Curt Harlow [00:00:00]:
Hello, my friend. You have found the Bible study part of the Thrive Podcast network. Is that right, Bri? Did I say it right? The Thrive Podcast and coming to you from Bayside Church. Our churches, we're a group of churches where we have multiple live communicators. And we got so much excitement about the Bible, there's not enough to contain it on the weekends. So here at the Bible study, we take a passage that we're currently learning on our weekends on all of our campuses, and we go a step deeper and say some of the stuff we didn't get a chance chance to say on the weekend. Some of you are familiar with this because you watched the earlier iteration of the Bible study a couple years ago. We're rebooting it and so get the word out there.
Curt Harlow [00:00:43]:
And to reboot it, to start it off, I brought in the two smartest people in all of Thrive and Bayside. These are, these are the. The goats of theological thinking at Bayside. And we have Amy and Dena. Everyone say hi to Amy and Dean. I guess everyone's me.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:01:01]:
Everyone's just you?
Curt Harlow [00:01:02]:
Yeah, it's just me.
Dena Davidson [00:01:03]:
I' hey.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:01:04]:
Hi, Dena. Good to see you.
Curt Harlow [00:01:05]:
Amy, what do you do here at Bayside?
Amy Zielsdorf [00:01:06]:
I'm one of the high school pastors at the Granite Bay campus.
Curt Harlow [00:01:08]:
Oh, so we speak teenagers. So you get a teenager, make them tune in?
Amy Zielsdorf [00:01:11]:
We sure do.
Curt Harlow [00:01:12]:
And Dena, what do you do?
Dena Davidson [00:01:13]:
I'm one of the directors of Thrive College. It's an internship program we have here at Bayside.
Curt Harlow [00:01:17]:
So basically, you guys work with high school students and 18 to 25 year olds. My favorite two groups. So that's exactly why we have you on here. We are in Acts, chapter 17, and part of the passage that we didn't get to in our verse by verse study on the weekends at Bayside. Is this one of my absolute favorites. In fact, the seminary I went to was named Berean College after this. And that's the very honorable, the very noble Bereans. I'm going to read it really quick and then I got a couple questions for us just to respond to as we study the Bible.
Curt Harlow [00:01:54]:
Here it is, Acts 17, starting at verse 10. If you have a Bible, pull it out. If you're driving, please do not. Just listen to me. Okay? As soon as it was night, the believer sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. Okay, so Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea. Right in there, right at the top of the Greek peninsula. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue.
Curt Harlow [00:02:19]:
Now, the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica. For they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scripture every day to see if what Paul said was true. As a result, many of them believed, as did a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men. A very famous story here and perfect for the inaugural relaunching of the Bible study. Because these folks, they said, Paul's making sense, but we're not gonna just believe him. We're going back to the Bible to see if what he's teaching is true. Such a great admonition. So hermeneutically, which is just kind of the rules we use to get the correct interpretation, the questions we ask, the tools we bring to a past.
Curt Harlow [00:03:10]:
You get the correct interpretation. Amy, what insight would you have about our Berean friends here?
Amy Zielsdorf [00:03:15]:
Oh, man. Well, I love the Bereans. I'm so impressed by their inclination of when they hear something new to be like, why don't I take that and go run it against what I already know to be true? That that is a response to hearing anything new. I think it's fascinating. I found myself, when I was reading it, as I thought about them doing this, I found myself thinking, okay, so they've heard Paul and they've heard everything he's saying, and now they're all going back to do their individual quiet times with their Bibles and they're searching through to see if it matches up with getting their coffee. Exact. Yeah, the morning light is perfect.
Dena Davidson [00:03:44]:
On Instagram.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:03:44]:
Yes. And post on Instagram or it didn't happen. And they. And they sit down with their Bibles and they. They wrestle with what this message that they've heard to see if it matches up with what they know to be true. And what is so interesting is that as you look at the people of Berea this time, they did not have Bibles. They were not at the point where they were going individually with the scripture. But what it actually looked like was for them to examine the Scriptures, especially daily, that they did it in the context of community, that they met in the synagogues with the rest of the believers to actually, like you said, open up a scrol and look back to the Old Testament and see does this match up with what we've heard to be true? Which I find so interesting because we tend to read.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:04:20]:
Well, we obviously read the Bible through all of our own individual lenses and our cultural lens and all that sort of thing. But to think about our. We live in such a heavily individualistic society too. But even scripture, from the very beginning was always meant to be done in the context of community.
Curt Harlow [00:04:35]:
And so, yeah, you mentioned this right when we were off camera right before starting. And I realized, yeah, for all of these years, all the seminary I've had, all the preaching I've done, I absolutely thought about this wrong. Till 30 seconds ago, I was imagining the comfy chair. And you know Andrew McCourt, one of our great communicators, he'll be on the podcast. He always says preaching at Bayside is a team sport. Studying the Bible is a team sport. Yeah, that's just really so good. Dena.
Curt Harlow [00:05:07]:
What? You got anything to add to that? Because I think we've already accomplished our goal.
Dena Davidson [00:05:12]:
End the Bible study right there.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:05:14]:
Wrap it up.
Dena Davidson [00:05:14]:
I mean, but I. Honestly, before we move on, like, I think that's such an important idea, because I am someone who's prone to just read the Bible on my own and to come up with my own ideas. And, I mean, that's how error happens, right? Yes, because like you. You were saying, we have our own lens, and it's in the context of community that we get to what it actually means. It's like. Oh, it's like what we were doing in sermon prep today.
Curt Harlow [00:05:39]:
Right, right, right, right.
Dena Davidson [00:05:40]:
So Curt was charged with leading us in sermon prep, and so he came in with his outline, which is a.
Curt Harlow [00:05:45]:
Meeting we do where all the communicators and potential communicators come together, and we. We beat up the Bible passage verse by verse. Right.
Dena Davidson [00:05:52]:
And to make sure. To make sure we are personally rightly understanding it before we go out and teach it to others. So Curt had a great outline. Literally everyone applauded after it was done. Never happened before in the history of sermon prep, by the way. It was a really good outline. And so he shared his. And then Wesley, Brannon, and I, we had a totally different interpretation.
Dena Davidson [00:06:11]:
And so we just literally saw.
Curt Harlow [00:06:13]:
Okay, let's be really clear about what happened. I shared all my content, and then we opened it up for discussion. There was applause. There was applause between the Dena and Wesley, mostly. Brandon was a little bit more diplomatic. I said, wow, you are so wrong about that one idea. Curt, you are as wrong as wrong could be.
Dena Davidson [00:06:29]:
Okay, well, we said it in such tactful ways until the third time when you were like, no, I still disagree. And we're like, no, actually, you're wrong, Curt. And so we kept going round and round and on. Honestly, like, I'm gonna leave sermon prep, and I'm gonna have to keep thinking about that. Was Curt right about that? Was I Right. Like in nothing. Nothing important. Like, no, everyone's wondering.
Curt Harlow [00:06:48]:
Right.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:06:48]:
I know.
Dena Davidson [00:06:49]:
Everyone's like, I have to know what passage was it?
Curt Harlow [00:06:52]:
Acts 18:18. Read verse 10 and then read verse 12, form an opinion, and it'll be on the next the Bible Study podcast. It really will.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:07:03]:
Okay, that's awesome.
Dena Davidson [00:07:04]:
Okay, so I'm gonna have to go home and I'm gonna be thinking about that. Was Curt correct? And like I said, no doctrine. But it's through the context of reading it in community, like you shared, that we get to truth. So.
Curt Harlow [00:07:17]:
Yeah. It reveals our privilege too. Because what you're saying, Amy, is for most of Christianity, on my mantle at home right now. My wife, whenever she goes second handing, which is seven days a week, Is.
Dena Davidson [00:07:33]:
That fancy for thrifting?
Amy Zielsdorf [00:07:34]:
Thrifting sounds better.
Curt Harlow [00:07:36]:
Second handing. My daughters are laughing at me right now. Are you guys going second handing?
Dena Davidson [00:07:41]:
I was like, kurt knows something.
Curt Harlow [00:07:43]:
When she was thrifting, she looks in the old books for old Bibles. And so on the mantle in my home, I have 20 old Bibles right today. Because I am incredibly privileged. They were like, in that synagogue, they were privileged to have an Old Testament scroll and scrolls. And they had to get together and go, let's unscroll this. Let's read this. He's talking about Isaiah. That's a very long scroll.
Curt Harlow [00:08:10]:
I'm sure Paul was teaching from Isaiah, teaching the Messiah. Very long scroll. And they were just there. I almost got this picture of them. Cause if you've been in the synagogues in the near east, they're a square building with a bench around the side. They're kind of on their knees in the center. That's probably equally wrong. But they're unfurling the scroll and treating it with great reverence and going.
Curt Harlow [00:08:32]:
Is what he said correct? Yeah.
Dena Davidson [00:08:37]:
I think my contribution to this is that you should have, you know, for the most part, you should not have original thoughts when you come to Scripture.
Curt Harlow [00:08:45]:
Amen.
Dena Davidson [00:08:46]:
So I always say, like, I want the old thoughts. Yes. If you are reading the Bible and you come up with something that you're like, I bet no one has ever thought of that before. Like, veto. That is a problem. If you.
Curt Harlow [00:08:59]:
By the way, I've been to that church. It wasn't a good experience. It was not a good experience.
Dena Davidson [00:09:02]:
It's crazy because we. We place such a. Such a emphasis on being original, and that's such a value, like you're saying, in an individualistic culture. But when you're reading Scripture, that's the exact opposite value. That you should have. So they're not listening to Paul and their ears are not itching saying, we've never heard this before. They're literally having the thought. I think what he is saying is striking a familiar chord.
Dena Davidson [00:09:28]:
He's using these scriptures to help me understand something new, but it's all in the old. And so I think that's just a word to us is we should be itching to hear preachers that are talking about old things. And if we can't find it in other commentaries, other preachers from old, not just from now, then that's like a red flag and we should always be searching for the old thoughts.
Curt Harlow [00:09:52]:
So as the old. Dude, I'm going to tell you guys about a thing. We used to have this thing called Christian bookstores. And that was the only place you.
Dena Davidson [00:10:00]:
Could get Christian special section of Amazon.
Curt Harlow [00:10:02]:
Yeah. You could go in there and you could buy Amazon. You could buy Commentaries and popular books and Precious Moments collection.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:10:08]:
Oh, yes.
Curt Harlow [00:10:08]:
And you get all three of those.
Dena Davidson [00:10:10]:
Many Precious Moments collection.
Curt Harlow [00:10:11]:
One of the guys, Brady Bobach, that was a great theological influence in my life. He said, listen, when you ever go in a Christian bookstore, walk past the first three fourths of the store and go to the old books in the back for that exact reason or another thing he used to say to me, Dena, right along this, he said he would say the worst thing you can say in a small group Bible study is what this means to me.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:10:33]:
Yes.
Curt Harlow [00:10:34]:
What this means to me is not a good question. No. What does this mean and what am I going to do about that is the proper order. Until this day. We just did a small group training up at Auburn. I said, I said politely and kindly encourage your people to not say in your small group what this means to me, which is what our instinct is as individuals.
Dena Davidson [00:10:57]:
Yeah.
Curt Harlow [00:10:57]:
So that's good.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:10:58]:
Oftentimes I would say maybe one of our biggest, like hermeneutical errors too is like when I interpret this again, interpreting it through our own lens, like we just talked about that we can, we can be so drawn to jump to what do I get out of this? Versus what is this meant to give? Right. And so to your point about even them going back to the Old Testament scrolls, I think about even as we spend time in the New Testament, is our, Is our response to them be like, does this how. And even reconciling that with some passages that feel like, man, how does like what Paul's preaching for, for them was like, they're preaching. He's preaching a new king. How do we reconcile this with, with what we thought was it was gonna happen and who we thought it was gonna be. And to go back, like you said, to the old message to be like, do those things line up? And sometimes there will be tension, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. Yes, but you have to go back to what was originally said to be able to know.
Curt Harlow [00:11:43]:
Yeah, yeah. If Paul with On Mars Hill, the very famous passage in this same section in Athens, the exact opposite happens. They do exactly what you're talking about, Dena. They go, oh, this is a new thing.
Dena Davidson [00:11:56]:
Yeah, exactly.
Curt Harlow [00:11:57]:
This is. Tell us about this strange doctrine you have and how effective is Paul there? Yeah, it's very much less effective. As opposed to the Bereans who go, I think this is connecting some dots of truth. I know. So, all right, here's my little observation, you guys. Tell me, tell me if I'm wrong. Dena. She's very good at doing it.
Dena Davidson [00:12:17]:
No applause.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:12:18]:
Everything's so loaded right now.
Curt Harlow [00:12:20]:
No applause. Okay, so if you look at this section, chapter 16, 17 and 18. So we're teaching it through on the weekends. I lead one of this week's sermon prep and I'm kind of going, wait, this sounds like this. And this sounds like this as I'm preaching it through. And I realized, oh, there's a pattern here in chapter 16, 17 and 18. And the Bereans are perfect example of the pattern. So there's basically, basically 4 Responses to the Gospel.
Curt Harlow [00:12:48]:
Paul in almost all these settings goes, he's speaking to primarily Jewish and then a God fearing Greek. So people know the Old Testament. And what does he do? He does, like a lot of the sermons in Acts, he just recounts the Old Testament. Here's what happened in the Old Testament, here's Micah, here's Zechariah, here's Isaiah and all these prophecies about Jesus. And so as they hear this put together, the first response is what Paul is actually doing with Timothy, Silas, Priscilla, Aquila. He's passionately going, so when you encounter the Gospel, one of the responses you should have is, I'm gonna spread the gospel. If you think the gospel's good news, you'll spread it. And this is the response that we see in Paul and his team.
Curt Harlow [00:13:34]:
The second response is reasoning. So it literally says in one group, Thessalonica, they reasoned for three weeks. So it wasn't an immediate and emotional thing, like, this is cool and Jesus for good. It was like, I have to think about this. Christianity is a thinking person's worldview. It's not afraid of questions. It's not afraid of doubt. I love that.
Curt Harlow [00:14:01]:
And then, of course, the third response is opposition. We went and we got a mob together. We dragged them in front of the Bema seat. We attacked them. We attacked them.
Dena Davidson [00:14:12]:
Okay, okay. Tune in next week. You better have Wesley on.
Curt Harlow [00:14:17]:
Dean is probably correct. I'm just gonna.
Dena Davidson [00:14:19]:
I can't wait to listen to your sermon.
Curt Harlow [00:14:21]:
There's a group, they hear the exact same message. And one says, we got to spread this to dangerous places. We got to go further into Greece. Another group says, I got to think about this. And the Bereans are that group. And the third group is not in my backyard. I'm not even going to listen to this. I'm not reasoning in this.
Curt Harlow [00:14:40]:
We're going to drum up some forces. And then at the end of this chapter, there's one example of a fourth choice, and it's the proconsul, and I can't pronounce his name. I don't pronounce Greek well at all. My Greek enunciation is just funny. That's all it's good for. But at the moment they drag Paul in front of the proconsul, he looks at him and goes, this is irrelevant to me. It's words and names and a bunch of stuff I don't understand. So do what you want to do.
Curt Harlow [00:15:10]:
I have no part of this. And so the fourth response is apathy. It's. I'm going to ignore it. I'm going to pretend it didn't happen. And it's funny when that happens. So you see this pattern. Opposition, opposition, opposition, conversion, conversion, conversion, bold going, bold going.
Curt Harlow [00:15:27]:
And then you run into this. And I'm like, oh, I think that's the problem in our culture. We like to make a big sensation about opposition. Oh, someone doesn't put Christmas on a Starbucks cock. Christians are being attacked. But I think far more problem is we preach the good news, we live the good news, and people yawn. I don't know what to do with that, but it would be really sad. Welcome to the Bible study.
Curt Harlow [00:15:59]:
Well, we discourage you with the truth of God's word. No, anyway, okay, let's cut to the chase here. So, Amy, great job. It was communal. They studied this girl, Dena. Incredible, incredible job. They fought for the original old, good, solid truth, not the new creative. And then, of course, what I said was the right answer.
Curt Harlow [00:16:21]:
So the point about it, all this is to finish up. What do we do about this? If you were going to just give me one really practical application thought, what would it be Ammi.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:16:31]:
I mean, I love, even as you're talking about the response, that can often be just apathy towards it. I love that even for the Bereans that talks about them being eager for truth, I think even in general, anytime we hear something new or even something old, and we don't know what to do with it, would our eagerness for truth rule out, like, rule out above any other response that we might have? And would it ultimately drive us to God's Word? Which I would say in the context of community, that I think for a lot of us, we have divorced our theology of community. And, and even in our, our own study of God's word, do we only do it by ourselves or do we do it in community? And in the context of community, not just to come to church on a Sunday morning to consume, but when you think about even the setup that they had, I love that imagery of them all circled around the scrolls. Was there like a, was there a group think moment where someone's throwing out maybe something that they heard and they're like, ah, I don't know that, that, that doesn't match up with this. And you know, I, I love imagining that idea, like you're saying, of, of beating up what we all are thinking. So hope close to truth as possible in our conversations. And so I would say if, if you are interacting with God's word in no context other than just by yourself, that you're missing out on the richness of how it was meant to be experienced. So I would say get in a small group.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:17:41]:
There's all the practical things of get in a small group, meet with someone for coffee to talk about it. There's lots of different contexts in which we could do it, but I love those in particular.
Curt Harlow [00:17:49]:
Yeah. A cup of coffee in the Bible with someone else.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:17:52]:
Yeah.
Curt Harlow [00:17:52]:
Or just getting an old fashioned, good old first century small group.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:17:56]:
Yeah.
Curt Harlow [00:17:56]:
Dena, what would you do in light of this?
Dena Davidson [00:17:58]:
Yeah. Were you gonna add something?
Amy Zielsdorf [00:17:59]:
I was gonna say too. I think there's a level of like you're saying in regards to discouragement too, that would our eagerness for truth keep us from being skeptical, though? At the same time, I think we can kind of even maybe like an at, like an added response to be. Would we can be just naturally skeptical about truth and if we can even get there. But I love the idea that their pursuit continued to go after truth, believing that they were gonna be able to find it.
Dena Davidson [00:18:20]:
Yeah. Healthy skepticism doesn't stop with questions like healthy skepticism always drives you to chase answers and so if you're not driven answers, you definitely drifted into this love affair with doubt. And that's not a good place to be speaking as a philosophy major. We love our questions. I would say my challenge, my application challenge, is to match your podcast listening with your Bible listening. So you're listening to the Bible study. That's awesome. I love that you're listening to the Bible study.
Dena Davidson [00:18:51]:
We're giving you our communal interpretation of Acts 17. Go read Acts 17. You cannot take what the preacher is saying and compare it to the scriptures if you're not familiar with the scriptures. And so it's really important that you be reading scripture in community. But also, since we do have the privilege of having the Bible in our pockets, please push play download the Bible app. I. I listen to the Bible when I'm getting ready. I listen.
Dena Davidson [00:19:19]:
Like if I'm doing preparation for sermons. Well, before I ever go into sermon prep, before I ever go listen to someone else's take, I am listening over and over and over again. It's usually it is. It's listening to the Bible being read to me. So match your podcast listening with your Bible.
Curt Harlow [00:19:37]:
I love listening to the Bible just in audio form because oftentimes the New Testament especially, it's dictated. A scribe is taking it down. So when you listen to it kind of spoke, things make sense to you in terms of the flow of it that don't always make sense when you're reading the written word. Okay, so mine is similar to yours, Dena. It's just ask more questions. So sometimes, especially if you've been a Christian for a while and you love the Bible and you believe God inspired it, you skip over parts that really should make you stop and go, what? What's going on there? And I found the more I go, what? I don't get that, or that seems like a contradiction, or that doesn't make sense. The more just exactly you said, it presses me in to learn more about context, culture, language, and then all of a sudden it goes from one dimensional to three dimensional, and I'm like, ah, I get it. So, you know, God's not afraid of our questions asking to be answered, seeking to find, knocking, the door will be open.
Curt Harlow [00:20:36]:
And I want to agree with Amy just a little bit here too. There's a cynical way to ask questions. I'm hunting for ways to not apply this and to see that it's not credible. So the difference between a cynical seeker and an authentic seeker is a seeker wants an answer, a cynic wants to figure out who to blame. And so if you come to it as going, I really do want the answer, I just think God is gonna bless your Bible study like crazy. And all of a sudden what you thought was irrelevant or we thought was boring or we thought you could skip over becomes the most important part of the passage.
Dena Davidson [00:21:12]:
So true love that.
Curt Harlow [00:21:14]:
Well, thanks for tuning in, all six of you. We're on a reboot here, so we really are asking you, can you like, share, comment forward? Your mom needs to hear this. She really does. Don't ask me how I know, but just forward it to her right now. And by the way, there's all sorts of other great content on the Thrive Podcast Network. You're going to hear great stuff from Mark Clark. And Leslie and Morgan have an incredible podcast. Bri, what's another one they should check out? The Mark Clark Podcast.
Curt Harlow [00:21:45]:
Absolutely. Odds for marriage Change the odds with Kevin Thompson. Definitely got to look at that one. You know, I have never heard Mark speak for more than 30 seconds where I didn't learn something. So the Mark Clark Podcast. That would be a good place. All of this you could find where BRI podcast network.com the thrive podcast network.com Next week we're going to go into Acts chapter 18 and we're going to learn who is right.
Amy Zielsdorf [00:22:14]:
Who was right.
Curt Harlow [00:22:15]:
Wesley and Dena.
Dena Davidson [00:22:17]:
Or that's already two in community over.
Curt Harlow [00:22:20]:
One or more veteran teaching the Bible for much longer.
Dena Davidson [00:22:24]:
Much older idea.
Curt Harlow [00:22:28]:
We're gonna learn that Wesley was right. He always is. And Dena too. So anyway, join us next week for Acts chapter 18. Tons of great stuff in there. We'll see you then.