Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Before I get rolling, you should know that your Christmas offering is at work, okay? We got the new lights installed over the weekend. I think they look amazing. I think Steve and the team did a phenomenal job. We had some volunteers here sacrificing some time and a specialist in who's running the lights for us this week. So we are very fancy. And we're very grateful for all their time. So let's say thank you to them. And if you gave to the Christmas offering at all, then you helped with this. So thank you so much as we continue just to kind of take steps forward in excellence. We're starting a new series this week called Best Practices. And to start the series, I wanted to take you back to, I think it was about 11 years ago, in 2008, I'm on a trip to Honduras. I taught at a school at the time. I was the high school Bible teacher and the chaplain, those poor young minds. And the trip that we took every week was, or every year was to Honduras. And so because I was a chaplain, I got to go. And the guy that led it was a guy who lived in the States named Mark Searcy. He's actually, he grew up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina. I think I said that right, tobacco. And he became, at the age of 19, he got married and he felt compelled to be a missionary. And so he moved to Haiti to farm there and to be a missionary in Haiti and ended up fleeing because they feared for their lives. The government was kind of chasing them down. And so they flew out in the middle of the night. And then they became missionaries in Honduras. And then at this season of life, I think he was in his 50s at the time, he led trips back down to Honduras with some of the people that he met down there. And so we partnered up with Mark Searcy. And I loved Mark. He has an easy laugh. He's a good old boy. He always had in his chest pocket a miniature bottle of Tabasco sauce for any of the food that they might eat or encounter in Honduras to kind of just make it more palatable. Like, he was a good dude. And the first night we were there, Mark says, hey, I'm going to do a Bible study. So whoever wants, just come on up to my room. We'll sit out on the porch and we'll do a Bible study. I'm like, great, I'm in. So I go up there and a couple of the kids go up there and dude starts teaching out of the Bible and he opens up his Bible. And I don't know about you, but when other people open up their Bible, I'm always like, I want to see how marked up is this thing, right? Because I heard one time, show me a Bible that's falling apart, and I'll show you a life that isn't. So I wanted to look at his Bible and go, man, what's in there? And what I saw is that it was marked up to high heaven. There was highlighters, four different color highlighters all over the place. And he starts to teach in this southern draw and this easy speak and kind of the occasional giggling. And I'm loving it. I'm eating it up. This dude knows his stuff. He knows his Bible. And I've been in Christian school. I've got a seminary degree. And I'm listening to him and I'm like, I've never heard anybody explain the Bible like this. I'm all in. And then he finished, and he said, any questions y'all have, we can just stay up. I love God's Word. We can just stay up talking about it as long as you want to. I kept that dude up until 2 in the morning, 3 nights in a row, asking him questions about the Bible. Until every night, he was like, Nate, I've got to go to bed. And I was like, okay, me too. And then we'd just be exhausted the next day. I loved it so much. And his knowledge was so effusive and so easy. Any question you asked him, Mark, what'd you think about this? What about this? How do I make sense of this? He would go, okay. And he would know the story to go to or the exact reference to go to. He didn't have to take his phone like I do and Google that. Let me Google those keywords. Oh, that's in Colossians. No, he just knew and he would turn there. And then he had this cross-reference system. Everything that was highlighted had notes out to the side and those were other verses that talked about the same thing. And so he'd off the top of his head, flip to a page, read you that verse, talk to you about it. And then he'd go like, well, actually it would be helpful if we could do this one and this one and this one. And so he'd flip over and just verse after verse after verse. And I found out that there was a method to his coordination. Each highlighter meant something different. And it was amazing. I loved hearing the Bible for Mark Searcy because he knew it so well. And you probably have known people like that in your life. Men or women who were such students of God's Word, who loved it so much that you felt like you could ask them any question and they could give you a verse to help you answer that question. And I think as believers, whenever we hear that somebody has a knowledge of the Bible like that, we all go, I wish I knew the Bible like that. Don't we? I wish my Bible looked like that. I wish people could ask me a question about spirituality and I could just give you a verse. Anything. I wish I knew the Bible like that. And I think that we know that if we did know the Bible like that, that we would be better at life. We would be better parents. Maybe, I mean, growing up, my dad, if we missed Sunday, if we were traveling on a Sunday, it's not like we got to lay out of church. We had just family church, which was way lamer than normal church. So I wanted to be in town on Sundays just to avoid my dad's sermons. But he would give these sermons and he knew the Bible and it stuck with me all these years later that it mattered enough to him to open up scripture and continue to teach it to us. And for some of us, if we thought of the idea of doing family church, of teaching our family the Bible, of opening it up for our children, we would probably be intimidated by that. We might not know where to turn or what to do, and maybe we wish we could do that. From time to time, we'll talk about doing a devotional in the house. Maybe we wish we could do that. Maybe we wish that when we opened up, that when we went to work and people would ask us questions about what we think and what we believe and how do I deal with this situation, I bet we wish we knew where to turn. I think when we hear about people who know God's Word really well, it's a very natural and common thing for us to think to ourselves, I wish I did too. But the question really becomes then, how can we do that if we don't study it all the time? Those highlights in Mark's Bible, and they were from cover to cover, they didn't happen in a day. That was years of waking up every day and spending time in God's Word, spending time in prayer. What I say are the two most important habits that any person can develop ever. That's years of effort. That's years of learning. That's years of seeking things out. That's years of prioritizing studying his Bible. How can we ever know it, those people that you admire? How can you ever know the Bible like them if we don't study it like them? How can we ever know God's Word like that if we don't read it every day? How can we ever be truly helpful, as helpful as we could possibly be to those in our circles of influence, to those on our tennis team, to those that we work with, to those that we happen to hang out with or are in some club with, or how can we ever truly be as helpful to our neighbors as possible if we don't know God's word to help them and how can we know God's word if we don't prioritize it and study it every day? We know this to be true. As a matter of fact, I think that to a room full of what are probably, I'm guessing, mostly Christians, whenever you talk about reading the Bible, you get the exact same reaction as when somebody talks about their diet, right? You have a friend, and they're losing weight. They're just withering away. And you notice them, and you're like, yo, what are you doing? You look great. You're going to have to buy all new clothes. What's going on? And they tell you about their diet. Oh, I'm doing the keto diet. I'm doing, I'm no carbs, no sugar. I'm just, I'm the starvation diet. I haven't eaten in three weeks. Like whatever it is, like some new thing, I'm doing this diet. What do you always say to yourself or sometimes out loud to them? I should do that. You see somebody and they're just looking healthy. What are you doing? They're like, I took up swimming. I'm running. I'm running with a group of people three times a week. It's really great. What do you always say to yourself? I should do that. Right? Because we know it's good for us. Somebody, maybe you're talking to a friend and they're telling you about this new budgeting technique. Man, me and my husband, me and my wife, we've been kind of budgeting. We're doing this and this and this. And you always, personal finances, we go, I should do that. When we hear, hey, we should read the Bible, all of us in our heads go, I should do that. No one's here to argue with me about that. As a matter of fact, I've worked really hard to not let it out that this week was going to be about reading the Bible because I was afraid that we would hear that it was about reading the Bible and go, oh, yeah, I know. Like, I should do that, right? And we know all the verses. We know what Scripture says about reading Scripture. We say that it's sharper than any two-edged sword, that it penetrates soul and spirit, bone and marrow. We know that the word of God is living and active. We know that God's word will not return null and void. Whatever we invest in it, we will get a return on that investment. We know that we are supposed to hide it in our hearts, that we might not sin against God. There's this idea that by memorizing the Bible, that by consuming it, that by learning it, it somehow operates as a preventative so that we don't do the things that we don't want to do anyways. We know that. We know that we're supposed to hide it in our heart. We know that we're supposed to put it on our walls and instill it in our children and teach it to the next generation. Like, listen, guys, we know the verses about reading the Bible. And if you don't, if those were new to you, then now you do. We know that we're supposed to do that. As a matter of fact, if the point of this morning was only, hey, go read the Bible more, literally, I think all I'd have to do is come up here and let this be the sermon. Hey, this is part one of best practices for this week. You should read the Bible. Let's pray. And honestly, tell me if I'm lying, 10 of you would be like, yeah, he's right. And you'd go home and you'd do it. Because we know that this is what we need to do. So to me, the more interesting question becomes, if we know we're supposed to do this, and none of us here would argue with me that it's super important to invest ourselves in learning Scripture, then why don't we do it? Why aren't we better at it? That's one of the church's dirty little secrets. I don't know if you know this, and I have to be careful about that. I'm sure there's more that are worse. But one of them is this. Nobody's very good at this. There are some pockets, very few heroes, who have made it a habit and do it daily and have for years. And those are the people who are rock stars that I want to be like. There are others we've experienced, this is where I would put myself, pockets of success where we have months and years where we're very good, and then we have days and weeks where we just forget or we get busy or we just aren't interested then, and we fall away. Everybody struggles with this discipline. I know this to be true because I've spent enough time in ministry and enough time in church that I've stopped being surprised at people who tell me they're going to start reading their Bible. People who we respect, who seem to have it together, and very much do, and are leaders in the church, who will come to me privately, and not just here and just my general experience. I don't want you to start thinking, naming names, like who's buddies with him that doesn't read the Bible. I don't want you to do that. But people are coming, will come to me and be like, hey, because of this experience, I just want you to know, like, I'm really going to get back into God's word every day. And earlier on in my ministry, I would be kind of surprised, like, what? You don't read the Bible? I thought I was the only hypocrite. You're like me? I've talked to pastors. It breaks my heart. I've talked to pastors who are like, yeah, I don't read the Bible every day. My sermon prep is my devotion. I'm like, bro, that's not good for you. So one of the secrets of the church that I just wanted to be honest about is nobody's good at it. Very few people maintain that discipline for a long time. So if you're here and your first thought to, hey, we should read the Bible more, and your first thought was, I should do that. Listen, everybody in the room feels the way that you do. Who's a believer? Everybody feels that way. So to me, the more interesting question is, if we all agree that we should do it, and we know the verses about it, and there's really not a new angle to approach you to convince you to do it, then the more interesting question is, why don't we? So I put a question out on Facebook this week, and I've been talking to people. Hey, we know that we should read the Bible. Why don't we do it? Y'all don't know this, but Facebook's one of the best sermon prep tools that there is. And I got a bunch of interesting answers. And they kind of fall into two categories. One category of reasons kind of tells on our motives a little bit. And the other categories of reasons are really things that probably should be discussed and handled. And so we're going to look at both of them. But I saw a lot of people say, I'm too busy. I just, I want to do it. I know that I should. I just, I'm busy. And that's legit. We're all busy. If you're not busy, we are all jealous of you. We all have more to do than we want to do. We all feel rushed every day. That's life. That's how it goes. And then when we have the down moments, when we can finally rest, we just want to shut everything off. That's not, maybe we don't want to run to Scripture. So some people said that they were busy. Some people said, and I thought this one was particularly interesting, that it's more easy to be comfortable than it is to be convicted. They kind of expressed this idea of, if I open the Bible and read it, I'm going to feel bad about my life. And I don't really need that right now, so I'm going to leave it be. And I thought, honestly, I'm not trying to be overly dramatic. I just thought how sad that to some people we've reduced Scripture to this source of conviction and not a source of hope. And we forget that it gives us promises and good news and offers us freedom in what is best for us, that hope is found in Scripture. And what a shame when we reduce it to the source of conviction, which, by the way, is because that's what's best for us if it does convict, because God has a heart to serve us, right? So some people said conviction. Some people said that they were busy. Some people just said, it's not interesting. I've read it before, you know, like I've read it before. I know it. I know what Ephesians says. And so now I just read other stuff. But one person even, they asked a question and I thought that this was really telling. One person said, you know, I really don't like to read, which is pretty legit. There are some people who just don't like to read and that's fine. I mean, I get that. We got to, that a roadblock that we've got to find a way past. But he said, I don't like to read. It's just not my thing. So I like to try to listen to the Bible in my car sometimes. Does that count? And I thought, what an interesting question. Does that count? Does it count for what? To whom? What score are we keeping here? Who's tracking that with you? Does that count? And you know it really told on him, didn't it? And it tells on us too. Because it's a question I've asked and I've heard before. If I read one verse a day, does that count? If I remember a verse and I say it out loud, does that count? If I read one chapter, does that count? If the chapter's short and it only takes me two minutes, does that count? Count for what? What are you doing? Who are you trying to please when you do that, when you ask if it counts? And it really tells on our motives, doesn't it? All of those questions, all of those excuses so far. When we're asking, does this count? What we're revealing is that we're really reading the Bible out of a sense of ought or duty. I'm doing this because I should, right? We talk about reading the Bible more, and the very first thing we experience is, oh, I should do that. Not, I miss that. I want to do that. I long for that. It's, I should do that. Like do your taxes or not eat meat. Things that really stink. I should do that. And that's what we relegate the Bible to, is this thing that we should do. And so it becomes this duty that we perform out of a sense of ought. And by white knuckle discipline, we get up early and we read the Bible. We get up early, we set our alarm. It's a big thing. We make coffee. We sit down with our Bible or our app or whatever it is, and we read it for five minutes. We're like, oh, gosh, that was great. I need to text out some verses, right? It's this thing that we do out of the sense of ought or obligation. And I don't know how you work, but whenever I do something out of a sense of ought, I always end up resenting that thing. You ever joined a Bible study because a friend asked you to? And you didn't really want to, but you didn't want to tell them no either. And so you did it. And every week that dang thing rolls around. You're like, has it been a week yet? Is it really Wednesday? And you dread it and you complain and you go and it's fine. And you come home and you're like, I'm glad that's over. That stinks, man. You ever volunteer out of a sense of ought? You don't like that. That's no fun. You dread it. The things that I do because I feel like I should out of a sense of ought that I just make myself do out of white-knuckle discipline, I never enjoy them, they never stick, and they never are around for very long. And so it's no wonder if what's motivating us to read the Bible is this sense of ought and should that we fall away from that discipline. It's no wonder that it doesn't work, right? So really we have to start asking, well, what's the right reason to read the Bible? Because I would tell you, if you leave here and you feel a sense of ought that you should, then I would just tell you don't yet. Because I think the only real motive that will sustain us and enliven us as we try to make this a discipline in our lives is to be motivated by a deep desire to know God. And I would ask that question to you. And I think that this is the question for the series as we go through this series called Best Practices. Every week we're going to look at a different spiritual discipline. Worship next week and then prayer and then some of the more forgotten disciplines. Some of the best practices that we can have in life and in spirituality. And the driving question for all of these practices really is do you want to know God? Do you have a heart for God? Mark wanted to know God. He wasn't trying to become smarter. He wasn't trying to be good at teaching. He wasn't trying to be an effective missionary or an effective pastor. Mark wanted to know God, and his Bible was evidence of that. The way that it gushed out of him when he got to talk about God was evidence of that. He wanted to know God and so he dove into God's word every day to get to know him better because he understood that there's no better way to get to know our creator God than to read the word that he left us that thousands of people have died for that's been preserved for us over the centuries so that we could have the living God there as we read him. He wanted to know God. Those nights staying up till two, those were pure nights. My motive was to know God. I had never heard the Bible like this. I had never heard it explained like this. I want more, I want more. I want more. And in that moment, it wasn't about being a more effective Bible teacher or prepping for some role down the road. It was just about, I want to know God. And when you wake up every day and one of your prevailing interests in drive that day is, I just want to know God better today. You're going to dive into God's word. And when you're through, you're not going to ask anybody, did that count? Because no one's keeping score. Then the question is, do I know God a little bit better? Do I understand him a little bit better? And so I would say that for many of us, this might be where you can stop this morning and just pray a simple prayer. If you're sitting there and you're taking an inventory of yourself, do I want to know God? First of all, be honest about that. There have been plenty of times in my life, some while I've been at Grace, where if you sat me down and said, Nate, do you want to know God right now? I would have to be honest and go, no, just don't. Which is why one of my regular prayers I prayed at some point every year of my life, if not more frequently than that, is God, help me to want you more. And for some of you, that's all you need today, is to just commit to praying that prayer. God, I don't want you right now. Help me to want you more. Help me to desire you more. Give me a drive that wants to know you, that makes me want to get up and open your word. Give me a drive that wants to understand the Bible more. God, I want to know you. I long for you. If that's not there, the disciplines that we're going to talk about for the next four weeks, those will fade. That's the only proper motive is the desire to know God more. And so I would say for a lot of us, it starts there. Father, give me a desire for you so that I will get up and pursue you more. And these best practices that we're talking about, I think they're best practices because they ignite your desire for God by your continued participation in them, in scripture reading and in worship and in prayer and in the other disciplines. They ignite your desire for God and then they deepen your knowledge of God. That's why they're the best practices. That's why we're going to walk through them for the next four weeks. But the fundamental question to the series, to all of those things, is do you want to know God? For some of you, the take-home needs to be, Father, I want to know you more. Help me. Now, there are others here, I think probably a lot, who you would say, yeah, I want to know God. I mean, I could want to know him more, but I want to know God. I genuinely do. I genuinely want to understand Scripture better than I already do. There's just some things that make it hard for me because I do think that there are some legitimate hangups and some roadblocks that need to be removed so that we can make this a part of our life. Things like when I read it, it's hard for me to understand. I just don't understand. There's big words or there's words I'm unfamiliar with, and I just, when I read it, I don't, it doesn't make sense to me. It's kind of out of context. I don't get it, whatever it is. We'll talk about that. Sometimes that's a translation issue. For some people, one of the comments I got, and I could totally relate to this, was, you know, when I just read words on the page and process them on my own, it doesn't really light me up. What lights me up is getting to talk about it with others. That helps me. Sometimes I come alive in conversation and hearing how you experienced it and getting to bounce reactions off of you. That's really helpful to me. I relate to that. I have a men's Bible study. We've taken a break for the summer because I don't like them that much. But when we start meeting again in the fall, all we do every week, particularly this guy, all we do every week is we read two chapters of the Bible and then we get together and I go, okay, what'd you learn? What'd you see? What'd you experience? What do you have questions about? We start to talk about God's word. So if you're somebody who's a processor who needs to talk about this with other people, get in a group where you can do that. Sometimes that's a legitimate need. One person said, you know, I like to be able to read the passage, but as it's just isolated there on its own, I really don't know what to make of it. I would love it if there was some sort of an explanation of the passage next to it so that I could consume them together. That's a devotional. What you need is a devotional. They're all over the place. Go online, type in devotional, they'll come up and buy one. If you need help or a guide with those, let me know. Email me, write it on your communication card, and I'll follow up with you. But a devotional, somebody, an author has opened it up, they list a verse, and then they have information next to the verse that helps you reflect on what you just read. Maybe that's what you need. If you're having a hard time understanding it, it could possibly be your translation. And this is a little tedious, but every time I talk about this in a Bible study, everybody who's there with me kind of really pays attention. And so my thought is that maybe we don't know this in church, And so I'm going to share this with you. If it's boring, I'm sorry. But when we start talking about Bible translations, there's really three major ways to do it. There's word for word, there's sentence for sentence, and there's thought for thought. The Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek and in Aramaic. The New Testament was written in this thing called Koine Greek, which means common Greek, which is a really solid argument against the King James Version. I'm just saying. As a matter of fact, if you don't understand it and you're reading the King James Version, stop it. That's a hard one to understand, and it doesn't really, it's not super helpful. But the three different kinds of translations, word for word, sentence for sentence, thought for thought. Word for word, what the translator does when they're trying to translate it from Greek to English or whatever the original language was in that verse to English, is they're just looking at the word. They're going, what does this word mean? What's the best possible English word for this word? But if you've ever taken a foreign language, you know that sometimes the sentence structure is not the same. Subject, verb, order, and adjective order is not the same all the time as it is in English. And so you have to minimally reorganize the words so that the sentence still means the same thing. But a word-for-word translation is trying the best they can to stay true to whatever this word is. A great example of word-for-word is the NASB, the New American Standard Bible. That's probably the most accurate translation going right now. I think you can make an argument for Holman. I'm not sure. I haven't looked at it in a while. But that's word for word. It's not very readable. If you look up something in the NASB, it's kind of hard to read. It's less understandable, but the words are right. So if you're doing a Bible study and you really want to know what does this verse say, look it up in the NASB. It can be very helpful. Then there's sentence for sentence. Sentence for sentence is they take it and they go, okay, this is what this sentence means in the original language. What's the best way to restate this in English so that people can read it, but it also stays true to what was written? A good example of this is the NIV or the ESV. I preach from the ESV and I read the ESV. Those are sentence for sentence, a little bit more readable, but while maintaining accuracy. And then there's thought for thought where they take like a whole verse and the translator says, what is this verse saying? And what's the best way to say that in English? A good example of this is the NLT, or the new living. If you are someone who's never really read the Bible regularly, and it is hard to understand, one of my first encouragements for you would be to start with the new living. You'll pick one up, use that filter on your Bible app. We're going to talk about those in a second. Use that filter there and choose the NLT, and it makes for a more readable, easily understood experience. Sometimes it's just a translation issue. And then some of you may wonder about something like the message. That's not a Bible translation. The guy that did it, Eugene Peterson, said this is not a translation. It's just to help. So it's good to read for overall comprehension, but you should always balance that with something that is an actual translation. So it could just be a translation issue that's a roadblock for us. For those that feel like we need more or you don't know what to read, that's a big question too. I want to read the Bible. I don't know what to read. I do a reading plan, but sometimes, Nate, those stink. So what else could I possibly read? There's an app called YouVersion. Some of us know, a lot of us know about it. Some of us don't. If you do know about it, man, you should be using this thing. It's called YouVersion. It's the Bible on your phone. They have it in the Apple store. And then for snooty Android users, they have it in the Google Play thing. Okay. So they have it there too. It's everywhere. You download it and it's the Bible on your phone in every possible translation ever. So you can figure out one that works for you. And then they have literally hundreds of reading plans. Some last seven days, three days, some last a whole year on godly womanhood, godly manhood, how to be a better husband, how to be a better wife, how to be single, how to be a better parent, how to be a better kid, how to be a better employee or employer, what the Bible has to say about grace or faith or mercy or love, chronological through the Old Testament or through the New Testament. You can find any number of things there, and it will tell you what to read every day when you wake up. And you can keep track of it, and you can take notes in it, and it'll keep track of your notes. It's a phenomenal tool. It's hugely helpful. And one of the best things it'll do, for those of you with commutes who don't like reading, it will read the Bible to you. You don't have to do anything special. You just open it up, and at the bottom of every chapter, there's a play button. You hit that, and it'll just start reading it to you. So you can listen while you walk or while you're in the car or whenever. It's hugely, hugely helpful. So here's what I want us to do this morning. Everybody, when you walked in, you were at least offered a bulletin. I want everybody to take that out right now. If you don't have a bulletin, you can use the back of a communication card, and you can bear down on the Bible that's in front of you. I'm going to give you a little homework. I know that it's summertime and that you didn't expect this and some of you are mad at me right now, but I'm giving you homework and I'm going to ask for everyone to participate because if you're the cool person in your row who doesn't participate, then other people are going to be empowered by your freedom and they're not going to do it either. And so we want everybody to try do this together. So write stuff down, even if you don't mean it, okay? Here's the homework for everybody. Three questions for you today. The first one, what's your goal? What's my goal? As I think about reading the Bible, as I mentally kind of go, I need to do that. What's your goal? What's a reasonable goal for you? It might be to simply, I'm going to pray every day that God will help me to want him more. It may be, I'm going to read my Bible every day this week. I would encourage you to make a goal over this series. It's month long that we're going to be four weeks in this series. I want to set a goal. Maybe it's I read a book of the Bible a week. Maybe it's I read a chapter a day. Maybe it's I read a verse a day. Set a goal for you that's reasonable. Don't get like, don't get your eyes big at the buffet and then bring home more than you can stand, like reasonable. Second, what's my plan? What's my plan? How am I going to accomplish this goal? This is where you need to think through, what are the roadblocks for me? What are the reasons I don't read the Bible more? Is it time? Is it interest? Is it that I need people to talk to? Is it that I don't understand? Is it that I need a devotional? What is it for you? What's your plan? How are you going to make sure that you accomplish this goal? And then last, who are you going to tell? Who are you going to tell? We all know we've made private commitments in our hearts to do things before, and if we just keep it between us and God, we have an incredible propensity to not do that thing. So who are you going to tell? Who are you going to invite into this to hold you accountable? And I would challenge you, if you're married, do not list your spouse there. That's not good. Because listen, I don't know about your marriage, but you probably don't need the added tension of now accountability partners for this new thing on top of everything else. Like, hey, did you pray today? No, but when I do, I'm gonna pray for your attitude. Okay, all right. So don't do that. A friend, somebody who can help you out. Keep track of that together. So today, I hope that there's some emails and some texts going out. I hope that you'll make a commitment to this, that you'll make a plan for this, and that you guys will hold one another accountable. Incidentally, I had this thought this morning. I'm just going to throw this out here. I think sometimes we don't know what to read. We have kind of a loose idea of what we'd like to read, but if we open the Bible, we don't really know what we're approaching. There's narrative books that tell stories. There's books that help us with theology. There's books for wisdom and poetry. There's different books for different things. I thought about typing out summaries of the different categories of the books of the Bible so that you could kind of use as a go-to guide of I'm trying to think about this, what would be helpful? Or as I look at Ephesians, where does that fit in and what is that going to help me do? If you're interested in that, write that on a communication card or email me. And if I get 10 people who are interested, I'll do it. If I get nine, Google. But that's the goal. Take whatever your next step is to make Scripture more a part of your life. If it's, God, I want to want you more, pray that prayer. If it's taking a simple step to overcome an obstacle, do that. Get somebody else involved. And let's be one of the very few churches, I believe, that has a whole bunch of people who are actually good at this because we want God more and we've chosen to prioritize this in our life. All right, I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna move into a time of communion. Father, we love you. God, I know for sure from talking to the people of grace, we want to know you more. A lot of us do. God, I pray that for those of us who might not be feeling that right now, who might just kind of be gliding through life spiritually, that you would ignite in us and in them a desire to know you more. God, I pray that you would help me work in my heart through your spirit to want to want you more. Lord, I pray that as we move through this series, that we would instill these disciplines and practices in our life out of a desire to know you, that you would change the way that we relate to you, that we would walk with you more deeply, that we would love one another more purely, that we would offer one another as a result of these practices more grace and more patience and more earnest and hospitable love. God, I pray that you would use this series in our lives to draw us more nearly to you. I pray for those who do have a goal and who have a plan. God, let them execute it. Give them the courage and the discipline to see it through. Give us grace for ourselves when we mess it up. But God, I pray that we would walk back in here this next week and the week after that victorious in the commitments that we've made. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.