 The one thing God left with all of us equally is His Word. He wants us to grow, as He says, in the grace and knowledge of the Lord. And He says in all of our getting, get understanding. And so because of this, I want to deal with four common mistakes that people make when studying the Bible. If you can avoid making these mistakes, I can promise you that your Bible study will go to the next level. The first common mistake is having no hermeneutic. And before I explain what I'm speaking of, let me at least tell you what a hermeneutic is. It's just really simply it is the method by which you would interpret. How you read the Bible or how you read anything is of the utmost importance. And my suggestion is that, one, you be consistent. And what do I mean by being consistent? Well, how I read the Bible in this portion of the text is the same with what I'm going to read all the way through. Does that mean that there are different times we have to understand for idioms and for figures of speeches and so forth? Well, sure, we recognize that. But even in the way that we speak ourselves today, we take that into account. And what you want to do is you want to avoid the temptation to spiritualize the text, in other words, to read into it, to find a deeper, hidden meaning. If, for example, hearing directions and you're told to turn right in 300 feet, you don't decide to turn right in 200 feet because that's close enough. No, you're not looking for a deeper meaning. You're looking for the precise meaning. And the only way that you can get that for the most part is just to be consistent. If God says something in the Old Testament about what he's going to do and then we see it in the New Testament, don't look for a newer meaning for what he spoke of or what he was going to do from the Old Testament. God does not think that deeply or that highly of our intellect that might shock some people, but it's the truth. Another common mistake is number two, ignoring the context. That is, who wrote it? Who has it been written to? Why is this book being written? Why is this being stated? And then also, when? That's just as important. If I were to say, for example, seek and you shall find well then you can take that a lot of different ways because you don't have a context to what's being stated. But when we read the passage or the story that Jesus is telling about a friend who comes out of town and goes to his neighbor's house and asks for something to eat, the friend says, no, everything is shut up. And what does he say? He says that though that he won't get up and give him something to eat or bread for his friend because he's his neighbor, but because of his neighbor's persistence, he will get up and get it. Therefore I say, seek and you shall find it. And then we ask people, what does that mean? They say, well, oh, he's saying be persistent. And so by getting a fuller context of what's being stated we can understand more clearly what's being stated. Now these next two examples are probably two of the biggest reasons why people struggle sometimes or have a hard time in their Bible study. Certainly two of the biggest mistakes that they can make. Unwilling to be wrong or put another way unwilling to learn something new. By the way, that's the reason for the name of this ministry, smart Christians, not because of what you know, but because of recognizing what you don't know. And so what do you do? You turn and search the scriptures to find out like the Bereans did. When Paul comes and makes a statement, the Bereans, what do they do? They went and search the scriptures to see if what Paul said was so. My understanding on spiritual gifts, my understanding on the church, my understanding on salvation and a few of the topics have been changed because I finally embraced the fact that it's possible for me to be wrong. Who knew? And so I believe that everyone would do themselves a favor by simply embracing the concept that I can be wrong as a matter of fact, not that I can be wrong, but instead look for areas where you were wrong. Actively search out and tell yourself I might be wrong about this. Why? Because it's not a negative, it's a positive because you end up learning something new. Something that Paul says that doesn't get a lot of attention, I think it's worth noting, when he is preparing to die in 2 Timothy chapter four, notice what he says in verse 13 when he's telling them to bring his cloak and so forth. He says, when you come, bring the cloak which I left at Troyes with carpas. And look what he says, the books, especially the Parchments. Now, what were these books? What were these Parchments? We don't really know what they were. Doubtful that they were some sort of comic books, some sort of fictional tale, but likely Paul wanted to either do some readings, some research, some studying. We have no idea. But he valued reading and studying even at his death, which should tell us something that studying is of the utmost importance, even for someone like Paul, who is getting ready to die. Because who knows, perhaps at even our late age in life, we've been saved for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Who knows how long and we still feel like we can learn something. Many of us say that we feel like we can learn, but a lot of times we don't really believe that because we are so unwilling to learn something new or more to the point, so unwilling to be wrong. And this last one didn't get a lot of attention, but you see it a lot and we don't think about it. As a matter of fact, this is probably one of the biggest cause for a lot of bad doctrine in the Bible or in the body. That is making the scriptures about you. Avoid reading yourself into the scriptures because guess what? The writer or the speaker did not think about you when they were saying what they were saying or writing what they were saying. They were speaking to a specific audience. Now does that mean that you could not glean something from that? Sure, as a matter of fact, it's vitally important that we understand the difference between primary application and secondary application. A primary application is something that everyone can apply and it's intended for the entirety of the body, even if it wasn't written specifically to you, but it might be given to the entirety of the church. Though this person might be the one that he's spoken to individually, you are still supposed to get something. In other words, some sort of pastoral or church instruction. A secondary application is an event that happens that has nothing to do with us, but we can learn either about the character and nature of God, how he reacts in certain things or how he moves about because of certain things or maybe punishments that can be expected by certain people if they do certain things. What is a sin and an example of someone committing a sin and then the punishment for that. But we need to remember that we are not the heroes that are in the Bible. We may want some of the same, maybe great faith or some of the same abilities, endowment that God has given to some of these people, some of the apostles. Maybe we would like to think of ourselves as someone who's our very shadow would heal someone else, but that's not us. There's a tendency to want some promises about Israel to be for us when that might not be the case because if you want the promises of that group, then you're gonna also have to take the curses of that group. Because the Bible doesn't mention your name specifically, that means that God has forgotten about you. Avoid the temptation of making yourself the feature of the scriptures. You're not David, you're not Moses, you're not Paul, you're not Peter. You are who you are and God has you where you are to fulfill whatever his purpose is in your life, but you do not have to go and take from someone else's story because you admire them to make it your own. Because remember, a lot of these very same people that we admire, we admire their successes, their conquest, we don't admire their failures, we don't admire their suffering. Many of these people died for the gospel and many of us don't want to do the same thing. And you may not have to, but the point is, do not make yourself the person that the Bible is speaking of when it was not. And so I think if you take those four things and just kind of incorporate them into your Bible study, then I think those would help a lot. Now, one of the things I want to also talk about is as you're reading, to get a good understanding, just one little extra note, make sure that you also have some of the proper study tools that kind of go along with it. Avoid the temptation of, since you don't want to make it about you, to interpret words that are in the Bible in the English. I understand that for the most part we are English speaking people. The Bible was not written in English. Again, that's not making the Bible about us, we want to make it about who it is about. And so if we want to look up something in the Bible, you don't have to be a Hebrew scholar or a Greek scholar, but try to look up the words, the meanings and so forth in the languages. Some of the tools that I would recommend that are pretty easy, I would recommend you getting yourself a good lexicon. This one I happen to like pretty well because it's pretty easy, though I have several other Greek lexicons. This is the analytical lexicon of the Greek contestant. This is by William Mount. Pretty easy to look at and understand. And then I've got the Hebrew lexicon, concise Hebrew and Aramaic lexicon of the Old Testament. Also pretty easy. There's some other lexicons that I have. Get yourself a good lexicon. Hebrew and Greek to kind of understand some of the words you're going to go over if you want to do a work study. Using these and avoiding these other four mistakes that I've mentioned, I think will take your Bible study to the next level.