Deuteronomy 6:6-9 Bible Study | Episode 865

January 31, 2025

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Deuteronomy 6:6-9  Bible Study | Episode #865

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Applying God's word to your daily life.

Hi, this is Chad Harrison and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life.

I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up.

His word to you and allow you.

To see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today in Jesus name.

Well, good morning. Welcome to Lake Community Church's morning Bible study. We're in Deuteronomy chapter 6 this morning, and we're in the verses that are right after the greatest commandment. The greatest commandment here is hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one or the Lord alone.

The word is is not there it is. It is one word, and it says. Best way to. To translate it. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is long or singular.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

And then it's followed by these verses which are really, really, I think.

Well, they're the discipleship verses. They're the verses that teach us how God wants us to figure these things out.

It's a methodology, really. It's the methodology by which. How do I live out the greatest commandment? If I'm going to do the greatest commandment, what do I do to bring myself to a place where I actually am doing the greatest commandment?

If I. This is the greatest one. What I do to make myself do those things. And he says, and these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.

Notice he says, I want this to be the. The. Your heart. I want this to be your nature, your character. Okay? This is who you are. This is how you live.

This is. This is the essence of yourself. Now remember, the reason he wants this to be the essence of us is because it's the essence of Him. God wants us to have his character and his nature.

And so the only way for us to have his character and his nature to be his essence. The only way for that to be. Be the case is, is for us to have his heart.

And that's a problem because our hearts are always wandering. Our hearts are always turning toward evil. No one is righteous. No, not one. Each is turned to his own wicked Ways.

We. We know that. And so how do. How is it that. Because salvation is not saving my flesh, my flesh is not going to be saved. Salvation is not saving my spirit because my spirit doesn't need saving.

It's born again. It's perfect. I don't need. I don't need for my spirit to. To be saved. What is being saved? My soul. And my soul is being saved. That's my heart, that's my passions, and my mind, my intellect.

And when you combine those two, your. Your intellectual thoughts and your heart, your. Your emotions, your passions, when you combine those two together, well, you have your soul and your soul.

You're being saved from your soul's wandering, your soul's wickedness, your soul's desire for evil. For not God.

When you. When you. When your soul is being. Is being brought toward that. Toward not God, you desire things that are not from God.

When that's the case for you in your life, when that goes on for you in the way you live, you. You.

You need God to change that. There has to be a process by which that happens. Okay? And the way that happens, the way that process works is you've got to be saved.

There's. You got to be brought back. How do we do that? Well, he says that they need to be in your heart.

So how do I do that? Well, first you teach them diligently to your children, meaning your whole family's lifestyle, is to know God's word. All right? And you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as a frontlets between your eyes, meaning they should be on your forehead.

You shall write them on the doorpost of your house and your gates.

What he's saying is, you've got to have the word of God before you all the time.

He said, notice, I'm going to teach them to my children. I'm going to talk about them when I'm in my house. I'm going to talk about them when I'm walking around with people.

I'm discussing things when I lie down in the evening, when I get ready for bed and when I rise up, meaning I think about God's word before I go to sleep, and I think about God's word before I wake up.

He says, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be a frontlet between your eyes, meaning I'm gonna have them as a Part of what I'm doing every day, my hands.

And I'm gonna make sure that I see the world through the eyes of God's word. I'm gonna have them right there in front of me. Almost like it's, it's almost a picture.

Of course, he would have never had this idea or understanding Moses wouldn't. But it's almost like night vision goggles, you know, the goggles where we can actually see what's going on.

Well, you're seeing through these goggles, and these goggles are God's word. You're seeing through these goggles. And, and you're, you're. You're seeing the world from that perspective all the time there.

So they're, so they're in what. Everything I do with my hands, everything I look through with my eyes. And you shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates, meaning everywhere I go, it's right there in front of me.

What is he describing? Well, he's describing a human process, if you want to know the truth.

And, and this is the worldly understanding of this process. But it's, It's God's process.

He. He's. If you're, if you're trying to learn something, if you put a hundred hours into learning something, you're going to have a. A rudimentary understanding of it, meaning you're gonna, you're gonna begin to get the basics of, of a idea.

Like, if you wanted to learn how to do anything, something that is intricate, something that has some, some depth to it, even, even something like being a plumber or, or building a house or growing crops or any of the things that you can think of that you might want to do something.

As far as a profession, I want to learn calculus. I want to. I want to.

I want to learn bookkeeping or accounting. If you spend a hundred hours studying that 100 hours, that's basically two and a half full weeks, 40 hours a week working. If you spend about two and a half weeks, you're going to get a really fundamental understanding of it.

You're going to get a, a basic idea of how that works. If you spend a thousand hours.

Now, a thousand hours is.

Thousand hours is basically half a year. If you spend a half of a half a year working on it. When I say half a year, 40 hours a week, that's basically 25 weeks.

If I spend 25 weeks on it, I'm going to become. I'm gonna become very proficient in whatever I'm doing. And you know, that as well as I do. Every job you've ever gone to by the time you get six, in fact, most of the time there's a six month period with any job and, and they can let you go after six months.

Why did they do that? Well, they figure after six months you ought to get an aptitude for what you're doing. You ought to be, get pretty good at it, you ought to get decent at it.

And so when, when you ought to get decent at it in six months, if you're not getting very decent at it, meaning you're not showing that you have an ability to pick it up, then you know, they'll probably let you go because they need people who are going to be good at what they're paying you to do.

So six months is a really good period. 40 hours a week, half a year. At the end of half a year, if you're not very good at this, probably need to find something else to do, right?

So 100 hours, you become, you know, you have, you have the basic knowledge of it. A thousand hours, you become very knowledgeable about the skill level. If you're going to be able to do it.

10,000 hours, you become an expert. That's five years, five years every day of studying something, you become an expert on it. Meaning, you know, probably most everything that has to do with that area.

And, and if you're capable of, of doing it, capable of understanding the, capable of, you have those capabilities, then you'll be, you'll become an expert at it. Now in the world, not every, not everything that I try am I going to be an expert at.

There's areas of interest in the world that I'm not very good at. I'm not naturally inclined toward my, my heart does not naturally bend toward it. And my, my skills, skill sets, the things that I'm good at do not lend themselves to that.

And so my understanding, my knowledge of those things is always going to be not, not as good as other people because I just don't, I don't have a natural bent toward it.

But there's a lot of things, and everybody has these things that if you spent 10,000 hours, five years really actively trying to be good at something, you'll become an expert at it.

You'll become super knowledgeable and super able to handle those things. That's why an attorney, you, you, you, you can't be a judge until you've been an attorney for five years.

Why? Because they want you to be expert at what you do. Even if you're not Doing everything in the law. They want you to have an expertise in the law.

These things are just not the way the world operates, okay? The way, the way people function. Well, understanding that God is going is given. Given us an ability to know him and to know His Word.

He's given us the holy, the Holy Spirit. He's given us a new human spirit. But there still has to be the actions of faith that are required for you to grow into that knowledge and become an expert of walking with God.

And God does want you to become that mature in every way. He wants you to become mature in your walk with Him. Well, how do I do that, Pastor? Well, you've got to put the time in.

Well, I already have a job. I can't put 40 hours a week in that too. I know.

So If I put 20 hours a week into it, then it'll take me 10 years. If I put. If I put 10 hours a week in it, it'll take me 40 years.

And in 40 years, I can become a expert in what God says and his word says.

Now, 10 hours a week's not hard.

10 hours a week's basically spending an hour and a half a day in some way in the Word. Well, if you watch these bible studies, that's 15, 20 minutes right there.

If you listen to another Bible study online as you're working or as you're exercising, there's another 20 minutes. So for you know what, you've got 40 minutes already. Then if you spend 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening just reading passages of scripture and thinking about them, that's another 20 minutes.

But remember, I can put it to work in the world. Remember, it needs to be written on my hands and in my goggles. If I spend during the day contemplating it and how it affects my life, the God's Word, by.

Just spend some time during the day thinking about what's going on around me and considering it in comparison to God's Word, well, that's another 20 or 30 minutes. So you could easily.

Especially if you go to church on Wednesday night or you go to church on Sunday morning, there's a solid. Those are solid time periods. Spend some time work in worship.

Remember, most of our songs are based off of God's Word that teaches you to ponder and think about God's Word. Before you know it, you could easily spend an hour or two hours in direct study of God's Word or in.

In just allowing God's Word to be a part of your day, a part of what you're doing, which is, by the way, what he says, what I do. Well, I'm going to talk about it when I sit down in my house.

I'm going to teach it diligently to my children. I'm going to apply it to my children's life and I'm going to teach them how to live in it. And then I, I'm going to do it when I sit down in my house and when I walk, by the way, when I, when we're just out doing things, I'm on.

I'm on. When we're exercising, you know, I'm going to listen to God's Word when I lie down and when I wake up, meaning right before I go to bed, I'm going to read God's Word for five or ten minutes and then when I rise up, I'm going to read a little bit of God's Word when I get up.

Or maybe I'm going to listen to the Bible study here or, or maybe I'm going listen to a sermon of a pastor I really like or, or maybe a book series that is teaching through one of the books of the Bible online.

There's all kinds of things that we have now. I'm going to put that right in front of me all the time. And then I'm going to consider it as I go through my day.

And then you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, meaning as I'm working, I'm going to remember God's word about those things and I'm going to put it between my eyes.

I'm going to make sure that I'm seeing God's Word through everything I'm doing. And then I'm going to write them on the doorpost of my heart and I'm going to have it on my gate so that it's reminding me about what God's doing.

Before you know it, you could easily spend 10 to 20 hours a week in some way immersed in God's word or in some way considering God's Word. And if I did that, if I did 20 hours a week, in 10 years, I would become an expert in God's word.

I'd become expert in it.

You go, well, I want to learn it faster. Well, I'm not saying you can't put 40 hours a week. You know, you can work 40 hours a week. There's 196 hours in a week.

So you could put 40 hours a week along with your job into it. If you don't have, especially if you don't have children. You could spend 40 hours a week really kind of concentrating on God's word.

In fact, there's a lot of people that have a job and then they try to become an expert at something else. And as they, that, that something else is something that they really want to do.

And, and as they become an expert in it, they move from the job they're doing to the job that they want to do. And they do that in the process of really, they do it in the process of a few years.

That happens. You see that happen all the time. Well, you can become an expert in God and God wants you to be an expert in him. He wants your heart to be bent toward him.

And why wouldn't I want to spend five or ten years of my life really, really digging into God's word? I promise you this, if you do that, you'll dig into it the rest of your life.

It'll become a natural way of what you do. It'll be what kind of who you are.

And how many Christians don't even really put in that much.

In fact, how many Christians, you know, if they're lucky, go to church once a week, you know, and spend maybe an hour thinking about God a week. Well, if you spend an hour thinking about God a week, you're never going to become an expert.

You're never going to become someone who is really knowledgeable about God. And your heart's never really going to be changed and you're never really going to experience what it is to be a spirit filled, powerful Christian.

You're just not ever going to experience that. You know, you won't know it. You just won't know it. You won't, you don't see it, you won't understand it.

You just won't know it. You won't know it anymore.

And, and that is, that is a very, very sad thought. It is a very, very depressing idea that I wouldn't know, that I wouldn't see, that I wouldn't understand.

God says, look, I'm giving you my greatest commandment and you need to put it into practice. You need to put it into practice in what you're doing. I listen to this Bible study.

You're already on the road. I mean, that means that you have some kind of innate desire, desire to know this. And you're, you're practicing it. You're, you're listening to the Word regularly.

That's the case. Then you're likely becoming an expert pretty well. You spend a lot of time going through God's Word. You, you read through God's word once or twice for sure.

You're becoming very, very knowledgeable. You become skilled in the word of God and you do that three or four times over the period of five years and, and, and supplement it with, with all the other things that, that are out there that can allow you to know God's Word.

Before you know it, you will become, you'll become an expert in what God's doing. You'll be able to see God moving in your life and you'll be seeing God moving in other people's lives and you'll be someone who is, who is walking with God and experiencing God.

I pray that'll be the case for you. I expect it and I look forward to seeing that in your life as I look forward to seeing it in mine.

As you go today, I pray that.

The Lord will bless you and keep.

You, that he'll make his face to.

Shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.