BONUS: How to Hear God's Voice in Scripture
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What are the five tips for hearing God's voice in Scripture?
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 thing, and it's God's living voice continuing to speak to us now.
Here's some tips. Three, 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 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.
There's a 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 Exodus and then 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. We've talked about this before in other contexts, but here's the story of like the 10 virgins, five wise virgins and five foolish virgins. And in that scripture, what happens? They all fall asleep. And when the bridegroom is there, they wake up and the foolish ones have not enough oil in their lamps.
How can knowing what you're reading enhance your Bible study?
And so they ask the wise ones, give us some of your oil. And the wise ones say, no, get your own oil. And if that were to be a universally applicable kind of a parable, you'd say, well, I guess we aren't supposed to share. But that's not what that parable is about. so we have a lot of different genres one of the first tips to hearing god's voice is know what you're reading pay attention to the genre um another thing to be able to do is recognize that when we're reading the bible we are reading the word of god expressed in the words of human beings this is very very important for us the catechism reveals this to us that um throughout all the words of sacred scripture god speaks only one single word his one utterance in whom he expresses himself completely that's a quote from script from a
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