"Started Speaking in Tongues"
EPISODE 168
Search the Scriptures for Answers
Is it insincere to pray without action? What’s the key to preaching without notes? And most importantly, is a hot dog a kind of taco? In our first ever “Ask the Geeks” episode, we discuss listener questions. In these episodes we’ll discuss questions about prayer, preaching, divorce, and how we “visit” orphans and widows today. As usual, we kick things off with an icebreaker and then go Finding Jesus in a classic text about Biblical inspiration. If you have a question for a future episode, we’d love to hear it! Drop it to us at biblegeeks.fm/contact.
Takeaways
The Big Idea: The Bible doesn’t answer every question, but it does hold the answers to life’s most important questions.
This Week's Challenge: Identify any Bible questions you have and search God’s word for their answer.
Episode Transcription
He has a thing that he likes to talk about, the "me, we, God, you, we," which just sounds weird, I know. Ryan just started speaking in tongues here. That's right. Just sorry, everybody. That's right. Well, hello everyone, and welcome to the Bible Geeks Weekly Podcast. This is episode 168. I'm Bryan Schiele. I'm Ryan Joy. And thanks so much everyone for tuning in. Again, as we talked about on the last episode, we are sort of in an interregnum in between our guidance studies we've been doing. Good word. I had to bust out that one every now and again, but yeah, here we are. We're basically doing something that we haven't done before. It feels kind of weird. Like in 168 episodes, you would figure that maybe we would get into like a whole full on Q and A episode, but that is not something we've done before. And yeah, we're going to wade into uncharted waters here on the episode and go through a whole list of questions that we have heard from our listeners. And thank you again so much for everybody for submitting these questions that we're about to chew on for quite a bit here. - Have we really never done a Q&A kind of episode? - Like a full up Q&A episode? No, we've answered a few questions here and there, but I don't think we've ever dedicated an entire episode to Q&A, so should be fun. - Yeah, okay, well, let's jump right in with an icebreaker question. So this is a question, but it's a light, easy question that I came up with to get us started. What's an unimportant or even unanswerable question that you have a strong opinion about? - I like as we're about to like seriously chew on some meat in the scripture that we just have to talk about some unimportant stuff first. (laughing) - It's an appetizer. - Oh yeah, speaking of appetizers though, that's actually one thing that I have a very strong opinion about. a question that lots of people ask and fight about. And it's this question about what is a sandwich? And in the category of this question, what is a sandwich? Something that I firmly believe is that a hot dog is a taco and that a pop tart is a calzone. - Wow. - I'm just willing to put that out there here. I wanna let everybody know right off the bat, in the category of sandwiches, hot dogs are tacos and pop tarts are calzones. They are not sandwiches. - Man, you are talking crazy land. Dogs or cats, what is going on here? Well, I totally disagree with all of the above. Next, we're gonna get into whether chili and stew are soups and all kinds of other questions I've heard around this. Is a hamburger a sandwich? Yes, I think a hamburger is a sandwich, but a hot dog is not a taco, my friend. Nevertheless, your position stands and you've stated it clearly. - I have a website to prove it, by the way. I'll link that in the show notes. It's called the cube rule for food identification. You can go and check out the fact that I am totally right on this. So please continue. What unimportant or unanswerable question do you have a strong opinion about? - Maybe this is not as controversial actually as what you have just laid down, but I think this is a good chance for me to show my credentials as a card carrying Bible geek because I have a lot of strong opinions on Bible topics that have no need to be answered and that we really don't need to know. - Adam and Eve have a belly button. - Yeah, that kind of thing. So my go-to example of a topic that it's really silly for people to debate when I'm trying to illustrate, we don't have to argue about everything or even take a stand on everything related to the Bible is who wrote the book of Hebrews because we don't know and it doesn't have any bearing on salvation or morality or anything like that. We know it's inspired and yet I have to fight off an inner growl, like a voice inside me that just gets all worked up. Every time I hear someone from the pulpit, they think Paul wrote the book. And yes, that is an old and popular opinion, but it shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter. I want to be clear that it shouldn't matter. It was someone in the apostle circle and he wrote it and he was inspired. But for reasons that I'm not going to go into on an icebreaker, I think it was a Paulus or someone like him with a similar background, but in any case, definitely not Paul. There's so many reasons it was not Paul. And yet here I am arguing for something that does not matter. An unimportant and unanswerable question that I have a strong opinion about. Pop tarts are calzones and Apollos wrote Hebrews. That's fine with me, sure, why not? - All right. - All right, so let's get into something maybe a little deeper here on the episode to kick things off and that is our Finding Jesus segment. And we have, like we did on the last episode, we've gone back to an old tradition from long ago, early on in the episodes where we used to spring a Jesus starter on each other. And for this one, I'm gonna go to 2 Timothy chapter three verses 14 to 17, and that is a finding Jesus. We're gonna go to somewhere where Jesus is not, but see if we can find him in those passages. And this is where Paul, who by the way, did not write the book of Hebrews, turns his attention to the young evangelist Timothy and says, "But as for you, continue in what you have learned "and have firmly believed, "knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood "you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. And here's the kicker. All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. So where do you find Jesus in Paul's words to Timothy there? Oh yes. He is right there in verse 15 and all scripture is pointing us to Jesus. and helping us to see who He is and delivering us a clear faith that we can stand on in Jesus Christ. But also, Jesus is the perfect embodiment of someone who made scripture the fabric of how He saw everything, what He spoke from, the kind of righteousness He carried was derived directly from Scripture. You think of the temptations of Jesus in Matthew 4 and how He stepped right up to Satan with a "thus saith the Lord." It is written over and over again, and He had the Scriptures in His heart and in His mind, and so He was ready. He was equipped for any challenge that came. And I think that's really right on track with what we're trying to do here. We're trying to search the scriptures to recognize that in them we find the breath of God, the words of God that have spoken something that we can stand on, settle into, and know is going to build us up and give us what we need to live the way we need to. Yeah, that's so powerful. I mean, as you think here about how Jesus is the embodiment of these things, you know, as you were talking about there and how all of the scripture really points to Jesus, I I just did a lesson not too long ago from 2 Peter 1, verses 3 and 4 where it's the precursor to this big giant list of things that you should be adding to your faith. And there in 2 Peter 1, verse 3, Peter says, "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence." The more we know about Jesus, the more we are acquainted with him and the more we find ourselves in relationship with him here in this verse, the more we study about him, the more we are acquainted with these things that show us who Jesus is, the more we're equipped, the more we are ready to handle everything in this life, everything in terms of godliness, we have all things that we need. We've got it all. got it all when we know Jesus and I think that's such a powerful way of thinking about what He does for us in just the simple act of studying and of finding ourself connecting with Him in His life and His teaching. And I appreciate how you used that word knowledge and knowing two different ways because I think that's here you know in verse 5 he talks about adding to our faith virtue and virtue knowledge and there's that idea of just knowing things learning about the Lord. And because of that, with that learning, if we're trying to do something besides developing facts and just filing away things, we start to not only know about Jesus, but to know Jesus, to know God, and to have that kind of a knowledge of God where we are more than acquainted with the idea of Him and the facts about Him. We know him. That's the grace and knowledge we wanna grow in is that relationship with the Lord that is developed and can't be developed without the scriptures and spending time with him in the scriptures. - And I love this phrase here that he uses to Timothy when he says that he learned it from his childhood, having been acquainted with the sacred writings. And I think that's really the purpose of this episode as we try to answer some of the questions that we've received from listeners over the past little bit, as we try to answer these things, we're not gonna be giving just our thoughts and our opinions. The whole idea is to go back to see what God says about these things. And so maybe that leads us into our main segment here on the episode, and that is "Ask the Geeks." - Listen to these riddles. Tell me if you interpret them as I do. What has yellow skin and rights? - A ballpoint banana. Precisely, Robin. The only possible meaning. - I had never heard this set up before, I love it. And I was thinking about this idea of a Q&A. I feel like it's more like question and discussion as we, like you said, hold up the scriptures, but we're discussing it with each other and hopefully the discussion continues as listeners take it and continue the discussion. It's like a Q&D, if you will. So our first question to discuss is this question from a listener, is prayer without action considered hypocrisy? It's actually like on the face value is you might jump to a yes or a no, but that in itself starts to give you something that there's more to dig under. So what do you think? Is prayer without action considered hypocrisy? As you said, what do the scriptures tell us? - Yeah, as you think about this question, and I really start chewing on it, you could see it both ways, But I think we have to balance here in answering this question, both the power of prayer, which I mean, we can just collect up verse after verse talking about how powerful prayer really is, but we have to balance that with the power of action. There's a deep conversation here about what God does and what we do. I mean, there's a whole grace and works parallel here that we could dive into a little bit. And I think we actually will, but lobbing just general blessings at people and praying off the cuff that God would do things, it really doesn't absolve us of our need to get into the lives of people and do something and take action. And I think that's kind of what this question is getting at because there will be times where people will lob out there sort of maybe on social media or whatever, talking to a friend, "I'm praying for you," or "Let's pray about it." Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers, right, exactly. And I think well-meaning people, sincere people might say that, but a populace maybe who have become sort of soured on a religious person's lack of action about things, they may see that as being hollow, or like this question implies, hypocritical. And so I think James deals with this. He's obviously trying to deal with the whole conversation of faith and works and everything in James chapter two, verses 15 to 16, But he says, "If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' sort of lobbing a blessing at them, without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?" Now, obviously James here is not trying to teach the lesson about how we should be providing food and clothing for every single person. That's not necessarily the lesson to take away from this, although that's an important thing. I think what he's saying here is you've got to connect what you say with what you do. And in the same way, you have to connect faith and works. And so that's really the overall point he's trying to make, but this is also a truth that he's using to prove that point by saying, look, if you're gonna tell somebody, go in peace, be warmed and filled, almost a blessing at them, you better be willing to take action. And implied by this statement, I think, is that we will take action if we can. If we have the opportunity to do something for someone, we will do it for them. And so I think hopefully we're all tracking here at this point, but if you can't directly impact somebody that you're praying for, what do you do then? 'Cause there's plenty of people that we could pray for that we will never have the opportunity to physically one-on-one do something for. And so prayer is also powerful. Yes, our actions are powerful, but prayer is powerful when we trust that the results aren't under our control. And so James is gonna go on to say in James 5 verses 16 to 18, how we have to confess our sins to one another, we have to pray for one another that we would be healed. Then he says the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. And then he talks about Elijah, who famously prayed that it wouldn't rain and three years and six months it didn't rain. But he says that he was a man just like we are, with a like nature as us. And then he prayed again and the heavens gave rain and the earth bore its fruits. Powerful prayer there in the example of the life of Elijah, and when we pray for each other that our sins would be forgiven, of course, no amount of action on your part is going to take away the sins of somebody else. That's something I can't do anything about. When I'm praying for someone to be healed of some sickness or whatever, that's something I can't do anything about. And so there's both sides of it here, is what I'm looking at. We have powerful action, and God has powerful answers to our prayers. And so if for some reason our prayers are just performative, which I think is probably what this question is dealing with. And there are a lot of examples in the Bible of people who just wanted to be seen by other people. That is definitely hypocrisy. As Jesus is gonna talk about in Matthew 6 verse 5, how Pharisees go out standing on the street corners, and oh boy, they just want everyone to see them as they pray and as they pray long prayers. And so of course, those Pharisees at that time, they didn't really mean it. They were doing it for just performative fake reasons. And so I think it's the why behind our prayers that's really the biggest deal. And so is prayer without action considered hypocrisy? It can be, but also we need to see that prayer, even without action, is still powerful. And so yes and no? I mean, is that an answer? - I think it's an answer. I think what you said before about the social media or just the thoughts and prayers idea, The dismissive nature of that is another aspect of this that I appreciate, that's a challenging idea that, for me, I think at times I have been faced with whatever, an email or a post or somebody saying something and I don't know what to do with it and it's a little like a question you can't answer or a problem that you wanna solve but you're not sure what to do and then I just pray about it and it's like that's the answer and it can get maybe too neatly packaged up. Like I, well, at least I did something with it and I don't take the next step of, okay, what else can I do? Is there something else I can do to help? Again, you can't do that with everything. Sometimes prayer is the answer, but if we are allowing ourselves off the hook with prayer, then that is an incomplete answer. So I like your yes, but answer there. I think maybe a better distinction is praying without love and commitment to people would be hypocritical. Praying without real commitment that I'm all in for their good. And praying is action. I think you kind of touched on that, but I just wanna emphasize again, we need to get that it's no small thing to labor fervently in prayer, as Paul talks about in Colossians 4.12. Praying earnestly is work, and it makes a difference. A prayer like that is never hypocritical. But I think of Boaz praying for Ruth and then Ruth using the same words that Boaz used to call him on him and say, "Would you take me under your wing?" We talked about that several weeks ago or a month or two ago. Or Jesus telling his apostles to pray for workers at the end of Matthew nine. And then a few verses later at the beginning of Matthew 10, he sends them out to the field because sometimes God's answer to your prayers is you. And we need to be ready to take these things to heart and to be active and get our hands ready to do the work, whatever it needs to be. I feel like this is gonna be a theme in this episode. - No, I agree with you 100% because I think when you couple love into this conversation, it is one of the big reasons, of course, why Paul writes so eloquently about love in 1 Corinthians 13, how you could do all kinds of things. You can even pray, but if you're praying and you don't have the love for people behind it, then of course it is hollow. As you said, it is hypocritical there when you're praying without love. But when you're doing it for the right reason, when you've connected with the why behind it all, obviously the more you pray with that kind of love for somebody, the more you're probably gonna get out there and help try to answer your own prayer in that case, like you just talked about. Sometimes God's answer is you, and I love that. So let's get into another question here on the episode. And this one, I don't know, maybe this is a little bit lighter. This is kind of one of those like personal-ish questions. And if you can shift the mood ever so slightly from prayer to preaching, I guess this question has something to do with preaching. And since you're a preacher, let's just have you answer this question. So the question was, how do you deliver a sermon without notes? Not maybe something theologically important in the answer to this question. But definitely something that we've talked a lot about off the air in terms of prepping for sermons. How do you do that? How do you give a sermon and not have notes behind it? - Yeah, the first thing to note is that preaching without notes doesn't mean being less prepared. In a way, it means being more prepared in the sense that you know and are comfortable with the topic. If you're not comfortable with the topic, then you've gotta have your notes written down all the more. But think about it, if somebody asked you about a hobby that you've had for 20 years, that's just something you're passionate about, or asked you about what you do at work every day, you wouldn't need notes to tell them the answer. You might think about your answer for a second before, like, okay, I'm gonna tell them these three basic things about my job. And that takes you all of two seconds to think about, and then you go into explaining those things. And you can give a long answer, you can give a short answer. And in the same way, you don't need to be an expert on this biblical subject matter, but you need to be able to talk conversationally about it. And a really good way to do that is to use stories as an introduction or as an application or something from your own life, stories you know really well, 'cause you're just talking about something that happened to you. But also, like any story, and especially biblical stories are really important and really easy to remember 'cause you naturally know the flow of how a story goes, especially if you've dug in and looked at it. But secondly, you want to think in chunks. If you're doing a short talk, you might decide, say, I'm gonna use four chunks. This is a very technical term. (laughing) - Oh man, okay. - Four sections that you're gonna have your sermon in, but don't think of sections 'cause that implies there's all these little parts. You're thinking of it as just a big hunk of one thing. You know? - A chunk of a sermon. - You know, like a story is a chunk or an idea you wanna share. It's one idea, but you're gonna unpack it a little bit. That's one chunk. Maybe you start with a question. You're gonna ask, what did you spend your time on today? That's your first chunk. You're setting up the question, you're asking it different ways and then illustrating some different things people did that day. you know, maybe you went to school today, maybe you dropped off your kids for school, you know, what did you do today? And you just, you're just gonna talk about that question for however long, a minute or two minutes or whatever, it depends on the length of your talk. - And then Chuck too, might be a passage you're gonna go to. You could go to Ephesians five, you could talk about that verse about redeeming the time. What does it mean to redeem something? You're gonna, again, unpack this a little bit and think about what it means to redeem the time. You've already studied it, You've already thought about what that means. You're just gonna talk about redeeming the time in that passage. And then maybe chunk three is one specific application you want people to consider. And you're gonna say, this week, start and end your day in prayer and pray that you used your time well. And so you're thinking with them about that application and you're challenging them to do that. And you're saying why to do that. And you've thought about this. And so you're just explaining that and you know your days are numbered, so you're going to pray each day, and that leads to your final chunk, your invitation chunk. Again, really get this terminology right. (both laughing) And this chunk is gonna be a description of a countdown clock that we can't see ticking down. So this is just something that I just, you know, just trying to think of something simple for four chunks that could be a five minute talk, it could be a 20 minute talk. So I can't memorize a bunch of sub points, but I can remember four things that lead into each other. A question, a passage I have marked in my Bible and ready to flip to, an encouragement to pray about it, and an image of a ticking clock. I have those in my brain and I can talk about that in 20 seconds or a lot longer. And all the rest, I just have to flesh out. I'm just talking about it and I've thought about what I wanna say. - It sounds like you're kind of talking about waypoints there. setting yourself like, make a left at the circle K, you know, like all those kinds of things where you don't have to know every single detail to get from one place to another, but you know the major features along the way in the talk that you're having, right? It sounds kind of like what you're talking about. - That's a good way to put it. Yeah, you've named the route from here to the circle K and you've named the route from the right of the circle K all the way to that wicked big Dunkin' Donuts that you're gonna turn left at, and you're just going through that way. But you have to be okay with it sounding like your natural voice if you're gonna be doing this, because you can't, you can sort of write a sermon persona if you're putting it out into notes. You know, you're just gonna basically be reading your bullet points and that kind of thing. But if you're just gonna talk, you have to be yourself. And you'll stumble a little, like you would talking to a friend. I mean, some people maybe are just so smooth that they don't, but for most of us, you're just trying to figure it out. You might even forget something. What is that called again? What's that? Well, you know what I'm talking about, but anyway, you might run into those moments. And again, you don't want that. You're trying to prepare to avoid that, but it's okay. In the scheme of things, it's actually more listenable for you to be authentic and for people to be able relate to you, that you're conveying something that is true for you and that you're working through it. And for a longer talk, those waypoints, you're going to have more step-by-step waypoints, right? Chunks. Yeah, chunks too. Bigger chunks. Yeah. Lots of chunks. Lots of waypoints. Yeah. I mean, if you're giving somebody directions, let's go with your analogy. You're giving somebody directions to get to your house. If there's only four or five different turns they're going to have to take, you could maybe just say it to them, but at some point you're gonna have to map it out on the back of an envelope and give that to them or tell them, just talk to Siri. They're gonna tell you what to do at each point. You need some prompts. So for a longer talk, I like to have some kind of prompt because of all those chunks. And sometimes it's notes. I like to pare down my notes to just naming the chunks and have those maybe just on a little card or slip of paper that I can fold into my Bible. And so wherever my main text is, I'm going to have, it could even be in the margin of my Bible, but I'm going to have, here's the seven things that I want to do, seven things I want to talk about. And I may even have one or two sub points on one or two of those. And so I'm going to break those down. For me, my favorite way to do it, I'm a visual guy, graphic designer by trade. I like to use slides and each slide represents typically one of my chunks. And so if I see a picture of a countdown clock on a slide, I know exactly what I'm talking about. So I definitely recommend slides or something like that. If you're gonna do a 40 minute talk, I'm not saying you can't do it without some kind of prompt, but for me, I would feel a little unequipped if I went in for a longer talk without something that's gonna guide me through it. And I'll note, there's a book that's become pretty popular called "Communicating for a Change." It's by a guy named Andy Stanley. And it has some ideas that sort of relate to this in the second half of the book that talks about some different ways of breaking down. He has a thing that he likes to talk about, the me, we, God, you, we, which just sounds weird, I know. - Ryan just started speaking in tongues here. Just sorry, everybody. - That's right. But he kind of breaks down five different areas where you're talking about yourself, and then you're gonna talk about people, and you're gonna talk about what God has to say about it. That book may have something useful in it. I'll put that in the show notes. - Yeah, I love how you talked about being natural. And for some people, the nerves and the first time experience of being up in front of people and having everybody look at them, that's a lot to get over. And there may not be an opportunity to preach without notes like until you really get comfortable with the basic fact that you're standing in front of a lot of people, and they are looking at you. For so many of us, that was us in the beginning, and we were terrified of that. I remember shaking when I got up there early on when I was younger. At some point, once that begins to fade, it's not that you're never nervous, or that I'm always nervous before I get up. I can always, I look down at my Apple Watch, and my heart rate is just running, and I know it, and I can feel it, and then I get up there and for whatever reason, almost every time now, I get up and just calm down. Like everything just subsides and I just start talking. And that becomes easier to do, I think, the longer you've done it. And so maybe this whole conversation or the question about how do you preach without notes, maybe it's just you preach a lot of sermons and you just get used to having people looking at you, having to work through your chunks and your waypoints and whatever else you're trying to communicate just doing that for enough times to where it becomes natural to the point where you can settle into your own voice. Thinking through where you're going and like you said communicating those waypoints very clearly. The natural part of that is gonna come over time for a lot of people. So maybe don't expect to jump right into it. Maybe you're gonna have to use notes for a super long time until you stop the shakes. Well that's an important point and also it's worth noting that it is not inherently better to preach without notes than to preach with notes. It's just that the question is asking how do you preach without notes? And absolutely, yeah, you put your 10,000 hours in and it's going to be a lot easier. That said, I think that there is a way that you can get stuck in sort of a notes trap if you're just settling into that, where I know people who just have been writing out every word all their life. And if early on you can take it really seriously, I'm not talking about getting up there and talking off the cuff or anything like that, but take it seriously and prepare, but try to have a guide rather than having in your notes, everything spelled out and try to step out slowly. And it may be, you know, that it's a slow process and you're just taking little baby steps towards getting away from reading or that kind of thing. But the more you can do it, I think you'll find that your speaking is more effective again, not without notes, but not becoming so reliant on notes that you're reading rather trying to get to the point where you can talk to people where your attention isn't on the piece of paper, but it's on the people you're talking to and on what's happening in this exchange that you're having. I always think of it like, even though I'm the only one talking, it feels like a conversation to me even there. There's like, I'm listening to the listening, I'm paying attention to, did I get that? Did that come across or not? I'll even ask those questions. Does that make sense? And I'll get a nod or a huh or whatever. And you're just trying to attend not just to a piece of paper or a slide, but to that connection with people and to the truth that you're trying to provide to them. - Yeah, thinking of it, like you said there, thinking of it like a normal conversation in which you are looking to your audience for feedback. I do that all the time. And it's so helpful to see those people. Like I have tent peg people throughout the congregation that I am looking at and just wanting to see like, do they get what I'm saying right now? Are they tuned in? Does that make sense to them? And you can usually see certain people nod in their head, like you said, or you can see the looks of confusion. And so even in those moments, like being totally willing, like you would in a normal conversation to just pivot or stop or pause, repeat something, whatever it is you need to do, or just blow past it. 'Cause you know, yeah, we're all on the same page. Let's keep going. So I also like the point about using your slides as a way to mark your milestones. And I do that all the time. That's probably one of the best ways for me to keep track with what I intended to say. And especially for some topics that like really require a little bit more meat and conversation around certain details and passages. Having those things on slides just to make sure I don't forget it. Is like a big deal for me. I don't like bullet points in slides, but some topics, if you're not using notes, you've got to have bullets as your notes. I mean, or, or you need to have something where things are being spelled out because you're just in the weeds of trying to unpack some complicated false doctrine that you're trying to, you know, if you're, you're trying to explain something complicated and then you're trying to get to the heart of what the truth is. You want to be clear and clarity comes from really having a clear step-by-step process in those kinds of sermons. But yeah, I think that's a starting point on this conversation and thank you for that question. Yeah, it was super good. Alright, so let's move on to our third question here and listen, this one is a tough one. It's a really difficult thing to wrap our heads around. even Jesus said this thing was difficult. So we're going to get into our third question here in our ask the geek series. Wait, what is that? What's going on? Will the identities of our dynamic view all be revealed to the whole world? Is this the end to drop a click on this last few questions? Can they avert disaster? Find out next week. Same back time, same back channel. I guess we'll hit those next time. Alright, well may the Lord bless you and keep you.