Must Bible Reading Always End with Application?
00:00:00.000 | We have about a half dozen emails from listeners asking a very similar question,
00:00:08.480 | and it's essentially this. Is it okay to come away from Bible reading without a
00:00:12.400 | life principle or a specific point of application? Or another way to ask it,
00:00:16.360 | Pastor John, is must we come away from our Bible reading with an application
00:00:19.920 | principle every single time? Yeah, I feel pretty strongly about this. The answer is
00:00:24.800 | no. And here's why I feel strongly about it. I would say 95%, maybe 99% of my life,
00:00:36.520 | and I think everybody's life, is lived without immediate reflection upon a life
00:00:44.840 | principle, but rather we just act. If you think about your day, there are maybe, you
00:00:52.440 | know, a hundred big decisions you make in a day, and by big I just mean conscious,
00:00:57.200 | but 95% of your time, like right now, I'm just talking to you. I'm just choosing
00:01:04.600 | words. I'm not, before every word I'm not stopping to say, "Now what principle is
00:01:08.240 | going to govern this word? And what principle is going to govern this sentence?"
00:01:10.880 | It's just kind of tumbling out of me right now. Well, that's scary, right? Where
00:01:15.000 | did they come from? Which means most of our lives are lived spontaneously. Most
00:01:21.080 | of our lives are not lived after 10 seconds of reflection on a biblical
00:01:26.120 | principle. So where do they come from? They come from a kind of person, and that
00:01:31.760 | raises the question of, "Well, how do you become a kind of person so that you're a
00:01:37.360 | tree that bears spontaneous good fruit instead of a bad tree that bears
00:01:41.840 | spontaneously bad fruit?" And the answer is, you soak in the Scriptures and you
00:01:48.000 | let your sight of Jesus and your taste of Jesus and his ways in the Bible affect
00:01:56.800 | your soul, shape your soul. Your soul marinates in the sauces of grace
00:02:03.200 | until the soul is made soft and tender and supple and sensitive to the
00:02:09.320 | leadings of the Holy Spirit, so that in a kind of spontaneous way, it responds.
00:02:15.240 | Jesus said, "We'll be called to account for every idle word that we speak." Now, idle
00:02:21.280 | words are words that are spoken before you have a chance to think on any
00:02:25.320 | biblical principle that you've gotten from your text in the morning. So people
00:02:30.400 | who are bent on trying to get three principles or three points or something
00:02:35.680 | and then try to keep that list and consciously follow them during the day, I
00:02:39.640 | just think they're doing something impossible that we were never, never
00:02:43.400 | designed to do. And I would put it like this, a godly life is lived out of an
00:02:52.280 | astonished heart, a heart that's just astonished at grace, you know, amazing
00:02:57.960 | grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, so that we go to the
00:03:02.500 | Bible to be astonished. We go to the Bible to be amazed at God and amazed at
00:03:07.340 | Christ and amazed at the cross and amazed at grace and amazed at the
00:03:11.080 | gospel, and when we're stunned and amazed and humbled, we walk out of our study or
00:03:17.640 | out of our chair, wherever we're having devotions, and there's a spirit and a
00:03:22.640 | flavor about us that makes us a better person at the kitchen table and when we
00:03:27.720 | go to work. And all that, Tony, just to say, I'm not opposed to principles. Good
00:03:32.880 | night. I write books, which I'm trying to give things, and so they
00:03:38.680 | are helpful to meditate on. But that's the key. Meditating on truth shapes the
00:03:45.440 | soul. We become what we behold, it says in 2 Corinthians 3:18. So my goal in
00:03:52.240 | reading the Bible is mainly become a kind of person, don't amass a long list.
00:03:58.480 | Pastor John, do you think it's appropriate to talk about the
00:04:01.180 | subconscious here in this discussion? Is it right to say that we live out the
00:04:04.800 | Christian life through an informed, spirit-filled subconscious? Yes. That's
00:04:10.120 | basically what I was trying to say, that most of our life, I think, is lived from
00:04:16.840 | resources that are not presently reflected on in our mind. Our words
00:04:23.200 | are coming from inside. You know, what goes into the mouth, it defiles,
00:04:30.120 | and what comes out of the mouth, it defiles, because it's coming from a certain
00:04:33.960 | kind of heart, and most of that heart is unconscious or subconscious, and that is
00:04:39.360 | shaped day by day by what we're taking in. You know, it's shaped by what we do
00:04:44.240 | with our eyes on the computer, and it's especially shaped by what we do with our
00:04:49.280 | Bibles and our prayer. Whenever I pray, I'm pleading with God, "Get down deeper
00:04:55.800 | than I can get right now. Go deeper. Take your scalpel, and don't just deal with
00:05:01.480 | the sins I'm aware of. Good night. Please, go be a surgeon. Surgeons put you to
00:05:07.120 | sleep, and they go in there where you don't even know you have stuff. They're
00:05:12.400 | working with this little gizmo in your belly, and you didn't even know it was there.
00:05:16.160 | That's what God has to do with us. So yeah, I totally think the subconscious is
00:05:22.200 | being worked on by the Holy Spirit all the time. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you
00:05:26.560 | for listening to this podcast. Send your questions to us via email at
00:05:29.800 | pastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please include your first name and your hometown.
00:05:33.160 | You can find thousands of other free resources from John Piper online at
00:05:36.200 | desiringgod.org. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
00:05:41.400 | [BLANK_AUDIO]