ARME 1: Soquel, CA - Aug 2009

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

ARME Bible Camp

Doug Batchelor

Jesus Throughout the Bible

I am going to plug in my computer, but I can talk to you while I'm doing it.

And I'm going to be sharing some stuff with you.

I'm going to show you how I study my Bible.

I'll tell you an amazing fact while we're doing this.

There was once a time when they invented a machine that would print Bibles.

You know, the first printing press was Johann Gutenberg, And the first book they printed on a printing press was a Bible.

And up until that point, all Bibles were written by people, man's hands, scribes.

When the first Bible came off a printing press, they said, how can anyone have God speak to them through a Bible printed by a machine?

Really, there was a lot of conventional wisdom that As long as a man is writing out these things, there's a soul in it.

But if it's printed by a machine, how can God use it?

And there are people who think, How can God, how can you study your Bible through a computer?

Well, the Word of God is the Word of God.

You know, whether those words are pointed, pointed, or formed by little pixelated dots on a page, or whether they're pixels on a computer screen, the Word of God spoken, the Word of God written, the Word of God digitally, it's still the Word of God.

And so I hope you will not be disillusioned when I tell you that I almost never study my Bible, Bible.

99% of my real study is done in the morning or at night on a computer.

And I'll tell you how much this has helped me.

Of course, when I first became a Christian, I read a Bible in a cave and that's all I had.

And gradually I was able to get a collection of books, but When you live in a cave, you don't have a great library.

I had Stephen Haskell's book on Daniel, and Uriah Smith's book on Daniel and the Revelation, number of spirit of prophecy books.

Eventually, when I moved to Kovalo, I got a concordance or 2.

And when I wanted to study a subject, I don't know if any of you remember Young's Analytical Concordance, but it's a big heavy book.

And I'd have to look through reams and reams of microscopic print to find a word, and then you'd flip through the Bible and you'd find that verse.

Now with Bible software, what used to take me 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour to discover, I find in seconds.

And So I just wanted to share with you that I have been able to really make people think that I'm pretty smart because of a computer.

When I do the Bible Answer Live program Sunday night, Pastor Ross and Pastor Doug both have laptops open.

And when people ask us questions, we seem to have the answers very quickly.

Because we're going through the Bible software, we can type in 1 or 2 words and find, they think we're brilliant.

We say, well, that word appears 1, 100 times in the Bible, and it's this many times in the New Testament, this many times in the Old Testament, and here it is in Greek.

And it's really been a real blessing for me.

How many of you have either a desktop or laptop computer?

All right, all those people there, you can greatly accelerate your Bible study by using some of these, oh look, I got wireless here, I can go online.

This is the program I'm showing you right here and I'm not selling anything.

And I learned quite a bit from John Lomacain.

Every morning when Pastor Doug wakes up, I press that little icon, which is my daily Bible reading program.

I read my Bible every day, aside from what I normally read in Bible study and sermon preparation.

I'm always somewhere reading along in the scriptures.

Now it says here that I'm 10 readings behind.

That's because I'm doing it on my desktop.

When I'm on the road, then I use my laptop.

But I use this and then I just say, okay, view a search.

And it takes you immediately to those verses.

And I read through, and by the way, I don't read 10 chapters a day.

I used to do that so I could read through the Bible every year.

And I found out my mind started wandering or I wanted to study more.

And so I was racing to get my quota done every day.

And I found it was more productive for me.

2 years for the Old Testament, 1 year for the New Testament, and then I start again.

And I read through the Bible lots of times if you add in all the sermon preparation and articles and things that we're doing.

But I'm always reading through the Bible because you know if you just focus on 1 thing it's real easy to get where you've got your favorite sections of the Bible and you'll find 10 years go by and you haven't read any of the Old Testament or any parts of the Bible.

So you know I have great respect for my friend Dwight Nelson.

He reads through the whole Bible every January of every year.

Used to read through the Bible several times a year.

And so you can do it, you just have to be committed.

Something else I should say before I go on and show you some of the little tips in Bible study.

I'm sharing these things with you because there's never been a time in history when we have been more bombarded with information.

Have any of you ever gone through like a salad bar before?

And when you finally, you get your salad at Fresh Choice, you put your salad and all the greens in, and then you get down to the dressing, and you go to put dressing on, and you find out, you know, I put way too much dressing on.

And the only thing you can do is go back and add more salad so that it doesn't look like your salad is swimming in dressing, right?

Or maybe you put some soy milk in your cereal and you say, oh man, it's just swimming now in milk, I gotta put more cereal in to even it out.

In our culture today, because your mind is being so bombarded with other information, just we're surrounded by everything from billboards to magazines to radio to television, that you cannot survive as a Christian on the same amount of Bible study that they had 100 years ago.

Do you realize 100 years ago if you wanted to listen to a song, you had to know somebody who could sing or learn how to play an instrument or go down to the local country store.

But when they learn to reproduce music the way they do now, people can listen to songs and music, thousands of different ones all day long.

And it's almost like we are saturated with information.

So to compensate for that, I think we need to study like we've never studied.

And so, you know, as he was just sharing, when I was driving my car, just last night, I picked up my son from a lesson.

He said, dad, how come every time I get in the car, it says you always got a sermon on?

I said, well, if you're gonna talk to me, I wanna talk to you, son.

But I'm always trying to listen to something because I've got to feed my soul.

Back years ago, you'd read a little bit and you'd find yourself meditating on it all day long because that was really the only input.

But there's so much input right now that displaces the Bible in our lives.

You have to compensate by reading a lot of the Bible, studying a lot, listen to Christian stations when you drive.

They're not all Adventist stations I know, but if you're reading your Bible, you'll have a filter in your mind where you'll know how to spit out the seeds and hang on to the melon, right?

And by the way, I don't think it's a sin to listen to people other than Adventist preachers.

There are some good, godly preachers out there, but you've got to have a filter, because sometimes they preach doctrines of devils.

Back to Menu

Jesus Throughout the Bible

Transcript

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Contemplative Prayer: A Clear and Present Danger

1h 12m

How to Increase Your Intelligence

59m

The Almost Overmastering Delusion

54m

Morning Devotional: It's War Time

It’s Wartime - Part 4: War in a Garden

50m

Digging Deeper

1h 13m

Preparing for the Crisis

02 Self Quarantine: Stay at Home

34m

How to Study the Bible and Empower Your Devotional Life- Part 2

58m

Our Daily Bread

1h

God's Ordained Order

God’s Ordained Order - Part 5

56m

The Flood Story as an Illustration of Historical Typology

58m

Prayer

02 Prayer

57m

Dave Steward: Prayer Inspiration Weekend

Faith is Closer Than You Think

58m

Sound Doctrine