We come a long way in this 10 part course, scripture 101, an introduction to scripture, we've covered a lot of topics. What is divine revelation, inspiration and inerrancy? How did we get the Bible? Talking about dark passages of scripture, how to interpret the Bible, and who is Jesus Christ, all of these different topics, but ultimately they all culminate in this 10th and final lesson, which is the Bible in prayer, because without prayer, the scripture really loses its full force, because it truly is, as we said in our first lesson, our Heavenly Father's love letter to us.
He wants to speak to us. He wants to communicate to us in this loving dialogue. Okay. So to begin this lesson, I wanted to open up with Psalm chapter 1, verses 1 through 3, which in your notes, if you look at it, it goes like this, and there are so many other passages that I could have mentioned here, the great shaman prayer, we talked about that multiple times, here is real, the Lord, your God is one God, and you should meditate on the law, and you wake up, and when you go down to sleep and you walk on the path, it's basically, you are all in, focusing on the law, we talked about Joshua chapter 1, we got to give this Joshua this pep talk, you know, focus on the law, don't depart from the right hand or the left hand, etcetera, but this particular song is really beautiful.
These verses are really beautiful, because in order to be successful, in order to prosper, and all that he does, he prospers why, Why? Because he meditates on the law. He doesn't just read the law as an academic treaties. He meditates and focuses on the law day and night.
Like this is his, we're going to see later his daily bread. Okay? All right. So let's just do a couple introductory remarks before we dive into the Bible in prayer and exactly what the history of the church gives us as a method and art form, a sure fire way to really engage in prayer and dialogue with God and reading the scriptures.
But first I want to really emphasize this point that scripture is not, this is Roman number one. Scripture is not just an academic exercise. We're reading the Bible and we're trying to examine the various sources and the languages and how it came to us in its final form and the connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the typology and all this great stuff that we do together all the time. That's awesome.
It gives us goosebumps. It gives us chills to see the new and the old and the old revealed and the new, but it's not merely just an academic exercise. The scriptures are meant to go beyond the intellectual study of scripture to an application of the scriptures in our lives where we have a personal relationship with God and a union with God through prayer. And so the classic example, first one I have on your notes here is Matthew chapter 4 verse 4 when Jesus is in the wilderness with the temptations and his three temptations and he defeats Satan by quoting scripture all the time.
The first temptation Jesus says quoting Deuteronomy 8, 3, man shall not live by bread alone, but every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Now this is awesome. There's so many great things to say here, but there's an analogy that Jesus is using really back in Deuteronomy. The analogy is like look, even as our human physical bodies require daily sustenance in the same way our spiritual souls require sustenance as well.
Every single person, when they get hungry, they go and they eat to get strength, right? To get nourishment in order to proceed throughout the day. The same thing is true of our spiritual lives. In order to get nourishment, in order to get strength, we absolutely must feed our souls.
And we don't want to feed our bodies with just pure junk all the time. Nor do we want to feed our souls with junk either with like whatever new age stuff that comes up on the market or just kind of superficial bankrupt spirituality that might be peddled on the shows. We want the word of God. That's the way we get true, delicious, and delicious nourishment.
So Jesus is saying man does not live by bread alone to feed our physical bodies, but we must live on the bread of life. That's the Eucharist. Okay, first, body blood, soul, and divinity of our Lord, but it's also the scriptures. Okay, so we do have it every day.
And that's the other thing I want to mention before we move on here in the chorus, the lecture is that simply when you're hungry, you make time to eat. Alright, unless you're fasting, when you're hungry, your body says, give me food, you're like, okay, here's here's some food. I'm gonna give you some food. The same thing is true, you guys, with our souls, like we need to make time for to make time to feed our souls.
Okay, we just don't go day after day after day without feeding our souls because otherwise we'll basically starve to death. And that's what's happening with too many people. So go to the scriptures to have a personal relationship with God. I got this great quote for you here as well, catechism 2653, the church forcefully that especially exhorts all the Christian faithful to learn the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ by the frequent reading of the divine scriptures.
So again, the church encourages everybody, read the scriptures. However, it says, let them remember that prayer should accompany the reading of the sacred scripture so that a dialogue takes place between God and man. And then there's this great quote from St. Ambrose, where we speak to him when we pray and when we listen to him, we read the divine oracles.
We speak to him when we pray and we listen to him when we read the scriptures. That's the beginning of the dialogue and that's really gonna be the whole content of today's lesson which is how do we engage in dialogue with God by reading of the scriptures? The way that we've done in the history of the church for centuries and centuries here, okay. There's a couple more quotes I have for you I think to kind of kick us off with this lecture.
When I really love from catechism 131, it says, and such is the force and power of the word of God that it can serve the churches or support in her vigor. But also the children of the church as strength for their faith, food for their souls. So there it is again, the daily bread, it was our daily bread and pure and lasting font of spiritual life. This is what the scriptures do for us, strength for our faith, food for our soul and a pure and lasting font of spiritual life.
Hence access to the scriptures ought to be open wide to all the Christian faithful. There's great quote from the day where I'm talking about a confetti to here, but they're there here in the catechism. Scriptures must be open to all the faithful and the churches always said this. I know that whenever I teach scripture, I touch scripture for a long time now, people always come up to me and say, oh, you know, when I was a kid my pastor told me not to read the Bible and I'm not denying that.
But the church has always said that with all the faithful must have access to the scriptures. So for whatever reason, and there are probably many, you might have different priests, you know, in the early 20th century, mid 20th century, they don't read the scriptures, but the church officially doesn't teach that. Let's look at Pope Clement the 11th back in the 18th century. He says it is useful necessary at all times in all places, for every kind of person to study and know the spirit, the piety and the mysteries of the scripture.
This is Pope Clement the 11th, a long time ago saying everyone, everywhere should know and love the piety and mysteries of the scripture. And most recently, the nichos 16th says, I express my heartfelt hope for the flowering of a new season of greater love for sacred scriptures on the part of every member of the people of God. So that they're prayerful and faith filled reading of the Bible with time deep in their personal relationship with Jesus. And that's what it's all about.
Again, not just an intellectual study of scripture as amazing as that is as important as that is actually for a prayerful reading of scripture, but ultimately the goal is we're falling in love with Jesus. We have a personal relationship with Jesus because he speaks to us in the scriptures and then we speak back to him in our prayer. So that's going to be the topic of this lesson here, this 10th lesson of the series. Now let's go to part one, what is prayer and then we're going to talk about how do we pray using the scriptures.
Hi, I'm Dr. Nick. Thank you so much for watching this clip. I hope you enjoyed it.
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