SPEAKER_01
0:20 There's my handwriting on the pages. 0:22 There are plenty of notes in the margins. 0:24 There are crossouts, there are misspellings. 0:26 There are verses underlined so hard that the ink bled through to the other side of the page. 0:31 There are dates for my notes, and my boys will be able to see verses that broke me wide open decades prior. 0:40 They're going to see evidence, not of a finished product, but of a man that is being sanctified, a man in the middle of the fight, and I'm leaving that fight to my sons. 0:50 So, guys, I don't know what it is, but my entire life I had issues writing in books. 0:54 So I could never highlight or write in my textbooks. 0:57 It just felt wrong. 0:58 And then when I became a Christian as a 15-year-old, I was especially nervous about writing inside of a Bible. 1:04 It just never really felt right to me. 1:06 I felt like I was forcing myself to do it. 1:08 But I remember being surrounded by people whose Bibles looked like paper crafts, right? 1:12 I mean, multiple different shades of highlighter, all kinds of writing inside, and I just couldn't believe it. 1:17 But just about everyone I know that has a deep understanding of scripture has a Bible that looks kind of like that. 1:25 So years ago, I invested in a couple of sets of Bible journals from Crossway. 1:30 So it's, you know, one volume per book of the Bible. 1:32 You know, the verses are on the left side of the page, and then there's blank note pages on the right side of the page and in the back of each of these little journals. 1:39 And you can buy the entire sets, or you can even buy just individual books of the Bible. 1:43 And so as I am studying through different books of the Bible, or as different books are being taught at the church that I'm at, I'm able to take copious notes without any personal fear of defiling the Bible, right? 1:53 So these are just my notes. 1:55 This isn't, you know, polished scholarly commentary. 1:58 Like these are my real notes, my real thoughts, my real feelings, my real realizations. 2:02 You know, it's even my questions that I don't have answers for yet. 2:06 So I think Psalm 78 is pertinent here to kind of what I'm discussing. 2:10 So I'll read verses four through eight of Psalm 78. 2:14 We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done. 2:24 He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his 2:41 commandments, and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God. 2:52 So read that little phrase again. 2:56 So I think it's pretty clear that the psalmist here assumes that there is a temptation to keep our spiritual lives private, but he is naming that as a failure. 3:04 The command is to tell people about our faith so that the hope that we have gets planted in children who aren't even born yet. 3:10 So if you keep your scriptural journals and all the truths you've learned to yourself, you have done nothing for the next generation. 3:16 And if you don't even have the journals, then what are you passing down, right? 3:19 So a journal that they can open and read after you're gone is doing exactly what Psalm 78 commands. 3:25 And then if we go to 2 Timothy, we're going to go there for the second time this week again. 3:29 This is the Apostle Paul. 3:30 He's writing towards the end of his life, he's passing down wisdom to his mentee Timothy. 3:34 He says this in 2 Timothy 3, 14 and 15. 3:37 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. 3:51 So that phrase in the middle, knowing from whom you learned it, is important. 3:55 So Paul makes a point of naming the source. 3:58 So back in chapter one of 2 Timothy, he reminds Timothy that his faith for his faith first lived in his grandmother Lois and then in his mother Eunice, you know, a faith that was visibly passed hand to hand through the family. 4:09 And I'm working to make sure that my sons are able to say the same thing. 4:13 They will know exactly from whom they learned about these biblical truths, and they will be able to point to my handwriting with dates and the margins of the actual book of the Bible where I'm wrestling when I wrote it. 4:26 And here's a mistake that I see a bunch of Christian dads make. 4:28 So we tell our kids what to believe, but we never let them see the process that got us there. 4:35 We just hand them conclusions with none of the wrestling attached. 4:39 You know, so here's the thing. 4:40 I mean, conclusions without wrestling doesn't really transfer. 4:44 They just sound like rules and commands, right? 4:46 And we should let our kids see the mess a little bit. 4:49 We should let them see the prayer that we wrote in the margins during an incredibly tough period of our lives where we were lamenting, where we were mad at God. 4:57 I mean, guys, that's not weakness. 4:58 That's one of the real apologetics that you know you could ever hand to them. 5:03 You're telling them that they can develop spiritual resilience, real resilience, and they're going to be able to point to you and your journals as a good example of that. 5:12 And when they read those margins, make sure the destination is unmistakable. 5:16 Make sure that every note and every underline and every wrestling match in those pages point towards one person, Jesus Christ. 5:25 Make sure it points to the fact that he was crucified and he was raised from the dead three days later, and that believing in that is worth the cost of following him. 5:33 So that's not a verse that you write down once and put on the wall. 5:37 It's something to be reckoned with on every page of your journal.