Unlock Eleven: How Do I Actually Apply the Bible?

Somehow we got the idea that following Jesus is just a Sunday morning thing, that God only cares about the spiritual. But what if God wants so much more? Welcome to Not Just Sunday, the podcast We quit part Time Christianity and ask what it looks like to give Jesus every square inch of our lives. We want to give Jesus every day of the week, not just Sunday, because Jesus is more than everything in the world.

And everything is brighter with him. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. And we want to invite you on a journey with us to become not just Sunday Christians.

Hey, we're going to hop into the actual episode in just a moment, but we want to let you know that we are going to have another Not Just Sunday book Club, which is my favorite thing about Not Just. Sunday Woo Hoo baby I. Don't know, maybe it's not yours. I love reading and so there's nothing better than just sitting around and discussing a book with people.

And you can never find people who want to read the same books you do and have the same, you know, available time to sit and discuss them. So a podcast is a great place to have a book club. It is, and so we chose the last book, Keith and I, but we want to give the vote back to the people. And so we're asking you to vote on our next book for our book club.

After we describe them, I want you to pause the podcast really quick and just click the link in the show notes to go vote. It'll literally take you 10 seconds. You just click what you want to vote on and click send. We want your votes in because we want you guys to choose.

Honestly, these books are all fantastic and bum. We put them all on this list because we'll probably never offer them again. And I would like to do a book club on every single one we're doing. But Keith, maybe you can start with our first book.

If you want a fuller description on all these books, go back and listen to the beginning of last week's episode. We don't want to repeat everything we said there, but the one book on this list that I would say is on my Mount Rushmore of books is East of Eden by John Steinbeck. It is phenomenal. It's kind of the sprawling family history over multiple generations.

It's set in the West, it's clear, it's easy to understand, and it is about two brothers who mimic Cain and Abel in Genesis chapter 4 and how they struggle against one another. I love Steinbeck and this is my favorite Steinbeck book. Our next one is a translation. It's a book, Loris by Eugene.

I can't even say this guy's last name. The translation's fabulous. You won't even realize that it was translated. This is one of my favorite books.

It's not in my Rushmore, but it's probably in my top 20. And it follows the story of a young boy who's the son of a Doctor Who goes through tragedy, hardship, heartache, and comes out on the other end, both wrestling with his own sinfulness, but also discovering an ability through his connection and empathy to other people to heal them. And so it's kind of magical realism, like it's set in I think 15th century Russia. So it feels very real.

But then there's these moments that happen where he's kind of this Christ like figure that's healing others. And people who read this book, they will tell you there's something about letting it wash over you. It was just a book that changed me and changed how I wanted to see people and how I wanted to live in the world. And so if that's your style, if you want a little more of like we did with Theo of Golden, I think this is a great option to vote on.

Next book is my Name is Asher Lev. It's a book about how a young boy who has a very talented artist grows up in New York City. I think it's in the 1940s, nineteen 50s to a very traditionally religious family and part of a very conservative synagogue. The question it wrestles with is how do you be faithful to God in the modern world?

It has a lot of biblical themes because obviously this family's Jewish, but even a lot of Christian themes. I loved it, got most of my family to read it and and had a great family discussion about it. It's a winner. Awesome.

The next one, Oh, I need to say this about my name is actual love. There is no audio book and you're capable of reading books without listening to them. I promise all. The other books have all.

The other books have audio books, and I realize that might influence people, so I just want people to know, OK. Next up is A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Obviously famous author, changed how people write. You can listen to the other episode to hear about that.

It is a romance, a love story wrapped up in a war story. And as you can imagine, when you're trying to figure out love, while there's bombs dropping, there's a lot of tension and a lot of excitement and a lot of tragedy and heartache that come with it. It follows a ambulance driver who's American, who's for some reason working for the Italian military during World War One, and he falls in love with a British nurse. And it tracks their story.

And it really wrestles with the question of does life have a meaning? Like, is there actually a purpose to all this? Which is a question anyone would ask in the middle of or well, I think when I say it wrestles with it, I think that's the right way to frame it. The answer seems to be yes sometimes, and the answer seems to be no, sometimes.

It is not necessarily a feel good book if that's what you're looking for. But I found it deeply moving. I mean, I spilled some tears at the end of that particular book. You.

Cry over every book I don't. Cry over every book. I cried a lot in the last one because it was sentimental. I read all these books except Laura's the one you mentioned earlier, and Farewell to Arms is a fantastic book.

The last one on the list though is James by Percival Everett and it is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This time those story is told through the eyes of Jim, who is the slave. You might remember in Huckleberry Finn, Jim is kind of a fool. He's this slow guy who can't do much.

He's constantly dependent on Huck. In the retelling in James, Jim is a very smart guy, very cunning guy who plays dumb because the white people of this day couldn't deal with an intelligent black man. That Audible book is phenomenal. The reader is amazing.

Amazing. All right, so there you have 5 books you got James, Farewell to Arms, Loris, East of Eden. And my name is Asher Lev. Go vote right now.

Pick one. Pause the episode please and click the link as you will forget. And then we will announce a winner, we'll read the book and we'll discuss it. We're continuing our series on how to read the Bible.

And today we're going to hit a topic that I think everybody assumes that the first thing you talk about whenever you're talking about reading the Bible, which is how do I apply it? Like, how do I make this come to life? And as you can tell, we've waited a long time to get to this point because good application requires a lot of steps that come before it. And of course it's because we need to know a lot of things to be able to apply the Bible appropriately.

But when I say that you could draw the conclusion that the goal of Bible reading is information, that's not right. The goal of Bible reading is transformation. And so if we stop short of a applying the Bible, we might learn a lot, but it won't do what it's supposed to do in our lives and our minds and our hearts. Yeah, I agree so much, Patrick.

I've gone through points in my life where I just wanted to know the facts of the Bible. That's great. I mean, it kind of starts there, but it can't stop there. It has to be about transforming my life, and that's so much harder.

I have to take that information and apply it, and if I don't, then it was all kind of a waste. On the night of April 14th, 1912, the Titanic crashed into the iceberg. And you know, that story is very familiar story. 1500 people died in movies about it, books written about it, people tried to raise it from the ocean.

And we kind of have heard that story so many times. My guess is that you just kind of assume that the Titanic, which was the world's most advanced ship at the time, set sail and just had really bad luck and unknowingly ran into this big iceberg that it couldn't see. That story is largely untrue. That boat did not crash because it unknowingly ran into an iceberg.

That boat crashed because it did not apply the information it had. That boat knew, the captain knew, and the crew knew that there was an iceberg ahead of it. But they didn't change course. They didn't slow down, they didn't do anything differently.

The Titanic crew had received 7 warnings that night, 7 warnings that there were dangerous conditions ahead. Right before, like 45 minutes before it crashed into the iceberg, there was another steamer called the Californian that had been hemmed in by ice itself, and it was sending messages to the Titanic saying, look, this is incredibly dangerous, be careful right in front of you, there's massive problems. But the guy who received these wireless messages, it was kind of like a wireless Telegraph. His name was Jack Phillips and he was manning the Telegraph that night and he was so, so busy trying to send passengers on the Titanic their message to the homeland, like to their family, to their friends.

Hey, we're having fun. This is awesome that he told the Californian. Shut up, I'm busy. And he didn't take that warning to the bridge.

45 minutes later, they spotted the iceberg, but it was too late to turn around by the time they saw it. And they crashed again. 1500 people lost their lives. Now, we're kind of sympathetic to the idea that maybe a captain unknowingly runs into an iceberg.

We get that. But what if they knew it? What if they had all the information but they just didn't apply it? I think, I think, I think that that is my story more than I I want it to be.

I think I'm a person who knows more than I apply. I think if I stop knowing any more about the Bible than I do right now, I would have a lot of years of just applying what I already know. My problem most of the time isn't that I don't know what to do. My problem is I know what to do and I don't do it.

James 122 says do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. I also like a different translation, the NLT. It says, but don't just listen to God's Word.

You must do what it says, otherwise you're only fooling yourself. What I love about this passage is that it acknowledges the fact that even biblical authors knew we have this temptation to read God's Word and to maybe glean information from it, but not to apply it to our lives, not to allow it to change our lives. And that is the goal of reading the Bible. It's not just information, it's transformation.

The Bible itself says that. I mean, in Second Timothy 3, it says all scriptures God breathe and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. So God's word wasn't given to us so that we could know information, but so that it would change us. And that's one of the reasons I find what is professor taught me to do so valuable.

And that is just to pray before I read the Bible to pray that God would open his word, like open the Bible so that I could see the truth in it, but then also pray that my heart would be open to receive that truth. Because if I read the Bible with a hard heart, then all the truth just kind of bounces off. I have to be open and say, God, I'm open to you rebuking me. Again.

That's what Second Timothy 3 says. I'm open to you correcting me, God. I need to be trained in righteousness. And I think that's because obedience is the goal of our salvation.

Now, I want to be careful here. I'm not saying that we obey so that we will be saved. I'm saying God rescues us so that we will be obedient. In fact, in Romans 1, Paul's talking about how God has given him the message of the gospel to give to the Gentiles.

But he explains why. He says he's giving me apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name's sake. In other words, if we follow Jesus, that should change our lives. That should change who we are and not just that it demonstrates that we're saved.

In first John, the apostle John says this is how we know we are in him. Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did. In other words, if you're walking with Jesus, you're not going to be perfect, but you should have some transformation happening in your life. I think there's one more reason, which is that obedience is part of how we come to know who God is.

Jesus said whoever has my commands and keeps them is one with him who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them. And this makes a lot of sense. If you want to be transformed by the Bible, you have to have God transform you.

And if God's transforming you, then you're going to get to know God. But if you're refusing to be transformed, that means you're going to refuse to be obedient. And as a result, you won't experience him. You won't see him.

And so the big picture of the Bible is not that we earn our salvation by obedience, but that obedience really matters if we want to know who God is, if we want to demonstrate that we're saved, and if we want to live up to the calling that God's given us through the gift of Christ. So let's just stay on that for one more second. Jesus says that he shows himself to the ones who to his will, the one who obeys him, he shows himself. So if I want to see Jesus, if I want to have a close relationship with Jesus, if I want to understand who Jesus is and experience his peace and his joy and his goodness, then I've got to learn to obey him.

Imagine that you read in the scriptures that we should forgive someone. OK, I got it. I should forgive someone. Now imagine forgiving someone who hurt you and letting go of the anger against them and not beating them up over it and not holding it against them and not bringing it up when they screw up, bringing up past sins that have hurt you, but just laying down that weapon and saying, God, I'm releasing this.

I entrust them to you. I'm not going to use their wrong against me against them anymore. Now you're going to know God in a whole different way from having forgiven someone than just read about forgiveness. There's something about forgiving someone that's going to help you draw closer to Jesus who forgives those who sinned against him.

So it's not just that the gospel is saving you from something like from sin, from the penalty of sin, and from hell. It's that the gospel is also saving you for something or a life with Christ, for the abundant life, the good life, the obedient life. So I think if we don't apply the Scriptures, we just kind of missed the whole point of why God gave us the Scriptures. He wants us to follow Him, to hear His voice and follow Him into the good life.

So let's talk about how we apply, like just practical strategies. And I think the best place to start is with some common mistakes. And I think I've made every single mistake that we'll talk about today, if I'm being totally honest. And the first mistake is this, it's selective application.

So this is when you're like reading the Bible and you decide you're going to apply the parts that you like and that, you know, you kind of already doing, but you're just going to ignore the parts that are uncomfortable. You know, So my favorite example, and I think this is true of most people in the West, is Jesus talks a lot about money and wealth and possessions. And he warns a lot about having a lot of money and he warns a lot about having a lot of possessions and what I can do to your heart. I've just noticed that we Americans, we kind of like to skip past those verses.

It's selective application. I think another thing that's really tempting is to make descriptive passages prescriptive. So for example, there's a story of a guy named Gideon who's trying to figure out what God wants him to do. And so he comes up with this crazy plan.

He's going to lay a fleece outside. He says, God, if you want me to do this, then when I wake up in the morning, put dew on the fleece and he wakes up, there's dew on the fleece. And then he does the next. This time though, I'm going to put out the fleece, but put no dew on the fleece.

And he comes back out the next morning. There's no dew on the fleece. Well, some people have taken as like, oh, we should layout fleeces for God, not literal fleeces, but like, we should ask God for very clear signs. Well, the irony is that in the passage, this shows Gideon's weakness.

Like he comes across looking really foolish. It's descriptive. It's describing what he did, but it's not prescriptive. Yeah, I think that's really important.

What is is not necessarily what ought to be. So we see people in the Bible doing all kinds of things that we should not follow because the Bible isn't commending their behavior to us. I mean, we see David being married to multiple women. That doesn't mean I should go do that, right?

But you'll find people who will try to say, oh, see, this is what you're supposed to do. Yes for sure, because they just take this everything in the Bible is something we should emulate. But again, is this describe what happened or does it prescribe how I should live? So just another example in that is in Acts chapter 4 in the early church they sell their possessions and share it and then give to people who have need.

Does that mean that is an economic model that all churches and all Christians must follow? No, not at all. The idea there is that we should be generous. Yes, we can take that from it, but it describes what happened in the 1st century.

It doesn't prescribe that for every other Christian moving forward. Or take something like Jesus washing the disciples feet. He washed the disciples feet. Does that mean when I go to church that we should all do foot washings in church as a normal part of the service?

No, it doesn't literally mean I need to wash people's feet. What it means is I need to take the lowest servant position and be willing to do anything to serve other people. So if you want to apply the Bible correctly, you have to distinguish between the descriptive and the prescriptive. Here's another big thing that we do and we've already mentioned this in a previous conversation, so I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I think it applies here and just just be cognizant of it that the goal isn't to be like all the characters we see in the Bible because like we've said before, our tendency is to take the best of each person.

Like, you know, let's say the humility of Mary wanting to sit at Jesus feet and listen and the faith of Peter walking on water and the courage of David fighting the giant. And then we go, gosh, I can't be all those things right, because they weren't all those things. There's no super Christian out there that can do all those things all the time, and instead we're not trying to be like them. We're trying to learn from them, and we're trying to put our hope and faith in Jesus and ask Him to make us into the people that He wants us to be.

So be wary of turning application into moralism to just more things on your list that you've got to do. The goal of the Bible is to lead you into a relationship with Jesus. I think another major temptation application is reading passages in isolation. So this might be reading a single verse or might be reading in a little section, but ignoring what's around it because it turns out what's around a verse really matters if you're going to understand what it means.

Probably my favorite example of this is Matthew 1819, which says where two or three are gathered, I am there. People love using this. In fact, I was just listening to something where someone said, what's the church and they quoted this verse said where two or three are gathered, Jesus is there. That's what the church is.

I remember had a buddy in college who said he wouldn't go to church. He's like, but I'll go on my motor boat with my friends because where two or three are gathered. Seriously. Now here's the problem, Jesus is talking about church discipline.

So in the passage, it's what do you do when someone sins against you? And Jesus is like, well first you go straight to that person that they don't repent. Then you bring another person with you and the three of you get together and he says where two or three are gathered, I'm there. In other words, I'm going to help you guys deal with sin inside the church.

So it's not saying that a church is 3 people, nor is it saying that every time you get together with three people, Jesus is there with you. It's saying, hey, when you're in these really hard situations of church discipline and people sinning, I'm with you. It's going to be OK because those are really hard situations. One more, and this has come up in a couple other the conversations we've had in this series about reading your Bible, but it's that we shouldn't read the Bible as individuals, but we need to remember that we're part of the community.

You might remember back in the episode where you kind of walked through how the ancient world and the 1st century culture was different than ours. And we said that when they heard the Scriptures, they would be at church because they didn't have their own Bibles. They couldn't read, they didn't have their own books. They couldn't afford that.

Instead, they would hear it as a community and because they're all sitting together, they would automatically read it in the context of we need each other to do this. But because we have our own Bible at home or on your phone and you're reading it alone, it's easy to read it only as an individual. So you come up to a verse like first Peter 29 and the apostle Peter writes, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness and into his wonderful light. And if you read that alone, by yourself, you might go I'm a chosen person.

I'm a priest. I'm the chosen one. I'm. God's special possession.

So first of all, you're kind of feeding your ego a little bit there, like church ladies self esteem kind of thing, right? But then you go and I should declare God's praises. This is about me talking to my neighbor about Jesus. But that's not what this verse is saying at all.

It's looking at the church, the whole body of Christ, all the believers together and saying you are the people that God has chosen. He's building you into a new temple. You are his. Priest here, like the priesthood of every believer, you're representing God and you together as a body are God's signing, God's witness to watching world.

This is kind of where our English language doesn't do us right, because we have this word you and you can mean singular or you can mean plural. Like y'all. Yeah, like the South, right? I'm not southern, but we've all heard y'all and that means you, but everybody we're.

Mean about you, so we say use guys or. I think that's Wisconsin anyway. So remember, don't only read the Bible of the individual, but remember that it was written to communities. OK, so let's talk about how to apply.

So we said, here's the things to avoid. How do we actually do it? And there's a great paradigm for application. I've been using this for probably 10 or 15 years now.

I've given it to so many people. I've had some people say like this is so memorable and it's helped me apply the Bible and they love it. And so it's really simple. It's 4 words, head, heart, hands together, head, heart, hands together.

We're going to walk through each one. But each one of these is kind of like a lens or a grid through which you can read the Bible and then figure out how to apply it. And the first one, of course, is head. So Romans 12/2 says do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Then you'll be able to test and approve what's God's will, His good, pleasing, and perfect will. So when we talk about the head, when we're thinking about application, we're just asking how is this passage changing how I think? Like maybe it's changing how I think about God, or maybe it's shaping how I think about his character or his purpose. Head is just all about, hey, what's the information?

On some level I need to hear from this passage to understand what God is doing or how God is at work. The head is also understanding, hey, where am I at in this story? You know, where do I need help? Where do I need rescue?

Head is all about, I think, doctrine, theology, having right ideas about God, having right ideas about yourself. That might not feel like application always knowing the right things, but God does care what you believe, believe, and so it's always a good application to say, hey, how does this change how I think? Yeah, sometimes it's just smart to say, does this passage give me something I need to believe? And we just are self focused people.

And so our first instinct is always to look and say, what does this say to me or about me? But like you said, I think we're better off if we just start with the question of what do I learn about God? What do I learn about his plan? What do I learn about his character, his grace?

And the order here is really important because like Romans 12 said, we need our mind renewed on the Scripture. So it starts with the head, but then it moves to heart. The heart in the Bible is where our loves are, our affections. It's kind of the Control Center of a person's life.

In Proverbs 4, it says to guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. Your whole life is lived from your heart. Jesus says that our words reflect what's going on in our heart. So when you read a passage, you just say, is there something that should encourage my heart or convict my heart?

Is there something here that my heart should love or that my heart should avoid? How does this passage stir my affections for God? Or how does this passage shape what I love and want and value in life? Head, then heart and then hands.

Because hands are the practical things. We get really specific and we start saying, OK, what does this call me to do? And the more specific you can be here, the better. If you're vague, then I'm afraid you never actually do vague things.

So let's say forgiveness. I need to forgive Joe for hurting me in this way. It's not just forgive people, but who do I need to forgive? Or let's say I'm convicted about gossip.

I need to identify, hey, when I'm around this group of friends, I tend to gossip about this person and I need to really be aware of that. I'm not saying you can always be that specific, but the more specific you can be in a particular situation, the better. What is this call me to do? Does it call me to serve?

Well, then who can I serve this week? I can serve the person in my office by asking them if they need help on a particular project that they're working on. I can serve the people in my family or my roommate by mowing a yard or doing the dishes. What does this passage call me to do?

That's the hands question. Head, then heart, then hands. If you skip the heart, then you get moralism. Yeah, you get, dude.

You just get, I'm just going to go do this and grid it out. Head to hands. Bad move. Head transforms your heart.

That leads to hands. Hey, we'll get back to the episode in just a second, but I have a secret to tell you. The key to having a lasting Bible reading habit is not having more time in your day or just trying harder. It's having a better starting point and honestly, the one reason we love to talk about our sister podcast 10 Minute Bible Talks is because it's a great place to start At 10 Minute Bible Talks.

We combine a simple daily Bible reading plan with a short, practical podcast that helps you to understand what you're reading and the time it takes to get to work. So if you're really enjoying this unlocking the Bible series and it's helping you think about how to re engage God's word, then I think 10 Minute Bible Talks would be a great next step for actually putting these these principles into practice. You can find 10 minute Bible talks in our show notes or just search for it on your favorite podcast platform. And the last step is together.

And that's because Christianity is a group project. One of the challenges is that as modern readers, we tend to read the Bible by ourselves. Like, I'm in my, you know, living room reading this book. In the ancient world, people always read the Bible together.

And so that meant they kind of intuitively understood, hey, this isn't just telling me, for example, that I need to fight against gossip if I'm sitting in a community full of people that are gossiping. It's telling us all together we need to resist this. And so I often ask myself the question when I'm reading, hey, is there something about this passage that's calling me to change or challenge my community? Is there something in this passage that's telling me how I should be living alongside other people?

And sometimes that looks like, OK, I have to walk out of this and go talk to a friend and say, hey, I think we should be doing this differently. Or go to a friend and encourage them to say, hey, this thing that we're doing right now, this is going really well. But it's just realizing that some of these applications you can't do by yourself. You have to do it with other people.

If nothing else, they need to be praying for you, holding you accountable, right? I mean, the Christian life is a community project. What if we just went through a passage or two and just tried to unpack it and see if we could get to the right application by following this paradigm? Head, heart, hands together.

That sounds good. Let's do Mark for the passage where Jesus is calming the storm, because I think this is one that often or could be easily misinterpreted. Well, it's a well known story. So the idea is that you would kind of hopefully may be familiar with this story.

It's the story about how Jesus tells the disciples are going to go to the other side of the lake and he gets in this boat and a storm comes. They're all scared because waves are coming in. Jesus asleep, they go, wake him up. Teacher, don't you care if we drown?

He gets up. You'd have little faith. He speaks and calms the storm and they go, wow, they're amazed at who this is and they're terrified. Then it's over.

So how would you unpack that? I think the first question we'll start with the head is just asking, what does this teach me about who Jesus is? Well, maybe primarily #1 is the exact same lesson that the disciples learned. They kind of look at you and they're like, well, who is this that can calm the seas and the wind?

In other words, this is telling me that Jesus is something more than a human. Jesus is God. Jesus can command the weather. That's something that God alone does.

And so the first thing I need to know in my head is Jesus is who he says he is. He can control the winds and the waves. Yeah. In fact, in the Old Testament in Psalm 89.9 and Psalm 107, it's says that God controls the wind and the wave.

So Jesus has done this specific thing with the goal of helping the disciples see that He is God's Messiah. He is the promised one. And they asked the question at the end, who is this that even the wind and waves obey him? And that's our clue as a reader.

That's the question that we should be. We're supposed to ask and then answer the question. I mean, as we're talking, I think the other thing that I would learn in this is Jesus has authority. Like he's in control of reality.

He wakes up and says, yeah, OK, stop it wind, stop it waves. If you can do that with wind and waves, like what's outside of his control. So I think that's another thing is just to realize this is a passage that shows me the truth that God is sovereign. And the story starts with Jesus saying, let's go to the other side of the lake.

And that's what leads them to go down and get in the boat. And so if you were a disciple and you're out there in the middle of the storm, you should have remembered, hey, Jesus said we're going to the other side, so we're going to go to the other side. Now, there might be a difficulty between getting from one side to the other, but he said we're going to the other side. So I think we could say Jesus keeps his promises like God keeps his promises to us.

So whatever promises that he's made to us, we can be sure that he will see them through. So when we start with the head, we learn that Jesus is God. He is the one who controls the wind in the waves. He has authority over all things in this world.

He is a promise keeping God. That's all before we ever ask the question, where am I in the story? Because remember, we start with God first, then move to us, but then we move to ourselves. We go, where am I in this story?

Well, I don't think I'm probably the one that should be calming the wind in the waves, right? Like that's probably not me. I'm the dude freaking out of the boat. Right, I'm the one.

Who you ever been in the storm on a boat? It's not fun. I'm trust me, I'm the dude freaking out on the boat. We're the one in the story that needs to be rescued, right?

And we're the one that's helpless, scared, fearful, worried, and needs God's help. So I would put all those in the head now, head, heart, hands. Sometimes they overlap. Yeah, they blend.

So, you know, give yourself some grace. But that's what all what I would put in the head. Let's move to the heart. So again, this is where we're asking the question, how does this passage shape my loves, my desires, my motivations, what I want?

Or maybe what I shouldn't love, what I shouldn't desire. And in some ways, this one is just super easy because it's obvious what this supposed to do in my heart is make me be in awe of Jesus. It's supposed to make me love him because he's compassionate. Like his disciples are terrified and he actually shows up and he provides for them and reminds me like, Oh my gosh, I'm in all these crazy situations where I fear God won't show up to provide for me.

But in my heart, I should have to remember, no, I love a God who does show up in the storms. Well, because they say to him and they wake him up. Don't you care if we drown? And So what they're showing is that they doubt Jesus, his compassion, his goodness.

They kind of think he might be able to do something to save him. That's why they wake him up. But their primary emotion is Jesus didn't care about me. And man, we get in that situation, something bad happens to us, and we say he didn't care about us.

But what I need is a heart to trust that God loves me. OK, so we start with head, then we move to our heart, and then the next thing we talk about is our hands. This is the actual application. Like, hey, what should I do?

And again, this one's going to start feeling really obvious. That's because you've done the work that we've already done. And I think the first thing is when I'm in situations that feel scary, out of control and frightening, I have to turn to God, not merely because he can solve the problem, but because he is good. And if I want to get real specific, it might just be stopping and saying, hey, where am I anxious right now?

Where am I afraid right now? Where do I think things are going off the rails right now? And then I can reflect and say, OK, am I actually trusting God with those things? Or am I bailing water and just trusting myself and getting angry?

Like, where are you God? And if I'm not trusting God, the best time would be that I'm not praying. So maybe the applications, I just need to take these things in prayer before God and say, hey, God, I'm actually really scared right now. Could you please provide for me?

I can imagine saying to myself, I need to repent of doubting God's compassion for me here. God sent his own Son to die for me to meet every need, my deepest needs, and I doubt his goodness and I doubt he cares about me. And I just might need to say, God, I repent of that sin, a sin of unbelief. There's a lot of different ways this hands thing can go depending on what you've been experiencing.

It might just be worship. Like who is this? They were amazed at his power. And maybe I just need to take a moment and be amazed at the God who spoke the world into creation.

I just need to be amazed at the God who is so beautiful and creative and all that he made and his authority over all things. And I just need to say, Lord, I praise you. You are far better than anything that I can imagine or desire. And then you get 2 together.

The last one, it wasn't just addressed to me, it was addressed to Christians, plural. And Mark was writing his gospel to Rome, to the Christians in Rome, and they were experiencing a lot of persecution. And So what they needed was the confidence that God was in the boat with them. Is there something your church is going through or your small group is going through or your friend group is going through and you just guys need to be reminded that you're not alone.

God is in the boat with you. Don't skip this together part. And I think you can get the other side too, which is sometimes as a group, we have to repent. Like sometimes churches start freaking out.

They're freaking about what's happening in the nation. They're terrified of what's happening in their community. And this passage might come along and tell that church, hey, we need to repent and remember that we worship a sovereign God. He told us to go across the lake.

He never said it was going to be easy, but he told us to go across the lake. And we trust that he's going to be good to us. So we need to both repent and trust as a community. By the way, the only way you're going to do the together stuff, it's just a sidebar, is that you actually have to be in community.

I know it sounds obvious, but like it's just really true. We. Have to read the scriptures in community like do Bible study in community, talk about in community. Yeah, be in a small group or a Bible study where you're doing this.

But even just going to worship, like one thing that happens in worship when everybody's collectively confessing with one another is we're doing the together thing. We're supposed to be a community of confession. And if you're not doing it, you're not actually obeying the Bible. Yeah, I guess I said you have to be reading the Bible together because I think a lot of Christians have Christian friends, but they don't do Christian things with their friends, you know, explicitly Christian things.

They might be a dinner club, which is awesome. Have dinner and eat your food to the glory of God. Great. I love it.

Watch sports together, do whatever you do, but you need to have something where you're praying together, you're talking about your faith, you're sharing things, you're reading the Bible. That's how you learn to apply it, not just individualistically, but corporately as a group. You hopefully have a paradigm here of how to apply, and then you can take that paradigm and apply it to a lot of different passages if you want to just do one now on your own. That I think is easy but good practice.

Think about Ephesians 432 there it says be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as God in Christ forgave you and just run that head. What do I learn heart. How is my heart stirred hands. How do I apply this together?

How do I need other Christians of my life to do it. This is a paradigm that will take the Bible from being information and lead it to be transformation in your life that you'll see in a year, five years, 10 years that you've really grown if you just just practice this in your Bible reading. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you want to quit Part Time Christianity, your journey doesn't need to stop here.

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