Is the faith I profess enough to get the job done?  What happens when it’s just God and me?  I think that shows who I really am.

God gives us things to do, but they are not Him.  They are tasks to be done, but not to be worshipped.  What is the difference between worshipping a thing or a task and just doing something well and being into it?  This trial comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes.  Some people go through it young.  Some when they are older, some never seem to have to, but who am I to say who’s going through what?

-sketch by Kadi Love

I want to know if I have what it takes… I mean me and God. I want to pray for that, but I’m scared to.  Be careful what you wish for, right? I think the same thing applies to prayer.  Prayer works, so I take it seriously.  God is that loving toward his people.  If the whole thing I have my hope in is nothing but a house of cards, he loves me enough to knock it down.

What is the chaff, the dross, the garbage, the dead weight attached?  Do I see things as they really are or even want to?  What are the things that I think are of God or came from God but do nothing but help me live my illusion?  Do I have the guts to ask him to take everything that is not of him and burn it right up?

Revelation 3:15-19

“…you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent…”

Montana is a great place to hunker in and study the Word for 9 months.  The rest of the gang here in the school are such a high caliber of young people and it’s such a privilege to be doing this together.  It’s been getting darker earlier with a little snow on the ground to make it feel like Christmas.  As I write this, the YWAM base here is getting more and more quiet with each passing hour.  The DTS (Discipleship Training School) left on their outreach, field assignment about a week ago to India, Thailand, and Malaysia, the School of Worship went to Thailand earlier this week, and our very own SBS (School of Biblical Studies) has been rapidly clearing out for Christmas break over the last 24 hrs.

Wishing safe travels to the departing...

I’m grateful to have had the chance to be here studying like this.  This is a missionary training school, so it’s not just study, study, study.  Once we finish in June, the skills and knowledge are meant to be passed along.  So there are options.  There is the Titus Project, which is an intense teaching program for 3 weeks here in Montana and then a Bible teaching field assignment to a target nation for 2 months.   It’s aimed at pastors in places like Nepal and Nigeria where people have expressed a strong desire to get better training in the word.  Then there is always the option of working on staff with one of the SBS programs around the world with Youth With A Mission.  The possibilities are endless, really, but for now, it’s being faithful here and going home for Christmas!

I am grateful to everyone who has helped make this possible.  People are so generous and I am blessed because of it.

Merry Christmas and have a blessed 20102!

“…and his name shall be called, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”  Isaiah 9:6b

…wow, so it’s Sunday and it’s officially the Sabbath.  God says it helps us to take one in 7 off and I believe him.  We work pretty much as hard as we can charting these books, so when there’s a day off, I sit typing at a computer.  Haha, not really… kind of.  it’s sort of a computer age, but oh well.  Montana is gorgeous right now, fall leaves everywhere, and mountains…and a beautiful lake…

The way this works, I am learning, is that we have a medium sized book like Mark to chart for the week.  It’s all done on-line and collected, finished or not, at 5pm Saturday.  There are several stages.  First, you read the book out loud in a group of about 4.  For Luke, that took 2 hrs. Then you go back and do paragraph titles, which means every paragraph is titled using no more than 4 words from that paragraph… in order, that summarize it.  After that, you divide the book into divisions, sections, and segments,  with titles for those as well.  From there (I forget which comes first) you come up with the main idea or theme of the book, the reason it was written, and pick the “Key Verse” that sums up the crux of the book.  Then you start again, for the 3rd time, and go through and color code it.  This means you make notations with colored pencils for observations like contrasts, repeated themes, comparisons, promises, predictions, literary content, etc. right in your copy of the ESV Bible.  Then you chart the book.    But before that, you have a “checker” sign off on your “horizontal” which is the divisions you created earlier, your key verse, theme, etc.  Until you’re signed off, you can’t chart.

The charting is the biggest part, so you want to be done with all the preliminary readings and stuff no later than Monday night.  Remember, you might have started Saturday, took Sunday off, and had some class Monday.  For each segment, you write up a chart. (Mark has 15-17) Each one is like a little sermon or paper.  You more or less type your color-coded observations into the computer program in a column on the left.  Then you go back and pick something as a primary observation and write up a “build” about that on the right.  You  are free to write as many builds as you want, but so far, it’s hard to get any more than 2 with any quality and still finish by the deadline.  A “build” is an observation with supporting observations under it (all with references), a series of questions and answers called the interpretation, and finally, the application part of the build.  That’s where you take it from the OR/OH (Original Reader/Hearer) standpoint and bring it to the contemporary reader, which is me, or you, or people alive today. This application comes from a Timeless Truth you pull from the text. So that’s plus or minus 30 timeless truths from a book like Mark in a given week.

The Bible has so much more, the deeper you go into it.  Who gets to take 9 months and do this? The thing I keep thinking is, “I am sinner, saved by grace.”  The word is like light shining into my heart.  Sometimes personally applying all these timeless truths is a bit of a flogging and I realize what a sinner I really am.

There was a day when I thought, “If I could just quit drinking and smoking and all that, I’d be pretty much fine.”  HA! The opposite is actually true.  The outside stuff is relatively easy to fix and actually was just symptoms of the inside stuff like, rebellious thoughts, self-pity, selfishness, comparison with others, unbelief, fear of intimacy, etc. etc. etc. It seems endless.  I’d like to say I’m like the disciples, but if the truth were known, I am more like a Pharisee… and who had a real problem with Jesus?  I am learning it’s possible to go from crazy, reckless lost to repentance to forgiveness, then to some self-righteous thing.  Jesus warns us to watch out for this…

“Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.  Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.” (Luke 12:1b-2)

Sobering… Grace. Grace. Grace.  Amen.

I wouldn’t rather be doing anything else.

Ben and Ryan explaining their "observations."

Well, I’ve been here in Lakeside for a exactly 2 weeks and I sure know more now than I did when I first got here.  We’ve been

in what they call “seminar” this whole time and will be for the next week.  After that, we divide into two groups of about 25 each for the rest of the 9 months.  It’s been slow but steady.  They started us in the book of Philemon to show us the “Method”, then moved us on to Titus, and right now, we’re half way through Ephesians.  Well, there’s not really a “half way.”  There is a start and an end time with teaching and work in the middle.  You work at your own pace and in your own way but the book is due at 5pm Tuesday.  We have been trained to put each book through a 12 step process.  It starts with an out loud reading, moves to making paragraph titles much like the ones in most Bibles, and continues on with a method of observation that would make middle school grammar teachers proud, complete with color pencils and pronouns.

After that, it’s good old, conventional research right from the Bible and the old fashioned kind from the library.  You more or less write a mini-research paper with info about the author, date of writing, and contextual stuff about the original author and original “hearers.”  Then there are charts, charts, and more charts.  Inside charts and outside charts, all consisting of observations, interpretations, and applications from the themes we’ve drawn out of the text.  You think you would have absolutely every insight and interpretation possible after that much dissection, but  I’m finding that the deeper I get into it, the more questions I actually have.  The themes I think I know like, “…by grace you have been saved through faith…” from Ephesians 2:8, (Yes, Hallelujah! preach it brother!) are surrounded and supported by things like, “…so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” v.7  Riches of his grace in kindness?  Wait. What? Then there is more and more…literally, no end to it.  The Word of God is like a deep well.

I am so grateful to be able to take the time to work like this for 9 straight months.  We have had tons of time to finish each book so far but according to the schedule, it ramps up quite a bit, so I am fastening my seat belt.  The staff are such great teachers and so patient with us.  It’s fun to be surrounded by this caliber of people. Everyone here is amazing…  I don’t know what it would be like to be in seminary, but to be surrounded by a group of future ministers must be something like this.  

YWAM Montana

Well, after a few years waiting and trying to figure out if 9 months studying the Bible Inductively was a good thing to spend my time doing, I am finally here in Lakeside, Montana enrolled in Youth With A Mission’s School of Biblical Studies (SBS).

Time is an interesting thing.  I think about it a lot lately.  Why it flies sometimes and seems to drag on endlessly at others is a bit of a mystery.  Does it fly when things are easy?  When things arefamiliar?  Maybe a bit of both.  It’s been my experience that the hard times go slow.  I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since I left New Zealand in March and even that period was only a 3 month lecture phase of a Discipleship Training School.  Each new endeavor seems to follow a similar pattern.  There are stages of experience.  At first there is the anticipation of the event, place, or assignment.  Even the period before the thing can be agonizing if it drags out too  long and is totally unknown.  Then there’s the trip to the place, the beginning there,  the meet and greets, the jet lag, the schedule, the geographical layout, and the rules or lack thereof.  This YWAM base is nice.  It’s in America, which makes lots of things easy to me being an American.  To me, Montana seems close to Michigan because places like Thailand and Laos are so far away.  On the first day our teacher, Tom, was giving an introduction to Montana, how it is being in America and what the expectations are here compared with some of the countries other students are from.  I thought it was funny how he talked about walking down the road and getting out of the way of traffic.  He said, “Americans like to drive.  They like to drive fast.  And they don’t like interruptions when they’re doing it, so walk accordingly.”  Exactly.

We’ve been mainly in lectures learning what they call “the Method.”  The first few days went slow with mostly new faces and tons of names to learn, but already, the passage of time is picking up.  It’s Friday tomorrow.  One week down.  I’m tired every night

My little study area.

because there is so much studying and academic leaning going on all day.  I haven’t been in school since 1999 if I remember right, so this is a stretch.  It’s a good stretch though.  At 38, I already face the temptation of finding what I find comfortable and just sticking with that instead of taking on challenges like this.

The Method goes from general to specific and the process is a chore to learn.  They tell me it becomes second nature and, for now, I’ll just have to trust them on that.  Over the next 9 months, we’ll chart every book in the Bible by what they call segments, breaking it down over and over until we are totally focussed in on the smallest detail and application of the passages.

YWAM Montana used to be an army base.

On one hand, I think I know what to expect.  on the other, I have no idea.  It’s a marathon of sorts and I was given advice to start with the end in mind.  Not to wish for the end, but to factor in where I will take it from here and to take note of that application as I go through it.  This kind of thinking helps to set the right pace and to see it fitting into the big plan.  It seems right to me.  I’m grateful to be able to spend the time doing it and hope for the best.