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Leaving behind religious obligation to find a more authentic expression of Christ in us. This is the Un Sunday Show.

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Hi, my name is Mike. This is the Young Sunday Show. I want to welcome you to my channel. I'm glad you're here. That happened to me. I learned how to study the Bible while missing the point. Let me fill in the blanks for you. Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I enrolled in a Moody Bible Institute course on the book of Galatians. The name of the course was Bible Study Methods. And so I got the commentary on Galatians that they used for the course. I got a workbook with some assignment sheets and envelopes and stuff I had to return, you know, when I did my assignments. There was no internet then, or at least it wasn't public. So everything was done through snail mail. So I would read the assignment in the uh in the notebook that they sent me, and then I would read it in the commentary and you know, read a little bit in Galatians. You spent most of the time in that commentary in the workbook. You spent more time there than you did in the Bible, in the book of Galatians. But it was a Bible study methods course, and it covered what they called 10 methods of Bible study. So there was the historical method, you know, there in the book of early chapters of the book of Galatians, you have some historical context that you can relate back to Acts, you know, and see what was going on and kind of fill in some of the blanks. There was the historical method, um, there was the analytical method, and I forget exactly what was involved in the analytical method of uh Bible study. There was the inductive method, there was the allegorical method, you know, and in chapter four when Paul is talking about Mount Sinai and Jerusalem, and he's doing the analogy there, and so they would they would use that. I don't remember what all the methods were, but there were 10 of them. I do remember that. And the the entire course was learning how to use these different methods to interpret scripture, to interpret what the Bible said. And then the idea again from there was you take these methods and you can apply them anywhere in the Bible, depending on what you're reading or what you're looking at. But in doing that, in talking about Bible study methods and in trying to develop these different methods of Bible interpretation, they miss the point. And I miss the point. The point in Galatians has nothing to do with how to study the Bible. There weren't any. It didn't exist. The entire purpose of the book of Galatians overall is to tell these Gentile believers that the law of Moses was obsolete and that they didn't need the law to be justified, that no one is justified by works of the law, and that the law has historically passed. At the time that Paul wrote Galatians in Galatians 3, he tells those Gentile believers that he's writing to that the law isn't even around anymore. It was only a place until Christ came. And when Christ came it passed away. So that's the message of Galatians. And when I was a young believer back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I was eating up this other stuff. I have an analytical mind. I don't know if you've caught on to that by now, but I do think somewhat analytically. And so some of this stuff that was in this book or in this uh commentary that we were going through, I really ate it up at the time. I jumped on it. I thought, yes, this is it. This is the answer. This is what I this is what I need to be about doing. In fact, I turned around and taught some of that to other people. I was an elder in a church at the time, and so I had some influence. But not once, not once in that course, or not once in the time that I was going through that course, even the people around me, the you know, the pastors around me and stuff, nobody mentioned the new covenant. And yet that's the entire point of the book of Galatians, is that if another gospel is is proclaimed or preached to someone that wasn't the gospel Paul brought, let him be anathema, let him be accursed. That's where Paul drew the line. He drew the line in the sand right there on the purity of the gospel, and he was willing to fight for that. But that wasn't even brought up in this course. And so I spent time studying and I missed the point completely. But I didn't know I had missed the point until it came to my attention years later. But that's the point of not only the book of Galatians, but that's the that's the point of the entire Bible is Jesus. As we see the saga unfold in scripture, we go from uh pre-old covenant where Abraham was justified by faith, and then we go to the old covenant where supposedly you're justified by works or justified by what you do, but we know that that isn't true. And that old covenant and that law of Moses was only given to those old covenant Jews. Gentiles never had that law. But then we roll into the new covenant, which started when Jesus died on the cross, and everything changed in that new covenant. The law of Moses passed away, Ephesians 2 and Colossians 2. Everything changed. All of a sudden, the economy was one of grace. It wasn't one of law, it wasn't one of works, it was an economy of grace, and it went to everybody, Jew and Gentile. Well, in my little study of the book of Galatians, in this in this uh course that I got from Moody Bible Institute, none of that was mentioned. It wasn't even alluded to. I left that course not knowing that I had missed the point of not only the book of Galatians, but of the storyline of the entire Bible. I missed it. And I didn't know I'd missed it. That's what's going on in so many churches today. That's how leaders are trained. That's how I was trained. When I was in Bible college, I don't remember anybody mentioning the New Covenant. I don't remember that conversation ever happening. It wasn't important. What was important was stuff like Bible study methods, you know, um how to date a certain book of the Bible or you know, whatever. How to preach, you know, teaching you how to get up and mount a pulpit and you know, get the actions down and uh be able to grab people's attention and keep their attention and say stuff passionately. There was no mention of the new covenant that I can remember. There was really no emphasis on the gospel. The gospel was thought to be the milk. Um the babes in Christ need the gospel. But then as you grow, it was supposedly thought, at least it it was uh it was caught by me, maybe it wasn't overtly taught, but it was caught by me that the whole object is to outgrow your need for that. Yeah, the gospel is true, true, and we're thankful for it, but let's file that under G for gospel, and let's move on to the to the deep things of God. And if you're listening to the audio, I'm using air quotes when I say deep things of God. And it's thought that the gospel is kind of the milk of the word is is what was used. And we need to move past that, those elementary things, we need to move past those, and we need to get into the meat of the gospel. The meat of the word is what we call it. And this Galatians study is one example of that. I was getting the meat of the word, or at least that's what I was told. I was told, yeah, this is deep stuff. Man, you need to teach this, and I and I believed that. I believed that was true, but man, nothing nothing was further from the truth. I missed the point. I studied hard, I studied long, I did a lot of sweating over this, I I sent in my assignments, I got an A, and I finished the course, but I missed the point. The point is there's a difference between old covenant and new covenant, and that's the theme of the Bible. Everything in the Bible isn't written to us, everything in the Bible isn't for us, it isn't intended to be. We can glean things, sure, we can always glean things from Scripture. Absolutely. But we have to keep it in context. And the big context is old covenant, new covenant, and that's extremely important. I don't care about the allegorical method, I don't care about the historical method, I don't care about the analytical method, and whatever the other seven methods were. I don't care. That's irrelevant. What matters is Jesus Christ and Him crucified. That's all that matters. And that was the beginning of the New Covenant. There's the study of the gospel for you. Let's put the gospel back where it belongs in the nest of the new covenant, and let's let it simmer there, let's let it cook there because that's where it's at home. When we understand the new covenant and we start to see the gospel in light of the new covenant, everything changes. It's not about Bible study methods, it's not about how I approach Scripture in terms of am I using the right method in this particular passage? That's not the point. That's missing the point. The point is there is a new covenant that is a covenant, a new covenant of grace apart from works, where we are justified by by faith apart from works, apart from anything we do, where we are made righteous by faith, apart from any effort, apart from any works or failure to do any works. We are justified by faith alone. That's the new covenant message of the gospel of grace. Hey, thanks for watching. If you're listening, thanks for listening. I appreciate you being here. Again, my name is Mike. This is the Un Sunday show. I'm glad you're here. And thanks for watching, and thanks for listening. Until next time, y'all take care.

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