8: Then, Always, Now: Bible Application Made Simple

(00:02) Stephanie: Season 4, Episode 8. Hello, Father.

(00:06) Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to see you.

(00:08) Stephanie: Good to see you. And you know what? Can’t stop, won’t stop, got to let the people know other exciting news. Last week we were like, “Hey, Spirit and Scripture course!” And that is still something we’re celebrating, but also, we need to let people know about a very exciting opportunity. That is you, sir, are teaching a live class. That doesn’t happen very often. You and the fabulous Dawn Whitestone are going to be teaching an eight-week class on Breakthrough! It’s a live online class and it’s starting right here at the end of the month, the Monday after our Deeper Walk Experience in Chicago, actually.

So there you have it. Would you give a little… Yeah, give me amped up Woo-hoo! That was awesome. So yeah, what is this Understanding Breakthrough class that you’re teaching?

(00:50) Marcus: So yes, this is going to be interactive. I’m going to be teaching for probably like 30 minutes of the class, and then we’re going to have an opportunity for conversation. Dawn’s going to be leading the conversation and exercises about it. We’re preparing for about two hours per session over eight weeks.

We’re not going chapter by chapter through the book Breakthrough. What we’re doing is looking broader than that at a lot of key Deeper Walk concepts that are related to Breakthrough. We will be looking at the five engines as well, but it’s going to be a good chance to get people introduced to the core foundational things that Deeper Walk teaches about transformation and breakthrough.

(01:58) Stephanie: I’m excited. I’m hoping I can be a fly on the wall in that little class there.

So if you want to explore more, if that sounds like, “I want to know more, I might do it,” the link to the website is in the description.

(02:12) Marcus: I will also say that, moving forward, this course is going to be a prerequisite to the prayer ministry certification. So this is also kind of a way for you to figure out if you want to go further and deeper with this and get the whole year-long certification. So there is a connection. This is being sponsored by the School of Ministry.

(02:36) Stephanie: Good call, yes.

All right, this week we are getting into Bible study application. And if we can restrain ourselves, we’ll see. I don’t know. Dad and I both like, woo-hoo, Bible! We love talking about it, which is awesome. This is also going to be our last episode of the series.

So, application. Observation, interpretation, application. Father, what is the goal? Why application?

(03:09) Marcus: Well, the Bible says pretty clearly, “Don’t just be hearers of the word but be doers also.” So we want to be hearers and doers. Jesus said the wise person is the one who hears his words and puts it into practice, and the foolish person is the one who simply hears the words and doesn’t put it into practice. So the ultimate goal isn’t just knowledge and information. As I like to say, “The goal isn’t to master the Bible. The goal is that the Bible masters us.”

I think that when we get to the application, though, there is an art to it and a little bit of a science to it that we need to understand, because badly applied scripture can really lead you astray. We don’t want to get so off base on our scripture that—I’ll give you an example.

It was not uncommon growing up – I had a very legalistic pastor in my early childhood days – it was not uncommon if the verse had anything about holiness or worldliness in it, he immediately went into why playing cards was a sin and dancing was a sin and whatever. His application immediately went to his legalistic predispositions, which was not what the text was teaching. And so you’ve got to understand how do you get from your interpretation into the application and not just use the text as a pretext for whatever soapbox you like to get on. So that’s why this is so important.

(04:46) Stephanie: That’s a good example. I know that’s easy to do. It’s easy to say, “I’m rolling up my sleeves, I’m looking for my observations, I’m looking for my interpretations,” and then to make the jump to, I think we all do this to some level where it’s like, “Well, this is the thing that I really believe is what matters and I really wish that people would understand this, and I think this could back it up. Let me read this Bible verse, that reminds me, and here’s the application,” but it actually has nothing to do with it.

You know, at one level or another, that’s an easy thing to do. So one of the things we want to do with learning how to apply our Bible study is to, firstly, be aware that that’s something, because you could do that in ignorance, right? Be aware that that is a pitfall.

From there, do you want to unpack the three phases of application?

(05:45) Marcus: Yes, I can walk through the three phases of the application process. I learned this from Dr. Grant Osborne, who taught at Trinity when I was there, and it’s pretty straightforward. And that is, guess what? It starts with the author’s intended message.

So the first step is, what did this mean to the original audience? And so if the church of Colossae got a letter from Paul, what did that mean to the church in Colossae? So I want to know as much as I can about their context and that situation to try to help me understand this is what it would have meant in that context.

When the Torah tells us that Moses is preaching on the plains of Moab, having just left Egypt, and that he’s talking to eyewitnesses who saw the miracles and heard the voice of God, that should inform my reading of the text. So what would that be like, and what would that audience understand this to be, and what was the message to that audience? So the first step of this is, identify the original audience, and using all of the interpretive processes, you’re figuring out what was the author’s message to that audience. So that’s step one.

Step two is where we now look at what is universal about that message. In other words, what is there about that message that is universal and could be applied to all people at all times in all situations? Is there something universal about it? That’s where it gets a little bit trickier, and that’s where we can let our predispositions get in.

I’ll tell you something we haven’t talked about yet that does affect Bible interpretation and application, honestly, is fear bonds and joy bonds with God. If I am fear-bonded with God, I am predisposed to see fear-bonded messages, and I am predisposed to come away with fear-bonded applications. Whereas if I am joy-bonded to God, I am going to be a little more free to interpret things through that lens and come up with applications that reinforce that. It’s something we haven’t talked much about.

That’s part of what leads to legalism. I’m a firm believer that legalism is anchored in a fear bond with God. What happens is, I go to the text, I get the message, and then the thing I think is universal is God’s going to get mad at you if you mess up. And that’s why we have to be careful about what is the universal message we’re taking out of this text.

(08:38) Stephanie: Would you say that would be the fourth lens we could have added over onto the application. I’m really glad you brought that up. I know I asked you to do it.

(08:41) Marcus: We could have added it as a fourth lens, but it doesn’t start with an “I”, so I was having trouble. But it’s true that one of the lenses that affects the way that we look at the scriptures is our attachment lens, and it’s something I haven’t heard anybody talk about before so I think it’s worth mentioning.

But an example of a universal principle—there might be several universal principles in any given passage—but let’s just take something like the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac. In that story, you’re like, “Well, what is the main point here?” And it’s about covenant, it’s about faith, it’s about the character of God. It is kind of ironic that that story is used so often as evidence that the God of the Bible is cruel and unkind and not to be trusted because he asks somebody to kill their kid, but that’s a very shallow reading of the text, and it’s definitely a fear-bonded reading of the text.

What’s going on there is much deeper than that. When you look at it from this perspective: that God had told Abraham, “Through Isaac, your seed, will come through whom all nations on earth will be blessed,” which means Isaac had to have a kid. God had promised it. Isaac was going to have a child. It was a promise of God. So for God to say, “Go kill Isaac,” meant Abraham’s putting those two things together and so this is a study in tension. How do you bring together two things that seem so diametrically opposed?

The author of Hebrews fills in the gap for us and says that Abraham had reasoned that God was able to raise the dead. And so he thought, “All right, well, I may have to kill my son, but God’s going to raise him from the dead.” Well, it would still be a very hard thing to do, right? If somebody said, “Hey, kill Stephanie. Don’t worry, I’m going to raise her from the dead the next day,” that’s still hard. But part of what God is doing there is…

(10:54) Stephanie: Thank you.

(10:58) Marcus: Yes, just for your reassurance, I’m sure you were laying awake at night wondering about that. But it’s also a little bit closer to what was going on to talk about you and me than to talk about Abraham and a five-year-old or something like this. Isaac was old enough to carry the wood. He was old enough to be the stronger one up there and needing to do some of the manual labor to get them there, meaning if Isaac had wanted to, he could have taken down Abraham, right? There is clearly implicit in this the idea that Isaac was cooperative.

We also have then this idea that Isaac probably knew that he was the promised heir and that the line was going through him, and that this is reinforced even by the identification of Isaac as the only son. Because Abraham had Ishmael, right? It’s just that Ishmael wasn’t the promised heir through whom the promises were coming, and the inheritance was going to go to Isaac.

Gifts were given to Ishmael. Hagar and Ishmael are sent away with gifts, but Isaac is the heir, and he is the one who carries on the family business, if you will, the family name. And so that’s why God says, “Your only son, Isaac, whom you love.” So it’s two things. It’s the one who’s carrying on: It’s the one child of promise and it’s the one who is truly beloved.

And what this does is it is actually God inviting Abraham to experience something with him, because God was going to do this very thing with Jesus, and nobody probably on earth can identify quite as closely with God as Abraham, who was his friend, we’re told. And so you look at all of these things. So what is the proper application here? Well, understanding that story more specifically helps us understand this is a story about deep identification with God and deep trust in God, not just at an intellectual level, but understanding that if God has told me, even something this hard, that I need to interpret that in the context of his promises and his character.

And so when God asks me to do hard, hard things, and there are things that don’t make any sense, that just even look evil on the surface, I have to interpret those things in the light of God’s character, in the light of God’s promises, and that reinforces my trust in my faith. Now that’s an application, that’s a universal application.

Now I can take that universal application, and now the third step is I’m going to apply it to my specific situation. So in my life, is there something that I am struggling with? Is there something that I am facing that is calling into question the character of God? That is calling me to wonder, is God really as good as I’ve always believed he is? Can I trust him to be good in this situation?

So if I’m facing something that is causing me to maybe call that character into question, I can go to a story like this. Well, the application here would be, “”Yes, let’s trust God even when it doesn’t look like he’s trustworthy.” Let’s, as I think it was Corrie ten Boom says, “Do not doubt in the dark what you know to be true in the light.” I might have the author wrong there, but that concept has been there throughout. And so that’s the application to specific situations. So those are the three steps.

(14:50) Stephanie: That was so good it brought tears to my eyes. I love it when you give a random sermon. And see, the application is where you get to the sermon I think. And it’s true because I find so much joy in the journey. I love making the observations and pressing into the questions, and I love letting God tap me and be like, “Hey, did you see that?” Or, “Look at this!” Having the aha. I love the joy and the journey. But then at some point you’re working it together to, “Okay, and here’s what I’m proclaiming. Here’s what I’m writing out. This is the application.”

(15:36) Marcus: And I’ll also say, from a preacher’s perspective, this is also why I can’t just go through every person sitting in that audience and tell them exactly how it applies to them. Sometimes the best I can do is say, “Here are some of the universal applications that come out of this, and here’s how it might apply to your life.” But you’re counting on the Holy Spirit to show up at that point, and you’re counting on the Holy Spirit to press something home for them that they need in their situation right now.

I’ve also found that there are levels of application, and I think of it often in terms of multiple levels from, how does this apply to my heart, inner world and what does God want me to know about the inner world things going on? How does this apply to my immediate relationships? How does this apply to my church context and what’s going on in my church right now? How does this apply in maybe broader organizational things that I have going on? How does it apply culturally and to what’s going on in the culture at large? How does this apply to the unseen realm and the battles going on in the unseen realm? In other words, there are so many layers of application.

I had a professor who used to say there’s only one meaning of a passage, but there are almost innumerable applications because there are multiple universal principles that often arise. We just want to make sure that it’s actually one that’s being taught in the text. And then there are layers of interpretations, whether you’re talking about your emotions and your beliefs in your inner world, whether you’re talking about behaviors in your life that need to be corrected, whether you’re talking about personal relationships, distant relationships. I mean, there’s just all kinds of levels of application.

And that’s why there’s almost no limit to this. And it’s also why we have to rely on the Holy Spirit to help us see how these things connect and to bring conviction. That’s what we’re talking about. There are some old words for it, like having an unction, having an anointing, but it’s having a conviction that the Holy Spirit I can’t get away from.  There’s something God wants me to see and something he wants me to do.

(17:58) Stephanie: Well, as you are getting to your personal application especially, it’s a great time for conversational prayer. It’s a great time to say, “Would you bring to mind what you want me to get out of this? How is the devil trying to get me to see this right now? Is there anything I need to clear up?” You know, but having some conversational prayer throughout the process here.

(18:21) Marcus: It’s one of the reasons why we have the Spirit and Scripture course to bring those two things together. Because scripture by itself can become very left-brained, and Spirit by itself can get unhinged because you’ve got to have an anchor. I can’t tell you some of the bizarre things I’ve heard people say that the Holy Spirit told them that were just not scriptural. So you need both. You need the anchor and you need the Spirit.

(18:45) Stephanie: That they thought the Holy Spirit told them. Yeah. Right. I knew what you meant. I’m just clarifying.

(18:50) Marcus: That they thought the Holy Spirit told them, but they said it as, “Holy Spirit told me this,” and I’m all, “Yeah, sure. I appreciate it. Make sure I’m not too misunderstood.”

(19:03) Stephanie: I also just wanted to highlight the way that I typically remember this. You shortened it, or maybe Dr. Osborne shortened it into: then, always, and now. So you had the original message, the universal principles, and then today’s application. So you have then, always, now as you’re thinking through.

(19:25) Marcus: I don’t think I even remember who came up with that. It might have been me, but I think I couldn’t tell you for sure. So, then, always, now, yeah. What did it mean then to the original audience? What does it mean always? (which is the universal), and what does it mean now in the situation that I’m currently facing? So that’s an easy way to remember it. Then. Always. Now.

(19:48) Stephanie: So are you up for an example? Can we take a little Bible study bite? I have a proposition based off of stuff I’ve known that you’ve done before, but if you have something in mind, feel free to be like, “Actually, let’s do this verse.”

(20:06) Marcus: One of the first ones that always pops into my head is these letters that John wrote in the book of Revelation where Jesus is dictating to John to send to these churches. And one of them I heard preached growing up all my life was this idea that to the Laodiceans, “I wish that you were hot or cold, but because you’re neither, I’m going to spit you out of my mouth.” And then I heard people saying, “God would rather that you were an atheist who hated him than a lukewarm Christian.” And I’m like, “I don’t think so.”

So what are we missing in a passage like this? Because there’s a case of preaching a very decisive point. And this is one of the reasons why it’s good to do some, “What did it mean to the original audience?” and do a little bit of background work on Laodicea. And when you do, you find out that it was a sister city to Colossae that got the book of Colossians, and both cities were famous for springs in their area. One was a freshwater spring that gave you drinking water, and one was a mineral spring that was like a kind of a spa that you would hang out in.

And the idea is, “I wish that you were hot or cold,” was more like “I wish you were a hot spring that I could soak in and get some benefit from, or a cold spring that gave me fresh drinking water.” But there was a point where the water from the two streams that came from these springs merged, and it was brackish, right? It was not very good. It wasn’t good for anything. You couldn’t drink it because there was too much of the mineral content in it, and you couldn’t really relax in it or use it for the medicinal purposes that the other stuff offered, and so it was useless.

And so the universal application point here is God is looking for people who are useful to him. And then you go deeper into the text of what was it that made them useless, and it was that they’d become so worldly focused that God couldn’t do anything with them anymore. They had become preoccupied with the things of the world so they were wealthy in the world’s eyes, but they had become poor in things of the spirit. And so that then preaches.You’ve got this universal principle that comes out of there of what God is looking for.

And now you apply it. Well, if I fear-bond apply that, God wants to use you; all he cares about is, are you useful for him in service? Or I can joy-bond apply that and say God wants to use you; he has a purpose for your life. There’s something for you to accomplish that’s going to give your life meaning and purpose as well as having an impact on the world around you. But for that purpose to be fully understood, we have to be repenting of things that keep us connected to the world in inappropriate ways, and we have to walk with him more closely. You might even say a deeper walk.

(23:23) Stephanie: Hey! So could you kind of backtrack in your head there what you just did, which was awesome, and pull out here’s where we observed, here’s where we interpreted, here’s where we applied?

(23:37) Marcus: So the first, “What did it mean to the original audience?” They would have understood it in the terms of the springs in their area, of the water flowing there. That’s the imagery that is used. And so the observation is that when he’s saying lukewarm, they knew exactly what he meant because there was a context where there was a hot water spring and a cold water spring at a point at which it became lukewarm, and they understood that that was something you would spit out of your mouth, literally.

And then he applied it, in the context of that letter, to their worldliness and said that your worldliness makes you unfit and unusable, and they’re actually in danger of God closing the church, of losing that candlestick. So that’s the message to the original audience: you need to address the worldliness, or I may end up needing to just shut this thing down. Well then the universal principle is God wants us to fulfill our purpose. He wants us to be of use in his kingdom, but worldliness often gets in the way.

And it might be too much to say that he would rather that you be an atheist, but it is not too much to say that our worldliness keeps us from being able to fulfill that purpose and be of that use. And so now we come into the now. Well, in my life now I have to look at myself, I’ve got to examine myself. What is going on in my life that maybe God would say, “Hey, you’re more worried about the world than you are about me?” And again, people can twist this, and that’s why you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to listen to the Spirit, because I’ve heard people preach this as, ‘You shouldn’t be in secular work, you should be in ministry,” and that’s not what that means.

It means that you should, in your heart, be looking at, are you living for money? Are you living for God? This really gets back to the two masters thing. You can’t serve two masters. And so that’s kind of how you begin unpacking these things. You start with, be as accurate as possible about the original message. Get the universal principle then that comes out of that that applies at all times. And then let’s look at our current situation and ask ourselves the hard questions. “What is it, God, that you want me to know?” And let’s start talking to him about it.

(26:13) Stephanie: This is good. I’ve so enjoyed this series with you. There are, if people are like, “No wait, I was here for what I want. I’m going to go get my Bible study major now,” or “I’m just going to give all of my free time.” Do you have any recommendations for resources at Deeper Walk or beyond just, “Hey, if you’re just on fire right now and you want to do more Bible study…” Like just a handful?

(26:41) Marcus: We do have this book, right? So yeah, this book is really tiny. It’s called 3-2-1 Bible Study. It’s a summary of everything we just went through. I know part of my daughter is cringing right now because of how poorly edited this is. I threw this thing together years ago.

(27:00) Stephanie: It is deeply in my heart to refresh this book, and we have not had the time yet. But if you are just like, no, I’m raring to go, I want more of it, you can find good content in that booklet. That link is in the description. It’s been in all of the descriptions for the series. And actually, you taught an e-course through that book a couple of years ago too. That’s on our website.

(27:24) Marcus: And I do believe that if you go to www.plaxn.com, that’s P-L-A-X-N dot com, that it will take you to the Bible page of the Deeper Walk website. There’s probably another way to get there. I don’t know what it is, but if you go to deeperwalk.com, go to the search bar, type in “Bible”, hopefully it’ll take you there. But I know that going straight to www.PLAXN.com takes you to our Bible page. There’re some Bible study tools there.

(27:51) Stephanie: And if you don’t know why that website address would take you to a Deeper Walk Bible page, then just go have a little adventure and discover why and get a handle on your Bible. So yes, there are Bible resources there. I highly recommend Blue Letter Bible. That app or the website is so good for researching.

(28:04) Marcus: We actually embedded it on that page.

(28:12) Stephanie: Right, that’s part of what brought my brain there. And obviously, Spirit and Scripture course. What kinds of materials would be good for people if they’re in the observation phase or the interpretation phase? Are there different kinds of commentaries or atlases? You don’t have to name specific ones if you don’t want to, but I want people to feel equipped for whatever stage they’re ready to move off into here.

(28:42) Marcus: Yeah, and everybody’s at a little bit different place here, so the simplest place to start is a study Bible. Most study Bibles have notes at the bottom of the page. They have atlases, they have chronologies, they have inserts along the way that can help you with the things you need. That’s probably level one. Let’s start with a study Bible, not an application Bible. So that particularly, somebody with academics has put the notes down there. Now you have to be a little bit careful because some of them have a slant to them, but by and large they’re very helpful no matter which version you get.

(29:27) Stephanie: I always recommend, whether you’re looking at commentaries or study Bibles, or whatever you’re looking at, get at least two so you can see that people have different perspectives and interpretations.

(29:42) Marcus: There are also some classic, free Bible commentaries out there that were written a generation or two ago that you can now access for free. I still look those up to see what Matthew Henry and Jamieson-Fausset-Brown and some of these other people wrote about stuff, because sometimes they’ll give you just enough of that background information to make things pop.

And then for me personally, I tend to look for commentaries by professors from evangelical schools next. And that is, are there Asbury profs? Are there Trinity profs? Are there Fuller, Gordon-Conwell profs? I mean, are there people who believe in inerrancy who have written these commentaries? Let’s start there and then branch out from there. So that’s kind of the way that I look through the commentaries. So that is study Bibles, free older commentaries, and then I’m looking for the ones that have been written by people who believe in inerrancy.

(30:40) Stephanie: That’s a good starting place.

Well, thank you everybody for joining us on the trail. This has been so much fun. Father, final thoughts for the 3-2-1 Bible Study Methods series?

(30:55) Marcus: You know, it’s funny. The Bible is so fundamental to the faith, and yet it’s remarkable how easy it is to let it slip out of your routine and slip out of thought. And what I’ve found is that a lot of times when we are struggling in our walk with God, one of the first things to go is Bible study. And oftentimes there’s a lot of reasons for this. Some of them are emotional, some are spiritual, some have other things to do with it.

So if that’s where you find yourself, let this be your call. Dive back in and take that deeper look at the text one more time. I think that we all need that reminder now and then of prioritizing scripture, making sure that we don’t lose track of what a gift it is to have the Bible.

(31:50) Stephanie: Yes and amen.