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Pacific Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Experiencing the Word of God: How to Turn A Bible into Your Bible

Chad Bernard

Morning Manna

Dear Lord, I want to thank you so much for the opportunity to get into your Word this morning.

I pray that you would speak to our hearts.

Your words cause things into existence that did not exist.

They stop the enemy right in their tracks.

Lord, thank you for loving us and be with us at this time.

So, I'm giving through 3 different presentations so you understand where I'm coming from.

I have a keynote or a PowerPoint that I was going to present.

If you're interested in them at all, if you might find any value in them, I would say I have a card here.

If you wanna take the card and you wanna email me, I would be more than happy to share with you those notes, if that's something that you would find benefit from.

Share them, use them any way that you can.

Oh yeah, if you have a Flash Drive, I would be more than willing to give that to you.

However, I can convert it into PowerPoint or PDF, whatever you need.

I'd be more than happy to share it with you.

I wanted to let you know before we get started that this is just an approach that I have been blessed by.

You might hear some of it and go, man, I think I heard that from someone else.

Growing up, People have shared ideas, and I think that's what's so great about God's people.

We come together and say, Lord, how's the Lord speaking to you?

And then you say, well, this is how he's doing it, and we share methods.

And the goal is just to grow closer to Christ.

So I am firmly convinced that personal devotions are essential for God's people.

It's just like the guy who is married but never talks to his wife.

Oh yeah, we got married about 15 years ago and I'm sure we still are.

And unfortunately, there are times where God's people, or those who proclaim to be God's people, they had an experience once, whether it was at summer camp or whatever, And they haven't talked to him since, and that can tend to be an issue.

So, what I'd like to do is if you have your Bibles, turn to the book of John, chapter 17, verse 3.

Now, it's a very, you might say, well that's kind of a simple verse, but here's what you've got to understand.

If you want, how many of you say, hey I want to go to heaven, I want to live forever, I want eternal life?

Does anybody, yeah, probably, Yeah, praise the Lord.

Now if you want to experience eternal life today, how can you do that?

Now, depending on what version you read, some versions say, you know, this is the way to eternal life.

It's not necessarily works what you're doing.

You know, I imagine you could do some things against God that could cause you to say, I don't want to know you.

But in all actuality, if you want to experience eternal life today, know Jesus Christ.

I believe it starts, it all starts and ends with your devotions, your daily walk with Him.

Now let me preface before we get going on further.

There are different ways to study the Bible.

That's why it's such a magnificent, supernatural book.

I don't know if it's fair to even call it a book.

And you can study it from different ways.

Now what I want to present to you this morning, I hope this will be very interactive, is I want to present to you a way where the Bible can come alive for you.

This is how it's transformed the way that I study.

And so you can study the Bible to try and figure out how your stance on what happens when you die.

You can study the Bible to try and figure out how your stance on like what happens when you die.

You can study the Bible to figure out why you're not a certain type of, you don't have a certain type of belief or religion.

I'm looking at this morning, specifically, growing close to the Lord, falling in love with Jesus.

And when I first met my wife, oh, by the way, I still feel that way.

I hope, Melinda, if you ever hear this, you remember that.

But any time I get to spend with my wife, I'm like, yes.

But I remember when we first started dating, just talking to her on the phone, just, oh, don't ever hang up, you know.

And I believe that when we get this excited and focused, and I don't want to be an emotionalist here, but I mean, I gotta be honest with you, when I read the Bible, it gets me excited.

I don't think that when we get to heaven and stand in the presence of God, we're gonna be like, yeah, You know, I really don't want to show my emotions here.

I mean, you're going to be like, hey, man.

So anyway, I want to talk a little bit about this concept of morning manna.

And if you go to the book of Mark, chapter 1, verse 35, I want to share something with you.

Again, I'm not dogmatic, I don't want to be a legalist on this, but I personally practice and am of the belief that the devotion should happen before I start my day.

And please understand that I want that to be in this light.

If you have your devotions in the evening or at noon time, or maybe you're like 3 times, 4 times a day, that's awesome.

The Gift of Prophecy

Dear Lord, thank you so much for again the opportunity to get into your Word and also to utilize an awesome gift, the Spirit of Prophecy.

And Lord, as we talk about your servant, Alan White, and as we talk about the resources that you've given us, Lord, just guide us.

May we just enjoy our time together and in the gifts that you've given us.

I want to start off this morning just talking briefly about Ellen White.

If you go to the book of Revelation chapter 12, I want to share with you a passage of Scripture of Ellen White.

As you're going to Revelation 12, we're going to read verse 17.

Just to tell you a little bit about myself, I think I'm a, as far as I checked, I was a sixth generation Adventist.

So, my family, they go back a little bit, and, in, in, in Adventism.

And to be honest with you, as I was growing up, the, the, the attitude towards Ellen White, even way back then, in the 80s, was was not necessarily a positive 1, People weren't really a big fan of her.

I think probably because usually when somebody wanted to yell at somebody else, they would use her name first.

And it kind of became, taking it, it was kind of a curse word.

Ellen White says, and then they would get after you for whatever it was.

And they would use her, and it would be terrible.

And everyone's like, man, as soon as I hear the words Ellen White, brace for the, you know, here comes the pain.

And so Precious Gift, the writings that I believe God is, I believe she's an inspired prophet, I believe that God has used her as the precious gift of this church.

Many of the people that attend the Adventist church don't use it.

And they want to actually distance themselves from her.

We don't like to say, instead of, they don't want to use her name anymore.

You say, an inspired author, Or an author who wrote about this time period.

Like they just want to kind of skirt the issue of her.

Because we don't want anyone to know that we actually, you know, we feel we have a prophet.

But I want to take a couple of texts, which is interesting.

In the Bible that represents Satan, the woman represents the church.

And then he describes the kids that Satan wants to straight up kill.

If you want to figure out who her kids are, this is what they look like.

Now, if I said that my kid in this room right now, my son, was wearing an Aqua shirt and wore a black tie, you'd look around the room and you might say, oh, Aqua Teal, is he the guy?

And then you look for a tie, and if he's not wearing a tie, well, that's not his son.

But you look over here and you see him, and he's got the aqua shirt.

But I mean, you would look at that, and you'd say, oh, there's Junior.

Now, depending on whether you like me or not, you would respond accordingly.

Well, the people that Satan hates have these 2 characteristics.

10 commandments, and then they have the testimony of Jesus.

Those of you who have studied this before, You know what the testimony of Jesus is, but let's not guess.

It's in the book of Revelation, chapter 19, verse 10.

So, if you want to be hated by Satan, which I think would be a good thing, you should be a person who keeps all of his commandments and has the spirit of testimony, right?

Or excuse me, spirit of prophecy or the testimony of Jesus.

So, If somebody came up to you and said, I can't believe you think you have a prophet, I think the natural response to that would be, you don't?

So I don't think you should hide behind the fact that you believe you have a prophet.

It's 1 of the identifying marks that prove that Satan hates your guts.

Because God has given us distinctly the 3 angels' messages.

To tell everybody what a loser Satan is and to unveil the deception.

Because Satan's got these things built up.

And as Adventists, we've been given this message that we can go, liar, liar, pants is on.

That's the first, second, third angel's message.

So Satan doesn't want that message to go out.

I found that most reasons why not all of these, not always, but most of the people who don't like her have never read her.

So what we're going to do this morning, very practical, we're going to go again, 1 of the most famous stories in the Old Testament, we're gonna talk about Noah.

David and Goliath, the story that you, you know, me, oh, I've heard this story a zillion times.

I could never think of anything else, I mean, anything new from the story.

You study into the Bible and you find, wow, new stuff comes up.

Same thing happens when you bring Ellen White into the equation.

You can read a story and go, okay, I've read it.

Read her writings and go, whoa, I did not see that.

Alright, so, what we're going to do, again, before you begin your Bible study, and I believe this too, Ellen White said specifically her writings were not as high as the Bible, but I believe that they were, in spite of, there's no but on that, they are, I also think that her writings are inspired.

So when I read, I ask for God to guide me as well.

Longitudes & Latitudes

Dear Lord, thank you so much for the opportunity and the privilege to get into your word.

And I pray that you would be with us during this time, that we study a different method of our approach to reading your word, that it would be vibrant and something that we can take away and feast off of.

Lord, thank you for the blessing that you're about to give us, is my prayer in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, the last lecture that we're gonna talk on, longitudes and latitudes, is, before I get in here, it's, a lot of times you'll read a passage of scripture and it'll give you like a number or it'll give you a town or it'll describe a person and you might not register with you, or you might just say, I wonder why that's there, and then continue on.

What we're going to do is look at an approach on how to address that, to see if we can get something more out of a passage or text.

Many times I've found, not all the time, but more times than not, I've found that when I've read passages that just made no sense to me, that if I took the time and studied the details or the things that I didn't think were important it comes into focus and it makes sense.

God is perfect, He is holy, and He loves us.

So anytime I read something that makes me think that that might not be true, I'm the problem.

And so I believe that if we are aggressive in trying to get understanding that we can find that.

So, we're going to talk about a couple of options.

Again, I want to start off before we get into this Bible study.

Always pray first for clarity, for understanding as you get into the Word.

And then here's a prayer method that I use.

And this is really actually more of my personal prayer devotional life.

It isn't necessarily, I don't hope to come off like this is my, when I'm about to study the Bible prayer method.

I don't have the, I'm about to get into the Word, now focus me there.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But I just want to prepare my heart, because I believe that if I ask God to clean me up and clear my mind, then he can give me the blessing.

So, and then I go through that by praising him first, then I go through confession, and then I ask prayers for others, and then I beg him to let me abide with him today, and then I thank him for what he's about to do.

So this is, I don't know, I kind of call it the trivia method.

I don't know if that's a good name or not.

You read a passage and identify trivial points, like towns, numbers, colors, dates, things like that.

And you say, okay, identify what, for further study on that.

So then what you do is read what happened just before the story and then compare it to different accounts if possible.

That's 1 of the blessings of the Gospels is many times 1 author, like say Matthew will write about it 1 way, and then Mark will say something different, and then it brings in more details and more understanding.

So you want to do a little more research on that.

Use resources like concordance, maps, speed of prophecy to find reasons why these points are included in the text.

I just want to take a little bit to talk to you about that.

There's a couple of things here that I'm going to just get out of.

And for instance, Ellen White Writings, ooh, why is it not there?

They're selling on ABC, I think, 1999, maybe 15.

And you have all the ratings on your computer.

And some of you are like, yeah, I know that.

But I was just saying, it's an awesome resource.

If you don't have that, you obviously can go to her website, the website, ellenwhite.com, and you can get that there.

Another website that maybe some of you have seen before is called blueletterbible.org.

You can type in a passage of scripture, like John 3.16.

And then what happens is you can, there are different little links here that will help you understand something.

For instance, if you click on C, That is the Hebrew and Greek.

So if you're wanting to find out what the words are, you can access that online.

So you can find out, like just before the meeting started, Nestor and I were talking.

I was like, I wonder what that word food is in the Hebrew.

And you can go to, I went to that website on my iPhone.

If you're a smartphone guy or lady, that's a free app for you iPhone people.

If you're an iPhone or an iPod or pad user, what's great about this website is you not only can read it online if it's on your phone, you can download whatever version you like and you don't need internet to access it.

You can actually download it onto your phone.

You also can any passage of scripture, you hit a button and it becomes audible.

So if you don't have the Bible in audio form, YouVersion, it's all free.

They have specific versions that you can access, but you literally just hit a button and then you're listening to the Bible on your phone.

So I'm not sure if they have this for Android users or anything like that, but they definitely have it on the website uversion.com.

This is something else that you can go on and you can type in your notes, and your notes will pop up as well.

And you can save them on the website so that no matter where you access it, on your computer, at a work computer, on your phones, those notes will stick with you.

And that's a really cool little, those are all free.

If I'm studying about a passage and I'm wanting to know about a city, or I want to know the distance, or how things are, I just Google it.

And then you can see all these amazing things that the pioneers had to go to the library to figure out.

Or they had these big scrolls or whatever, maps.

So once you want to get those things all set up, and again with a computer it's really easy to do, and then you go through and ask yourself some questions on how does it apply with you today.

So what I like to do is try to be as interactive as possible.

I like to go to a passage of scripture and then see how this all plays out.

If you have your Bibles, go to the book of Matthew chapter 15.

We're going to, if time permits, go through 2 specific stories in the Bible.

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Series

Experiencing the Word of God: How to Turn A Bible into Your Bible

Longitudes & Latitudes

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Parts

Morning Manna

47m

The Gift of Prophecy

39m

Longitudes & Latitudes

42m

Sound Doctrine