I want to know God better

WELCOME
Pastor Chris Paavola:
Thank you, Ms. Mary. Thank you, Ms. Ashley for those readings from God’s word. Good morning. Really good to be with you guys. My name is Chris Paola. We’ve already met. Yeah, it’s like one of my favorite days of the year, man. Putting the word of God in kids’ hands, it’s it’s such a big day. It’s so special. Kids, we make a big deal out of today because we think the Bible is a big deal and we want it to be a big deal in your life and for you to hold it in your hearts, not just in your hands, but we want you to hold it in your hearts. And you know what? What we want for all of us is to hold it in our hearts. And that’s a little bit of what we’re talking about today as we continue our series called Check All That Apply and we’re talking about how all the things that you want for you can be found in a St. Mark’s small group. And each week we’ve been talking about different things that you can find in a small group. We start with week one talking about how I want to know God’s power better. And we talked about how in small groups you will pray for other people and other people will commit to praying for you and you’ll be in this committed prayer kind of a relationship. And because prayer is how we tap into the supernatural power of God that you will see the miraculous in your life because you are praying for others and others are praying for you and you’re expanding the breadth of topics that you pray about. And then in week two we talked about how small groups helping make new friends that we kind of hang out with people who look like us and think like us and vote like us and watch the same TV shows as us and small groups is a way of us living out this vision of being a church as diverse as the city we serve.
And continuing to expand just the social groups that we hang out with. And so how that’s accomplished is small groups. And then last week we talked about how small groups get us serving beyond our bubble. Last week, by the way, grant Bish, our director of connections, preached his very first sermon. I think he did a great job areas. He is in the back Grant, you did awesome. You’ll never forget cutting your teeth, man. So Grant is, he’s entering a program called SMP to become a pastor and it’s a hybrid distance learning but onsite learning and stuff like that. And he’s going to be going that for the next couple of years. And this was his first sermon and I have to coach him on it and stuff. So I got the red pen out, that was fun. Got the red pen out and I was making, but to be fair, if you ever feel like you want to red pen me, go ahead and just send me your emails of your thoughts on my sermons anytime.
I don’t care. But Grant, it’s a tough act to follow. Great job. He talked about how small groups help us serve beyond our regulars. It gets us serving beyond our bubble. And really there’s a city that needs us. We talk about we want to be a church that prospers the city and there’s a city that needs us. And small groups is one of the way we can tap into that. And today we’re talking about how we can know God better and the way that we know God better is through the Bible.

TENSION
And you might be thinking, well, hold on, I don’t need a small group to read the Bible. And you’d be right. You do not need a small group to read the Bible. You absolutely do not. You could read the Bible right now. You could go home and you could read it on your smartphone.
I mean you can read it later on before bedtime. You can read the Bible by yourself 100%. You don’t need a small group for that. But there is something that a small group does make easier about the Bible. There is something that small groups make easier about the Bible.

ORAL TRADITION
And I’d like to take the next few moments to demonstrate what that is and to really set the stage for, we got to go way back. The Bible, I don’t know f you knew this, but was like an oral tradition. Yes, it was written down. There’s really smart people who wrote it down and meticulously copied it and defended, gave their life defending it. And we could trust that process. But that was something that was reserved for the really educated and the really wealthy. They’ve tried to do some studies on this and research on this, trying to figure it out.
But estimates say that somewhere between five and 15%, we’ll call it 10%, 10% of people in the ancient world. And in the first century before were literates could read, that means 90% of people could not read. So in a room full of like 150, 200 people here, let’s take these three rows right here. You guys are the literate bunch. You can, yes, you can read. The rest of you are the unwashed illiterate masses. Okay? You guys are all the plebeians who cannot read. It’s just these three rows that can read and write and copy the Bible and all kind of stuff. The rest of you are illiterates. So let me ask you a question. How would the rest of you read the word of God?
It would be oral. It would be an oral tradition that you passed on and you better believe that you would say it a lot. You can actually see this in the very beginning of our Bible in a book called Deuteronomy. It’s this Jewish book. It’s talking about all these laws for the Jewish people. And God says this, and the section we’re about to look at is called the Shama. And it’s like on the Mount Rushmore of the most important text in Judaism, the Shama. And I learned it in Hebrew because it kind of has a poetic style to it. It’s hear Oh Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. Every morning, they would wake up and say the Shama, when the sun would crest, they would turn to one another and they would say the Shama to each other every morning.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 6

And then they would continue on with really important words. And maybe you’ve heard these before, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. And that was like these core pillar, Mount Rushmore words they said every day. And then he continues, these commandments that I give to you today are to be on your hearts like deep within you and you have them on instant recall. And then he goes into the next few verses describing how to put it on your hearts. How do you put it on your heart? You impress them on your children, you talk about them, not you talk about God in general or what is God doing in your life or what can you observe from God and nature? No these words, these very words that I am giving to you. Impress them on your children.
Teach these words and talk about these words when you sit at home, talk about these words. When you walk along the road, talk about these words. When you lie down, talk about these words when you get up, tie these words as symbols on your hands, like bracelets and buying them on your foreheads. Write these words on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. And Jewish people would do that. The people who would write would go around in towns and inscribe on the doorframes, the words of God and they would write it on the doorframe. And then when you would walk into your house, you would kiss your finger, touch the doorframe and recite orally for everyone in the house to hear the words of God. And you would do this over and over. It was an oral tradition, but it didn’t stop there.
Young boys, ages five through 12 would enter into a school called the Bet Seref and, the Bt Sefer, sorry, the Bet Sefer. And they would recite the words of the Torah and the Pentitude, the first five books of the Jewish Bible, and they would just recite these words to each other and they would do it in a column response style. That’s why when you read the Bible, especially in Psalms and stuff like that, it’s kind of written in this double pattern, like kind of a repetition because it is a call and response a echo. And we do this in church sometimes when we do responsive readings, one person will stand up here and say it and then the congregation will join their voices together and repeat the echo of whatever that is. And they would do this from ages five to 12. And then at 12 you would graduate into bet midrash and Jewish boys would learn the words and the writings of the prophets and they would do the same thing.
They would call and respond and then all the people in a town would gather in the synagogue. And when they gathered in the synagogue, the literate person would read the scroll, but then everybody in the room would echo what was being written. It was an oral tradition and what was happening. And our brain, God has hardwired our brains to do this. It was transferring from the long short-term memory to the long-term memory in education.

PHONOLOGICAL LOOP
It’s called the polyphonic loop. And we repeat patterns over and over and the more we repeat them, the better we memorize them. And we do this so that we can reduce the cognitive load of having to recall it and start to gain fluency through repetition. We do this all the time. You would do this in Spanish class or German or whatever you took in high school where the teacher would walk in and say, bueno class, say Stan.
And then the class would say, bueno Chris, or whatever. I’m butchering it anyway, but what are you doing? Your repetition. You can’t learn a language just by reading it. You got to put it on your lips. In Latin class when I was going to school, it was Iran and you would repeat Iran and you’re trying to learn how to conjugate verbs. Or in math class one plus one is two, two plus two is four, four plus four is eight. And we would go through these things in verbally repeat them because of the polyphonic loop. I’ll even prove it. Kids, we do this all the time, kids, I’m going to show you a picture. Okay kids, I’m going to show you a picture and I want you to tell me what comes next. Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? What comes next? I see a red bird looking at me.
How did they know that? Because they sit and they want to read this book every single night and it’s the same book and I wish they would choose a different one, but they don’t. They want brown bear, brown bear over and over because we’re learning through polyphonic loop or I’m looking at a flag right here, right? The flag in the corner. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the states of America and to the see. And how do you know that? Because you had to stand up in class, half-awake every morning in school and repeat it. And here some of you haven’t been to school in 50 years and you still know the words because of this polyphonic loop.

INFORMATION PASSES
FROM OUR HEAD
TO OUR HEART
THROUGH OUR LIPS

The oral repetition information travels from your head to your heart through your lips. Information travels from your head to your heart through your lips.
This is how God has wired us and is true of brown bear, brown bear. It’s true of the pledge of allegiance. It’s true of learning a new language like Spanish and it’s true of the Bible. God’s word also travels from your head to your heart through your lips. I’ve got here, this is my Bible from home. I don’t like preaching from this Bible. It’s big. And then stuff falls out and paper gets everywhere. But this is my Bible. Got it. Sits pretty much either on the kitchen table, I forget to put it away or it sits next to my kitchen table. And I try every morning to read this. And when I read this, I make a lot of notes in my Bible. It’s just what I do. And I got a Bible that’s called a wide margins or a journaling Bible so that I can write in the margins. And the reason I’m doing that is because I’m trying to impress it on my heart. I’m trying to learn it by heart. Actually on Thursday this was sitting out, my kids were fighting over which of my grandkids were going to get this, who is going to get this Bible? And I’m like, can we not talk about that yet?
But something happened. Something happened when the Bible became a book. I think it’s a great thing. I love the Bible, don’t get me wrong, but something happened when we put the Bible in a bounds book like this. And this didn’t happen for thousands of years. Remember it was an oral tradition. Scribes and scrolls were transcribing it and keeping it very secure. But the vast majority of people were just orally speaking what they heard. And then around 1000 ad or maybe four or 500 ad, they started taking all of the books that they knew were circulated. They knew that the early church held to and they took all of, so the letters of Paul and John and Peter, they took the biographies of Jesus that were credible and then they took the minor prophets, the major prophets and the Torah and they put ’em all together and they put it together and it’s called a Bible.
And then a guy named Gutenberg in the 15 hundreds invents the Gutenberg press and it’s able to be widely circulated for all of us. It’s a great thing. But now when I talk to you about reading the Bible, it’s primarily done with your eyes, not your ears and not your lips.

GOD’S WORD PASSES
FROM OUR HEAD
TO OUR HEART
THROUGH OUR LIPS

It’s now the Bible has gone from something that’s said to something that’s read and something’s lost because we’re remember information travels. God’s word travels from our head to our hearts through our lips and something is lost when we quietly sit and read and take in with our eyes the word of God. We’re not engaging all of the senses that were designed to use. It’s fascinating and maybe that’s why memorizing the Bible is hard for some of us. If I gave you a blank piece of paper and told you to write down Bible verses, how many of you would need more than one piece of paper? Just if you write down the Bible verses that you’ve memorized by heart and could it be it’s because of the way that we process this book has changed dramatically with new technology.

RICH WORDS
It’s interesting and that’s where small groups come in a little bit earlier, Ms. Mary was reading from Colossians three and it’s kind of like these one-off instructions to the church and buried right there in the middle of Colossians three, Colossians three verse 16 is this instruction about the word of God.

Let the word of Christ dwell within you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom.
Colossians 3:16

Remember he’s writing to a small group of Christians gathering in a living room in the middle of modern day Turkey. And he tells them, ”Let the word of Christ”, the words that were spoken, but the word of Christ “dwell in you richly teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom”. And what’s so interesting about this little section is that when you read it in the original Greek, that word you is singular, not plural like y’all, like you singular. So he says, let the words of Jesus dwell in you as the individual. You sitting right there, you as an individual, let the words Jesus spoke that resonated across the airwaves and hit people’s ear drums.
Let those words dwell in you richly. As you teach and admonish one another, you could teach and admonish one another. In all wisdom, it’s a singular command for a plural one another setting. How are you supposed to do that in here? How are you right now? Supposed to let the word of Christ dwell in you richly and teach and admonish one another? I got the microphone. How are you supposed to do it? You can’t. Not in here, but you can in a small group and in a small group when we teach and it’s not like a pop quiz every week and you show up and we grill you and quiz you on how much of the Bible do you know? It’s not that. It’s not Bible trivia when you show up, it’s so like, okay, taking the Shama, love the Lord you got with all your heart, soul, and strength, right?
A didactic kind of academic setting we would say fill in the blanks. What are the four ways we’re told to love the Lord your God? That’s not what we do. In small groups though, in small groups we say it says, love the Lord your God with all your strength. What does that mean for you to love God with all your strength and then you process it as a group? Well, for me to love God with all my strength means, and what you’re doing is putting the word of God on your lips. It’s resonating and you’re processing it, you’re internalizing it. You’re doing what Deuteronomy said to do, you’re talking about it and it’s on your lips. And as it does, it transfers from short-term to long-term memory. And the word of God travels from your head to your heart through your lips. Or another example, we wouldn’t say, what are the nine fruits of the Spirit? We would say the fruit of the spirit of lovejoy, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control against such things. There is no law. Which of the fruit of the spirit do you want in your home right now? Well, the fruit of the spirit that I want in my home is gentleness because, and now you’re putting the word of God in your lips and you’re processing it and it’s traveling from your mind to your heart because you’re talking about it and using it in conversation. Brown bear, brown bear.
Now you might think, well, I don’t know much about the Bible. Who am I to teach or admonish anyone? But this style of talking about the word of God and what it means to you is endorsed by Jesus. I love this little casual throwaway line that the Apostle Luke writes in his biography of Jesus. Because take a look at what happens. This guy walks up to Jesus and says, he asks a question, and Jesus’s response is what is written in the scriptures?

25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher, he asked “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 “What is written in the law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
Luke 10

How do you understand it? This is Jesus, the guy who has the whole book memorized Jesus, who I believe was there in the beginning when it was written. He’s eternal Jesus, who has authored this book. And instead he just walked up to the book’s. Author asked a question about it and the author said, well, what does it say? You say it.
How do you understand it? And in the answer the guy gives, he has to respond with the very words of God. Not a concept of God, not a thought about God or an observation about God. No, the words God’s dared to speak, it’s powerful. And then he processes, what does it mean for me? What do the scriptures say? How do you understand it?

SIGN UP FOR A SMALL GROUP
And that’s what we do in small groups. And so in your bulletin, there’s a QR code on the screen, there’s a QR code. If you’re watching online, you can just kind of scan the QR code that’s on the screen right now and then scan that, take you to a page and get registered and you can be in a small group where you begin to process the word of God and make it travel from your head to your heart with other people.
And I want it so much for you. And honestly, I don’t care if you take your phone out and do it right now, just don’t go on Facebook, but scan your QR code, get registered. I want this so much for you guys, just like I placed the Bible in the kids’ hands. I want it placed in your heart. And I believe that happens through small groups when we process the word of God with one another. Now, let me say one other things that happens, okay? When you memorize something by heart, it starts to guide your heart. And something marvelous and miraculous happens, you’ll begin to start saying the word of God, not just in the controlled setting, but in just general everyday life. And what you’ve memorized by heart, you can bring to minds.

THE WORD IN YOUR HEART WHEN…..
So, for instance, parents, your kids are graduating and they go off to college and then they call you and they say, mom, should I buy a car?
I don’t have much money. Should I take out a loan? You can say, well, here’s what the word of God says. You can take the word from your heart and bring it to mind and say, well, scripture says the borrower is slave to the lender. So maybe just pay cash for a beater. That part’s not in the Bible, but you see what I’m saying? Just pay cash for a beater. You’re going from A to B, it doesn’t matter. And you’re suddenly using the word of God to instruct, or a friend calls you up and they’re going through a divorce. You can bring from your heart to mind the promises of scripture for your friend. I love you so much, and he will keep in perfect peace. Those whose minds are stayed on him for the trust in him. So just keep trusting right now. And suddenly the very word of God is dwelling in you richly not ideas of like God’s got this. Not bumper sticker slogans. No, the words he spoke, the promises he spoke, the commands, he spoke. Or maybe Satan tempts you to despair and you are just distraught at the sin that you’ve done and you think, what a horrible person I am. How could God love me?
But you can bring from your heart to your minds the very words God spoke where he said things like greater love has no one than this, that he laid down his life for his friends. But God has demonstrated his love for me in this, while I am a sinner, Christ tied for me. That’s the word of God’s dwelling in you, richly guarding your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Wow. And that’s what I want for you because you were in a small group where you sat in a circle with a group of people, and God’s word traveled from your head and your eyes to your ears and your mouth to your heart, through your lips. Let me pray for you.

PRAYER
Heavenly Father. First of all, we confess that we have neglected your word. We’ve treated it with just as something secondhand something to be overlooked. Forgive us, God, your word is so precious. Forgive us for treating it otherwise, for making other voices and other things preeminent. And forgive us by your grace and your mercies to begin anew at this day through the death of your son Jesus, I pray, God, that in me, and I mean this for each of us, but then each of us, your word would be central.
Make our souls hunger and thirst for your word. Like it says, make your word as sweet as honey. Like it says, make your word a living water bubbling up inside of us. Make your word our daily bread. Make it a light to our feet and a lamp to our path. Let us hide your word in our hearts. And God, I pray that our small groups that you make St Mark A. Church, not with small groups, but a church of small groups, and that in our small groups, your word would dwell among us richly. Begin with me in Jesus’ name, amen.