Faithbase

I have a confession to make. I used to be addicted to soap. I'm clean now. Yeah. Alright. You know, one of the things that comes up the most in my interactions with people is the question of how am I supposed to read the Bible. And if you've been around church or in any kind of capacity like this for any bit of time, you'll notice that you hear that come up a lot, right? We're always talking about the importance of devotional time, quiet time, reading, engaging the Word, and blah, blah, blah. But oftentimes we forget to tell people how to read the Bible. And the SOAP acronym is something that I like very much. It's something that I've learned and kind of relearned from a buddy of mine named Justin. What's up, Justin Chandler? And so SOAP basically is an acronym. And the S in SOAP stands for Scripture, the O stands for Observation, the A for Application, and the P for Prayer. And what's cool is when you break these down, it becomes pretty obvious in terms of an easy, simple way to just pick up Scripture and begin learning and trying and growing and things like that. So you start with Scripture for the S, right? Anywhere you want. If you're going through a book, it's good to just probably stay in that book for a while so you can kind of see the narrative develop and the themes become more obvious to you. So usually when I'm going through something, I'll be in that Bible book for a long time, right? So the Gospels, for example, I've been in for almost a year now. And just going slow, section by section, so that way I'm a little bit more bite-sized chunks instead of whole chapters at a time because it gives me more time to meditate on them. And then after you start with that Scripture, you make an observation about what the passage is telling you. There's some key, simple things that you can look out for. Repeating themes, repeating words, ideas that are new or foreign to you that you may not have heard of before, or just simply something that you find interesting that occurs in that passage. After the observation is made, you begin to think critically about how you can apply that to your life, right? So if you're reading something about Jesus and the vine and the branches, for example, right? And Jesus says, remain in me or abide in me and I'll remain in you or I'll abide in you, whatever it is. You begin to notice, all right, there are themes that Jesus is building on here in this section of verses. Maybe I should look and figure out what they are and how I can apply them to my life. And then the final one is prayer. And prayer is the single most important step out of anything that we'll do, particularly in our walk with Jesus, because it reminds us of two simple things. The first one is that we are inviting God into a dialogue and into an encounter, right? We want to find Jesus, we want to experience him more, and we want to have a deeper relationship with him. And the second thing is we're yielding our lives over to him. We're saying, Lord, this is the thing that I think that your word is telling me. This is how I think I can grow from it. But I want to make sure I'm in dialogue with you to make sure that I'm tuned for the best way possible to move forward in my relationship with you. And when you invite God in that discussion, you'll find that there are things that God will reveal to you that you may not have seen. God might use somebody to help you find your own blind spot or grow in some way that was unexpected for you. So S-O-A-P, Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer. If you have any questions, please feel free to DM me. I'm at Joshua underscore Carmen on Instagram. I would love to talk with you there. Thanks so much and have a good week.