelf right now, and I gotta confess to you, I hardly ever use them because now all those Bible dictionaries are online. I got one app on my computer and my iPad that is. It's called Accordance. And it's got every Bible dictionary that I have on my shelf in there. What is a Bible dictionary? It's something that helps you ask the right question of the passage or explains parts of the passage you don't understand because they're stated in a cultural context that is not yours. For instance, if you run across any discussion of money in the Bible, Jesus said the widow had one mite. You don't know what a mite is.
Curt Harlow [00:06:27]:
You've never had a mite. If you had a mite, it was a bug in your hair. So I go to the Bible dictionary and I say, what was the widow's might? And they tell me there's an article in there that will tell me the story of money and how mites fit in it in the first century. Now all of a sudden I can read that story and have the right context information of what Jesus means there, which is very, very, very little amount of money. But he didn't say penny. So I don't know that I gotta read a widow's mic. This comes up all the time, by the way. This comes up in assumptions about living quarters, it comes up in assumptions about seasons, comes up in assumptions about geography, and it's just so fun to say, I don't know, that they mentioned a name there.
Curt Harlow [00:07:10]:
They mentioned an island there. They mentioned, like, one place in the Book of Acts. Luke lets us know that Passover had already passed. And we're like, why is he letting us know that? Is that so that we can actually understand the Passover is an important Jewish holiday? No, he's telling us it's late October. He gave us a date. He just gave us the calendar so we know it's storm season in the Book of Acts. So first I pray, I say, God, I want the original meaning of your word and nothing else, no matter what. Secondly, I start asking all sorts of questions.
Curt Harlow [00:07:40]:
I get out a good Bible dictionary. People will often say to me at that step, well, what if? Should I get a commentary? People love to say commentary. You know what a commentary is? It's. It's a scholar's opinion about that passage. And my answer to you is, no, don't get a commentary. You don't want that scholar to do all the work and just cheat and go to the end. Then your opinion will only be as good as the scholars. Plus, doing the work of getting to the original, meaning yourself, will get it in your life so much deeper.
Curt Harlow [00:08:12]:
Now. What do I do after I do the work of exegesis? I soften my heart and hermeneutics. I get the right tools to ask the right questions. Sometimes I'll check my work against a better scholar than me because I don't speak Hebrew and I don't speak Greek. And to be honest with you, not all my seminary classes were the best classes. I think I learned more from some of the brilliant people around me than I did some of my teachers. No offense, if you're still alive out there, teachers, okay, let's move forward, pray, ask. And here's the third one.
Curt Harlow [00:08:42]:
Read. You see how we've already done a lot of work before we're actually reading the passage? And I would say, read carefully. I don't recommend speed reading in the Bible. I do like reading entire epistles in one setting. I think you ought to read the book of Ecclesiastes in one setting. Because if you divide the book of Ecclesiastes up over several months and just read a paragraph here or a chapter there, you're going to get depressed. It's meant to be read in one setting. But by carefully, I mean don't skip over concepts or words or names you don't understand.
Curt Harlow [00:09:17]:
Oftentimes, reading comprehension is related to how often we lie to ourself that we Understand what's being said. So in this case, I don't have a Bible dictionary. I just got a good old dictionary, which is of course my iPhone. When I'm reading and I don't completely understand a word or I get to the end of the passage and I'm like, what did they just say there? Does that ever happen to you? Well, I don't even know what they just said. I read that passage three times. It probably means there are vocabulary words in there that you do not fully understand. So I'll stop and say, what's Damascus? I'll stop and say, what's a Samaritan? I'll stop and say, what does reconciliation really mean? Why does Paul use that word reconciliation? And nowadays it's so easy. The Greek lexicons online, the Hebrew lexicons online.
Curt Harlow [00:10:10]:
Every scholar that's got opinion backwards and forwards about every Greek and Hebrew words online. So you can find very fast a lot of great information while you're reading. Just don't run through the reading. Now here's one other suggestion I have for the reading part of your Bible study. Listen to the Bible on audio. It's so good. I don't do this always, but I do it a lot. And here's the reason why most of the Bible was recited.
Curt Harlow [00:10:38]:
So Paul is in his jail cell, he's in his incarceration in Rome, and he's writing two Timothy and. And you know what he's doing? He's pacing, he's walking around, and someone's writing every word he says down as the letter to Timothy. So sometimes when you hear has a little bit more sense to it. When you have to divide it into American English sentences, you lose some of the flow of the train of thought. This is really true for the book of Romans, by the way. Book of Romans, man. When you're reading it, it feels like Paul goes on tangent here or there. But when you listen to it, it's more conversational.
Curt Harlow [00:11:19]:
It's more. You see why Paul's mind is going there. You see what the Holy Spirit is doing because you hear it. I love listening to the Gospels this way. You can almost imagine people sitting at the Sermon on the Mountain hearing Christ teach these lessons. So do your reading carefully and actually do a lot of reading, but mix it up. Do some audible. Sometimes in this play, I will do what's called a manuscript study.
Curt Harlow [00:11:48]:
So in the Greek, especially in the New Testament, there's no punctuation at all. So what you do is you write out the English translation like there's no punctuation, just one run on sentence. Just write it out. The practice of writing out the passage, by the way, will get the passage into you really well. And then you go back and you see, where would I put the divisions, where would I put the paragraphs? Where do I think the main ideas are? And you become the amateur editor of that manuscript. A lot of times that will help me read it more carefully. And all of a sudden the Bible will just come alive to me. All right, so we pray to make ourselves in the right exegetical attitude.
Curt Harlow [00:12:29]:
Then we ask so we're using the right hermeneutical tools to understand the original language, to understand the original context. And. And then we read, but we do so carefully, making sure we're not skipping over parts that we don't understand. And then finally we think that's the T. Now, I used to be taught every time I studied the Bible, write down a very specific application of what you're gonna do about this passage you just read. And then give yourself a due date. And if you haven't won someone to Christ after reading Acts chapter one by Tuesday at five. And what I learned is that brought a lot of condemnation into my life.
Curt Harlow [00:13:09]:
I was like reading the Bible every day, and I'd have this list of applications and every single thing I should do about it and deadlines on it. And guess what? It was mission impossible. You couldn't do it. Now what I like to do is I like to say, God, I've taken time to get the vocabulary of your Bible into my life. And as I've gotten this truth into my life, I give you free reign to tell me how to apply it and who to become, how to think I have free reign to, in more of a contemplative way, let the Holy Spirit speak to me when and where and how he wants my attitude to change, who he wants me to love, who he wants me to text and who he wants to be called. Because honestly, we live in a very distracting world. A very, very distracting world. And if you don't say, it's not just good enough to study the Bible.
Curt Harlow [00:14:03]:
I gotta think about it and I gotta be open to listening to the Holy Spirit. So distractful that I don't know if you can hear all these dings, but I forgot to turn off the Internet on my iPad. And while I'm teaching against distractions, my whole team has been texting me and I've gotten two alerts on my phone. How did this happen? From Instacart. When did I give Instacart. Permission to get to my watch. See, this is what I mean. You gotta take time to think.
Curt Harlow [00:14:28]:
All right, one more time. Let's review. You sit down with your Bible, get a good cup of coffee or a cup of tea. Get something rewarding. Make Bible study fun. Don't beat yourself up if you miss a day of Bible study. Find times when you can actually really study and do it more like that. I pray more in the morning than I actually study.
Curt Harlow [00:14:48]:
Sit down and reward yourself, get that cup of coffee, get that snack, and then just spend a few quiet moments. Just. Only if you did that and said, God, I am not taking your word for granted. Give me the courage to let your word speak to me and my circumstances in any way you want. I want to know what you meant, not what I mean. And then secondly, you go, let me ask the questions about those original people. You know what's fun about doing the ask part? They are so much more like us in nature and it's always shocking. I read the story of Moses, I read the story of Abraham, I read the story of Ruth.
Curt Harlow [00:15:30]:
I see us, Noah, Noah's kids. I see us all the time. Even though it was written to them in a different language, different culture, different time, different money, all that. If you ask those context questions, you're going to go beyond that to the real principle and you're going to find out that we're all full of fear, full of sin, and dearly loved of God. And it's beautiful knowing the same way God spoke to Abraham and Isaac is going to speak to me and my children. Then again, you read carefully and try the audio trick. And the last one is this. Give yourself some time to think about the passage.
Curt Harlow [00:16:12]:
I love people that read the Bible through in a year. I love that. That's a good discipline. A lot of benefits to that. But not all the Bible is meant for your devotional life. God is not like, you know what? I'm really inspire him today by getting him into the chapter in numbers where we count all the sheep. And some of the Bible is about telling us who God is, but it's not meant for our individual devotion time. When you get into those parts of the Bible, you need to actually think, what is this? What does numbers say about the nature of God? That's not a.
Curt Harlow [00:16:45]:
On Tuesday I figured it out, that's like a bigger 50,000 foot level. And then you'll get to a passage in the New Testament that says, whatever's right, whatever is true, whatever is noble, think upon these things. And you're like, yeah, my thoughts have not been towards the right and normal. And you apply that that day. But there's a lot of the Bible where you walk away from it and you go, God, help me. Over time, really think this through. We just finished the Book of Acts, and whenever we do this, we go through a whole book over a year. I'm 61 years old.
Curt Harlow [00:17:19]:
I know I don't look it. I look 71, but I always go, wow, I've been preaching this book for 61 years, and I learned so much going through it this time. So much. Not that I'm adding to it or having new discoveries. I'm finding the well water that's the sweetest water that's the deepest water. I'm finding the truths I already knew to be more truthful than I knew them to be. I'm finding God to be more consistent. And that only happens as a study in such a way that the Bible gets in me in a contemplative way, a thinking way.
Curt Harlow [00:17:59]:
All right, I've repeated this too much. You get it part. I hope you could try it. I hope you go try it. And I also hope you join us again for the Bible study. We're right now in the Psalms. I don't know when we're going to show this, so it may not be, but whatever we're in, go back and get a hold of those and let's get on this journey of mastering God's word. One book, one chapter, one verse, one idea at a time.