The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
BONUS: How to Hear God's Voice in Scripture
Mon, 30 Dec 2024
As we get ready for the Bible in a Year journey, Fr. Mike shares five tips for reading the Bible that will help us to hear God's voice in Scripture. For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/bibleinayear. Please note: The Bible contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.
Full Episode
Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Bible in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's voice and live life through the lens of Scripture. This is not a day in which we are going to be reading from Scripture, but it's a day we're going to be talking about Scripture. In fact, we're going to be looking at how do I hear God's voice in Scripture?
What are the ways in which any person can actually pick up the Bible and not just get the story, not just understand the stories, but really hear God's voice, like really know what it is we're listening to, who it is that we're listening to. Because the Bible is not only a document, the Bible is a living, a living thing. And it's God's living voice continuing to speak to us now. Here's some tips.
We read five little tips, five tips on how to hear God's voice. And I want to start out with the first one. The first one is know what you're reading. What I mean by know what you're reading is a couple of things. First thing is know that the Bible is not necessarily, sometimes we approach the Bible like it's a magic eight ball, right?
Kind of like just look for an answer or we approach the Bible like it's a book of inspiring quotes. So we just look for inspiration. We look for like some up being uplifted and then we read some stories and that we're going to get into the stories as we go through this Bible in a Year plan. And you're like, wait, that was not inspirational.
And that does not provide me with a lot of direction for my life. So you need to know what you're reading. What I mean by that is we need to know that there are many genres. There are 73 books in the Old Testament and New Testament, 73 books in the canon of Scripture. And they are a mix of literary genres. And so I need to approach them like, okay, this is not all inspiration.
This is not all edifying. This is not all uplifting. This is not all those things that we like to think of when we hear Bible stories. The Bible, though, is a mix. Yep, some of the books are historical. Some of the books have a narrative that we follow. That's one of the things we're going to do by following the Great Adventure Bible Timeline.
we follow the narratives but also there's some books that are legal they're from the legal book like leviticus there are stories that are retelling the same story like for example genesis chapter one and genesis chapter two tell the same story but in two different perspectives we also have things like um exodus and then uh numbers that will tell a lot of the same stories
So sometimes we have that happening when we're reading the Bible. We have to understand, okay, that's that. Also, there's things like Proverbs, which are wise sayings that belong to the wisdom books or Psalms, same kind of thing that belongs to the wisdom books. And it has like these collection of prayers. Then we have the gospels. And not only do we have the gospels that are,
like basically a history, but kind of like a biography, but kind of not like a biography of Jesus, a unique kind of biography. But even in the gospels, there are genres like parables where Jesus tells a parable, which is not meant necessarily to be taken literally or not necessarily meant to be taken as, how would you say it, universally applicable.
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