No More Excuses: How to Start Loving, Reading, and Studying your Bible

Do you struggle to read your Bible every day? Ever find yourself growing bored with God’s word even though you know it’s something you should love? Do you want to make Bible study a normal part of your weekly routine? Today’s episode is for you! We are going to discuss five steps to help you start loving, reading, and studying God’s Word. 

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Books Mentioned: 
Grasping God's Word - https://amzn.to/4dhexAP
The New Strong's Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible - https://amzn.to/4d8MX8M
The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson - https://amzn.to/3Yupf2r
Women of the Word by Jen Wilkin - https://amzn.to/3WHCCKe
Radical by David Platt - https://amzn.to/3WAniir

Access the show notes here: [LINK]

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

So, Welcome to Going Deeper. Welcome back to Going Deeper. I hope you guys are having a great day today. This is likely one of my favorite episodes that I've scripted so far, and I think it's gonna be really, really helpful for so many of you. I have five steps that you can take to start loving, reading, and studying God's word on a more consistent basis. So some of you know that this podcast actually launched on my birthday, and because I am a nerd, I wanted to share the books I ended up buying with my birthday money. I got not too much money for my birthday, and I'm not really somebody that spends money on clothes, but I'm also pregnant, so I'm not going to just buy maternity clothes. Oftentimes, I've said I love books, and I like to buy books. So the first thing that I actually got with my birthday money is not a book, but it's a printer. Isn't that funny? Yeah, I'm not even going to go into that, but I wanted a printer at our house so I wasn't constantly bothering my husband at work to print things for me. Anyways. Two, actually three books that I got with birthday money. Very, very random. Okay, do not, don't judge me. I am a nerd. So the first book that I got, I have a friend who went to Liberty and she went to Bible college. And one of the books she recommended like probably a year ago to me was called Grasping God's Word. Now, when she recommended it to me, I had no idea that this was actually a textbook. Genuinely, it's a textbook. But she spoke so highly of it and I saved it on Amazon. And I went back to go look for books that I had saved. It popped up. And considering that my current Bible study group just ended a study, and I'm wanting to figure out the next book of the Bible that I want to study, and I also want to increase and improve my study of Scripture, I thought this would be a great book to buy. And then when I went to go buy it, I thought, oh, this is a full-blown textbook, but we're going to do it. Your girl's going to do it because we can't afford Seminary or Bible College at the moment. So this is the next best thing. So I bought that book. I'll make sure to link it in the show notes. And then I also got the New Strong's Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Yay! Which basically a concordance is just... every word that you could ever find in the Bible, like so you could look up the word baby, and it'll show you all, all the areas in the Bible that you can find the word baby. And I thought that would be a great resource to have while studying so I don't have to use my computer. And then the last book that I got is called The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson. Do you guys know Andrew Peterson? You know, he's a He's also a, if you've heard of him, you've probably heard of him because he is a artist, like a singer, singer-songwriter. He did the song Dancing in the Minefields. Oh, so good. So good. If you've not heard that song, you need to listen to it. But he is also a writer, a fiction writer. How cool. And he wrote a memoir. Anyways, The Winged Feather Saga is actually like a young adult slash children's chapter book series. And one... I love like Harry Potter and those sort of things, like fantasy novels. So I love that it's got a Christian twist to it. And I've heard good things about it. But also I thought it would be a really cool way to start reading aloud to my kids. So we got those books. Three books, very nerdy, but that's what I got for my birthday. And those are also happen to be recommendations that I told you I would start each podcast with. I'll make sure to link all those in the show notes, which by the way, I have been adding all of the show notes online. and details of each episode to my website under the blog tab. If that's easier for you to access, it's at justineshuri.com. Okay, so I have a feeling this is going to be a 45 minute long episode, potentially longer. So we're going to dive right in. And I want to start off similar to how I did last week's episode about grace power by sharing an aspect of my story. So growing up around age 12, at the time we were living in in Kentucky, which we are currently living in Kentucky, but we've lived all over the place. We were living in Kentucky and I was playing soccer. I was like, I was just living my life. And then all of a sudden this new family comes into town and a new girl joins my soccer team. Her name is Mia. And at first me and I didn't get along because we were competitive, but then very quickly we just became best friends. And I don't know how long before I was at her house all of the time. I was spending the night. Her mom was taking me to youth group, like sweaty after practice. I mean, I spent so much time with Mia and her family. So much time that after a few months, I started to notice some really interesting things about her family. Here's some examples. One, I noticed that they prayed hand in hand before every single meal. Also, occasionally, we would get on our knees in a circle in their dining room and pray for something specific or important that was going on. If I ever spent the night on a school night, Meg, which was her mom, would pray over us before bed. Also, after breakfast the following morning, Mia... Aunt I and her four other siblings would often gather around, especially before school, would gather around their living room ottoman for a devotional led by her dad. Also, if we missed church due to soccer games on a Sunday, her mom would play the sermon on the radio and then ask us probing questions about what we learned from the sermon on the radio. Now, here's another very impactful aspect of the things that I noticed. I started to notice, after many sleepovers with Mia, and just spending a lot of time at her house, that it was very common to see any one of her family members reading their Bibles at any time of day. If I came home from school and they were all in separate areas and we were doing homework, I would come up into the living room and see her dad lounged back on the couch, Bible cracked open. But most memorably, I'll never forget that Mia was up every morning before me and I would walk out to find her reading her Bible and prayer journal. Now, it was also very obvious that this habit wasn't required by her parents or forced by her parents. It was just simply a natural overflow of her faith that she was raised up in. It was very clear that her parents read their Bibles. That's what they did. And so all of her siblings did so as well. And the beautiful thing about her family is was that what they believed about who God is actually dictated their day-to-day lives. And because of their faithfulness, my life has been so powerfully impacted for the better. They gave me, even at such a young age, at 12 years old, they gave me a vision for what I wanted my future family and faith to look like. And they gave me a longing to have a similar love for God's word. So that is such a huge part of my testimony and my story. And I wanted to intro with that because we will come back to this idea of having a vision for our future and our faith. But introing with this idea of having a love for God's word and making it a normal, common, and consistent aspect of our daily lives. And most of us have a similar vision for our faith. We want this to be true in our lives. But it's practically living it out that proves to be challenging. It's, for most of us, a sore spot in our faith walks. We want to love reading and studying God's Word, but we just don't. Now, I will give us all the benefit of the doubt. All of the benefit of the doubt. Because I have been there more times than I'd care to admit. And we also need to treat the subject with a ton of grace. But I also think this is an area where we need to be challenged. because we do make a lot of excuses. Whether we don't have enough time, we get bored, we lack understanding, or we get overwhelmed, we fear failure, we have a lack of discipline. But at the end of the day, a lot of us just simply don't want to be in God's word. And this is true for me. This is true for my life. It is a fight every day where I have, oh, I could do this. Do I really want, I don't really want to read my Bible right now. You know, that's what we're up against. But we both know that there's no good reason or excuse for why we shouldn't be loving and reading and studying God's word on a consistent basis. That's what this episode is all about. How can we do that? Okay, it starts with the right perspective. So I told you that I got this new book called Grasping God's Word for my birthday. And I've already read quite a bit of it so far. And it's genuinely really good. And I feel like I'm back in college again. Anyways, I was reading last night and something stuck out to me, something that I didn't know. It was in a chapter on Bible translation where they went into detail about how we ended up with our current English translation. Okay, this is what I learned. During the Protestant Reformation, before we had any English translation like we do today, Translating the Bible into common English for the common people was actually criminal. So there are three important characters that I learned about. John Wycliffe, who was the first to endeavor in this Bible translation, he was excommunicated from the church. And after he died, his bones were dug out of the ground and burned because of his work to translate the Bible. Then there was William Tyndale, who we've all probably heard about because of that major Christian publishing house, Tyndale House Publishers. He was burned at the stake in 1536 for his work in Bible translation after completing the New Testament. And then after he died, he passed his... Well, before he died, he passed his work on to a man named John Rogers in order to finish the Old Testament translation, the Old Testament English translation. And he... also was burned at the stake. So all three men who made it possible for us to even have an English translation of the Bible were persecuted and martyred. This was very convicting for me. Because I have over 10 Bibles in my house, because three men considered God's word important enough to translate it, knowing they were likely to be killed because of it. And it's not like persecution and martyrdom... don't exist anymore. There are still 52 countries, I found this out, 52 countries where it's either highly dangerous, highly restricted, or completely illegal to own a Bible. We know these numbers, we just don't want to think about it. Listen to this stat. According to a 2013 Barna Group survey, which it's been 10 years since then, so I'm sure these numbers are higher, the average American household owns 4.4 Bibles... and 24% of families own more than five. However, despite this, 35% of Americans say they never read the Bible, and 60% read it less than five times a year. So we have the inspired divine revelation of the God of the universe, the one who knitted our very bodies together in our mother's womb, sitting commonly on our bookshelves and nightstands, and we struggle to commit to more than five minutes of devotional reading in a given day or week. This is convicting, and we can't, I can't, you and I can't keep dismissing this reality. Like I mentioned in the first episode about distraction, we know these things are problems, but it's become so common on our culture that it doesn't really feel like that big of a deal. Now, like I've already said, This conversation requires so much grace because we do have busy lives. It is hard to find the time. The Bible is hard to understand. And we do struggle with discipline. All these things are true. But it doesn't take away from the fact that the most important thing that we could ever do in a given day is spend time with God. Because the Great Commandment and the Great Commission cannot be obeyed and lived out if we're not actively and consistently engaging with Scripture. I recently reread Radical by David Platt. You guys know that book. It kind of went viral, if you will, in the church about 10, 15 years ago when it first came out. So good. A very convicting read. Kind of caused a lot of people to feel tense about some things. But there's a lot that's good that you can take out of it. But a quote stood out to me, and I just read this over the weekend. And I want to share this quote with you. He says,"...we have settled far too long with Bible light." both as individual Christians and in the community of faith. We've adopted a Christianity consumed with little devotional thoughts from God for the day, supplemented by teaching in the church filled with entertainment stories and trite opinions on how to be a better person and live a better life in the 21st century. Meanwhile, we hold the matchless word of God in our hands and it demands a superior position in our lives, our families, our small groups, and our churches. Now, Before you click off this episode because you feel discouraged or ashamed, I need to clarify something. I don't want you to hear me say that your devotional reading is not enough. Because devotional reading is still better than nothing, and we all have to start somewhere. In fact, part of my story to getting to where I am today is a year of quote-unquote Bible-light devotional reading. But this is my exhortation in this episode. We can't be comfortable with staying there. Small steps are good. Seasons allow for fluidity. Grace is there for the hard days. But I want to challenge us to not settle for anything less than a persistent pursuit of growing in our knowledge and wisdom of the word. But it is a fluid pursuit. Sometimes it's going to be one step forward and two steps back. But the key is that we just keep stepping forward in faith by grace.

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Okay.

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By now, I'm sure you're ready to just dive into these five steps. And because I want you to listen to this episode in its entirety, I have saved the most important step for last because it's been the most transformative in my journey to loving and reading and studying God's word consistently. So make sure you stick around to the end. Okay, the first step in this journey is prayer. But it's also a forever step, meaning we have to start praying about this and then we can't stop praying about this. Because here's the fact of the matter. This isn't just an inner battle between our wills and our wants. This is a spiritual battle. Ephesians 6.12 says, For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Kristen Nave from She Loves Bible on Instagram, which I highly recommend following her, she put it this way, This is not a casual struggle. It's war. There is a spiritual battle for our affection and an enemy who does not want us to read God's word. This is why prayer is absolutely key to overcoming this struggle, because we're not just waging war against our sinful, fleshly desires. We're waging war against Satan, who would love nothing more than for us to not be in God's word. In all honesty, everything is stacked against us. Our sinful flesh, all the allure and attraction of the world that distracts us, and the enemy. So if we're not including prayer in this struggle, we're just going to lose the fight. God also is the only one who can give us A desire for him. He is the only one who can increase our hunger for his word. Philippians 2.13 says, Remember, in last week's episode, we talked about grace power. Not only can God give us a desire for his word, but he can give us the power and strength we need to say no to temptation and say yes to be in his word. But, We also have to pray that he would help us overcome this struggle, like help us make time for his word, help us be disciplined, give us the Holy Spirit in order to understand his word. He can do all of that and he will do all of it because he promises those who ask him for a hunger and a thirst for him are going to be given a hunger and a thirst for him. But as I've learned in my own walk, it is not an overnight promise. He has got to work in and through us over time, but he promises to give it to us, especially for those who ask. So anytime you struggle in prioritizing God's word, you should instantly begin to pray. Pray also while you're reading your Bible so that you won't get distracted. Pray anytime you look at your Bible for a hunger and a love for it. Just pray, pray, pray all of the time. Okay, step two is intentionality. Now, as a word nerd, I always like to look up the definitions of words. I already know to get a Intentionality can be defined as being deliberate or purposeful. And the opposite idea of being intentional is that of unwillingness or something happening by accident. So the reason that intentionality is so important here is because getting to this place of consistently loving and reading and studying God's word is certainly not going to happen on accident. We have to be purposeful in this pursuit in order to be successful. Ephesians 5, 15-16 says, If you go into this journey willy-nilly without any sort of purpose or plan, or if you have the wrong motives, you'll likely have a harder time staying consistent. There is a stark difference between simply saying,"'I want to spend more time in God's Word,' But you never sit down to put some prayer and thought into how this could sustainably look in your current season. What are your goals? Is it reading the entire Bible, slow studying through certain books, or memorizing large passages of scripture? What are the hurdles and the challenges you're facing? Is it comprehension, time, lack of discipline? What's your current starting point? You're not going to be able to go from reading none, no scripture, to an exegetical study. So be Realistic and start small but the biggest aspect that we have to be intentional about is our heart posture Because this is where it can become easy to completely miss the point We don't discipline ourselves to become students of the word just for the sake of knowledge or having all the answers We don't do it to check a box out of obligation We do it to grow in our knowledge of god to become wise and mature in our faith And to be able to lead others to christ So step three continues on with this idea of intentionality and it will likely help you answer the questions we just talked about. Step three is have rhythms. Now, notice how I didn't use the word routine. For me, routines carry a sense of rigidness and legalism. Like if we don't do this routine perfectly, we fail. Whereas rhythms are fluid. They flow with the seasons we are in. Routines are built on checklists, whereas rhythms are built on cadence. To be honest, this idea of having rhythms just has more grace to it. It feels more spirit-led than self-driven. Rhythms allow for fluidity and function and freedom, whereas routines make us feel like one misstep could send the whole process up in smoke, at least for perfectionists like me. So what kind of rhythms can help you begin to incorporate God's word into your everyday life? And how can this practically look in each season? For me, instead of thinking of these rhythms as sequences that I do only at certain times of the day, I think of them as sequences I do depending on what my intention is. I don't do all these rhythms all of the time, and I'm certainly not doing them all every day. And some are unique to specific seasons, but hopefully they can give you ideas for your own life. So the first, and this is the most obvious one, is... Having a rhythm of devotional quiet time, sort of like your go-to time with the Lord. And this has looked so different for me over the last three to five years. And I've tried a lot of different things, and I will probably continue to try a lot of different things. But oftentimes I will get into a flow or a rhythm that I really enjoy and do it for a couple of months. Sometimes it'll last an entire year. Either way, I will typically find something that works and stick with it for a good amount of time before I either take something away or I add to it depending upon my season. And I have shared this already in a previous episode, but typically, and I actually, so this is an example of reintroducing, I had already gone through Paul David Tripp's New Morning Mercies devotional. probably two years ago, three years ago. But I was feeling, I was having, and this is where this gets real. I was having a hard time picking up my Bible to read it and study it. Once I started, I was really enjoying it. Like I enjoy reading. I enjoy breaking down the text. But it was sort of a matter of how do I like break that down Or get past that point of, do I really want to do this? Am I about to do this? And I have honestly found, for me personally, that the New Morning Mercies devotional is sort of like a gateway drug into God's Word because it's so gospel rich. But there's also a, at the bottom, like a recommended reading. And so I start with the devotional. It's a nice little subtle beginning that reminds me of God's grace and the gospel. And by that point, then I'm like excited and I'm motivated. And then it, it's just a nice fluid transition into the actual, whatever I'm going to do for that day, whether it's just a devotional reading of, you know, our church is going through Romans. So I might read through Romans or whatever my Bible study girls are doing for that group. We will I will work through that passage of scripture. And then from there, I will almost always prayer journal. So this rhythm of having a devotional quiet time is one. Then I have a rhythm of studying my Bible. So I've worked through Jen Wilkins, Woman of the Word. And I kind of have a little mini process. Typically, let's say I'm going to be studying Romans 1. And this isn't something that I do in one sitting. But this is the rhythm that I'm referring to. And a rhythm can be spread out over an hour, over an entire span of a day, over an entire week. It doesn't have to be done in one sitting. So the rhythm of studying that I have is reading and rereading, then observing by annotating the text, highlighting certain things that stick out to me, and then I move on to interpretation where I ask certain questions, and then... From there, I will kind of step back and look to apply whatever it is that I've learned. And then also the final step is typically to work through the discussion questions for my Bible study group. And now a new rhythm I'm excited about is this Grasping God's Word textbook that I'm working through has sort of workbook style questions, things that you can work through. So If I sit down and I think, you know what, I want to spend 30 minutes going through this book, that's my own rhythm of personal growth in the discipline of studying scripture. Then some other examples are memorization. And this is new for me, getting into a rhythm of memorization. But I have found a rhythm. And for me, it's just a matter of plugging in that time in a given week. That has proven to be hard, but I'm wanting to grow in that area. Also, in other seasons, I have had a rhythm of listening to the Dwell app during feedings, when I have a new baby, showering, while I'm driving. It is my go-to. Not currently in the season, but it is a go-to. Also, a rhythm of family discipleship. So... Before my kids go to bed, you know, reading their devotional, reading from our little, you know, kids NLT Bible in a year that has a small passage for them and a little devotional. And then also in certain seasons, I will just simply, I have a one-year Bible, an ESV one-year Bible that includes a passage from the Old Testament, passage from the New, a Psalm and a Proverb. And I like to just do that in the evenings. The key here isn't to create like a routine that you never deviate from. It's to find multitude of cadences that work for you in each of these areas and then return to them time and time again in a given week. And maybe for you, rhythms are best formed around a certain time of the day because you're guaranteed that time. You know, maybe it's the mornings before your kids wake up the evenings before they go to bed or before you go to bed, during nap time, maybe lunchtime at work. There are maybe a couple hours throughout the week where you know that you have two hours of nothing. The beauty of rhythms is that they can flow in and out of your season, and they can change shape depending upon your capacity. The goal isn't to do them perfectly. It's to create intentional moments where you're engaging with God and His Word. And You can look to combine any rhythms in a given day or a given week. So, you know, maybe on the weekends you have more time. So you focus on scripture memorization or even study on the weekends. Maybe you want to replace scrolling with reading. So you start by reading a few chapters from a one-year Bible at night and follow it up with a reward chapter of fiction or another book you're loving. Maybe, like I said, you've just given birth to a new baby and you have extremely low capacity and your rhythm is going to look like listening to the Dwell app during feedings. showering, or driving. Because ultimately, this is the best rhythm you can incorporate. And this one might surprise you. It's not having a quiet time rhythm or a study rhythm or even a one-hour rhythm of prayer. It's a rhythm of returning. This is the most important rhythm you can have. Returning to God time and time again. Returning when you fail. Returning for his grace and his help. Returning for his guidance. Returning to his presence. Returning to his word. Returning to the desk where you enjoy studying. Returning to your journal where you pour your heart out in prayer. Return, return, return to the Lord. Okay, so we've covered the importance of prayer, having the intentional plan, which includes daily and weekly rhythms. Now this is the not so fun part. Step four is discipline. But don't become discouraged just yet because like I said, I really believe step five is the most important, though discipline is a close second. This is a tough one to flesh out because sometimes our brains can easily tune out, because most of us struggle to have discipline in this area, which is exactly why we even are in this boat in the first place. So because this is such a unique and personal thing for each of us, I thought it might be helpful to focus on what keeps me disciplined, and maybe it will help or encourage you. So the first thing that keeps me disciplined is having a vision. It's exactly what we talked about at the There are people in our lives, people who have gone before us, who have paved a way forward, who are examples that we can look to for inspiration and guidance. They can be our vision. Romans 1 11 through 12 says, I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong. That is that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith. The family I grew up around, They gave me a vision for what intentional, disciplined, and consistent time in God's word can look like. And not only that, but they modeled how this can dramatically impact every aspect of our lives and the lives of others in our lives. It's a ripple effect. The friends that I keep close, the pastors and ministers at my church, the authors whose books I read, the Christian leaders I follow on Instagram, they haven't seeing the sort of maturity in their walk with Christ by coasting and casually reading God's word. Even biblical characters can give us vision. Consider David or the disciples of Jesus. David says in Psalm 119, I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not stand against you. The disciples, they grew up as devout students of the scriptures because of their Jewish traditions. Most would have likely memorized the first five books of the Bible, which... It's considered the Torah by the age of 10. But of course, Jesus is our greatest vision. We want to become close to him and we want to conform into his image. And not only was he the word made flesh, but his entire life centered around the word and the will of God. So having a vision to propel you forward is such a helpful way to stay disciplined in the long run. Similar to vision, knowing that discipline leads to fruit is and fruit is our reward, is also a helpful way to stay disciplined. Because you reap what you sow. So if you sow many seeds, you're going to reap a large harvest. If you are lazy in sowing seeds, you're going to reap a small one. So consider the rewards you want here on earth, like an increase in patience or wisdom. But also, of course, consider the rewards that you're going to have in heaven. So do you have a tendency to get angry? A disciplined effort to memorize verses about anger could yield a great reward of not snapping when you want to snap. And this is what I'm still working on, but worth providing as an example. Okay, so yes, discipline is so important. And I don't need to break that down any further. Without discipline, we really couldn't move forward in this. So step five, it actually ties into discipline. And that's because it has to do with accountability. Yes, step five is accountability. And while Physical accountability to like a buddy or a group of people is how this looks tangibly. Let's back up for a moment and talk about this theologically. And in order to do that, I want to tell you a quick, funny story to explain. So a few months back, it might have been six months to a year ago, I was driving to Louisville to go to my now sister-in-law's house. bridal, David's bridal dress try on. That whole experience. And for weeks leading up to this day, my tire kept going flat. And my husband and I just kept pushing it off, kept pushing it off, kept pushing it off. We would just fill it up and fill it up and fill it up and fill it up. And right before I left to drive to Louisville, we filled it up completely. And I even hoped and prayed and crossed my fingers that I would make it all the way to Louisville. And I would plan to fill it up. But don't... I mean, we should have fixed it beforehand. But regardless, I get on I-65. I start driving. I am probably 10 minutes from David's Bridal. And my tire light comes on. I hear a ding. And I see my PSI. And I was like, oh boy. It was... dropping by the minute. Every two minutes, it was dropping. And I thought, oh, this is not good. And I started to pray. I'm like, please, God, please, God, let there be a tire placed by David's Bridal. Please, God, do not let me get a flat on the side of I-65. And this is just a cool testimony. No joke, you guys. There is literally a David's Bridal right next to a discount tire. It was like a light shone from above. Anyways, I roll up to this discount tire, and I say to the guy, hey, I think I need to fill up my tire. Can you fill up my tire? And he says, ma'am, I can hear it hissing. It's gone flat. And I turn around and see my tire was completely flat. It had flattened by the time I pulled up to the discount tire. And I actually left with four new tires that day. And I thought... I was not going to have to deal with a blinking tire light again. But to my surprise, a week later, there it was. Yet again, my front right tire was low. Well, turns out I didn't just need a new tire. I needed a new wheel. Thank you to the curb that I probably hit weeks prior. So humor me with this story. Some of us have a faith with a slow leak. We keep filling it up, but eventually it ends up flat again. We go to church hoping to patch holes and replace old tires, but our faith still slowly leaks until it becomes flat. And we wonder why and how in the world we're gonna fix it. A tire can't go anywhere without a working wheel. Our faith can also go nowhere without a firm foundation. Now, the foundation is obviously God's word, but to take this a step further, The foundational wheel, per se, that I'm referring to is discipleship. Now, listen to this quote from John Mark Comer. He says, both baptizing them into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or what I grew up hearing called evangelism, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded, what is called discipleship. His point was, so many of us, we were saved at summer camp, or at five, because we grew up in church, we prayed the sinner's prayer, and we were dunked underneath the water, and we were saved. The The call of Jesus is twofold, though. It's not just be baptized, a.k.a. come to salvation evangelism. It's twofold. It's also after that, after you are baptized and after you have become saved, make disciples, become a disciple of Jesus. The second part of that is teaching them to obey everything I have command. And so that beginning of the quote, he says... The gospel has been preached in such a way that you could become a Christian without becoming a disciple of Jesus. And I, looking back, that is so true for me in my life. For years, you know, I was saved at summer camp or whatever you want to call it, dunked, but I had nobody that came alongside me and walked the walk with me, who intentionally poured into me and discipled me by teaching me All about Jesus, teaching me the spiritual disciplines, teaching me how to live this life until later on. And so what is my point in all this? And what does it have to do with accountability? Who are you accountable to? Who is discipling you? Who are you discipling? Because if you don't know the answer to these questions, you probably have zero or little accountability. A lot of us go to church on Sunday. And we're in a small group, but how many of us have an older person or a mentor who's pouring into us, keeping us accountable? And how many of us are accountable to discipling somebody else? Because the second part of Jesus' command to teach them to obey everything I have commanded is not just for pastors and church leaders. It's for all of us. God has chosen to include us in his mission, to bring people to himself and to disciple others in his ways. So who are you teaching? Who are you pouring into? When I started leading a Bible study at my church was when I started to see a consistent habit of studying scripture show up in my life like never before. Because I had to. I couldn't just show up on a Wednesday morning having not done my homework or due diligence. And you don't need a formal discipleship group or even to teach a formal Bible study for this to pan out in your life. But could you join one? There is something actually called Bible Study Fellowship. It's been around forever. They have groups everywhere. You could find a local in-person group in your area or even an online one. But also, you can just find somebody in your church who leads a Bible study or somebody who you could just say, hey, could you mentor me? Could you disciple me? And then from there, also be intentional and prayerful about Having God put somebody or a group of people in your life who you can intentionally pour into so that you're accountable to them. If you're not growing, how can you then help them grow? But again, back to the discipline, you get what you put into it. If you decide to join a Bible study group and you do the bare minimum and you show up out of obligation, you're not going to see much fruit. And of course, accountability matters. Could also just mean finding a close friend who wants to memorize a portion of scripture with you and meet up once or twice a month. The point is, this is an area of faith that you just can't do alone. Well, really no aspect of our faith we can do alone. We have to do in community. But being held accountable and being accountable to somebody else is absolutely key. Otherwise, you're just... walking this road alone, and you can get away with skating by. You can get away with not reading your Bible. Okay, we have prayer, intentionality, rhythms, discipline, and accountability. In my personal experience, these five steps have been so important to growing my love for God's Word and making it a consistent part of my day and week. So You may be missing little pieces of the puzzle here and there. You may have one, but not the other. So consider how you might incorporate one. I know this was a lot. And the last thing that I will say as just a reminder, because I don't think we can be reminded enough of this, is lean into God's grace. Lean into that. I do not want... you guys to feel defeated or discouraged or like you're going to fail. I think a lot of us don't start doing something because we fear failure. We fear this idea that, oh, well, we're going to start something and then it's not going to last and we're not going to be consistent. So we just don't start at all. And that is one just big fat lie from the enemy. It's just one big fat lie. The mentality that we've got to have going into this is I am going to take the steps to pursue Jesus in any way that I possibly can in a way that is sustainable, that works with my season and my capacity. I'm going to try and I'm going to fail. I'm going to try something new. I'm going to utilize resources. I'm going to do my research. I'm going to grow in my knowledge of how to study. I'm going to look for ways to become a student of the scripture. I'm not going to let myself get defeated. I'm going to lean into God's grace because God wants me to be in his word. God wants to know me. He wants to spend time with me and I'm The only way that that's going to happen is if we acknowledge that this is going to be a hard, challenging battle that we're going to have to fight every single day. It's never... Well, I mean, I say it's never. It will eventually get easier, but it's not going to ever get to a place where, oh... This is easy. I'm not going to have to fight for this time. I'm not going to have the enemy tempting you to do something else. It's always going to be a struggle. But it's something that we have to continue to press into and rely on God's grace for. Okay, that is all I have for today. If you guys got something out of this or something resonated with you, please take time to leave a review, copy the episode link, share it with a friend. It would mean the world to me. If you have any thoughts or questions, don't hesitate to reach out via email. Thank you guys so much for listening, and I will catch up with you again in next week's episode.