Checking Your Lenses

In one paragraph

This message was about the lens we bring to reading Scripture. The pastor worked through the healing of Bartimaeus as told in Luke, Mark, and Matthew, and then took up the hard teaching on divorce in Matthew 19 and Mark 10. The thread running through all of it was a simple question: do you believe God is good and that He loves you? the pastor opened with the idea of hermeneutics, the interpretive...

Read together

1. Luke 18:35-43 blind Bartimaeus approaching Jericho, covered in detail as last week's text and revisited for harmony comparison
2. Mark 10:46-52 Mark's account of blind Bartimaeus leaving Jericho, read and compared with Luke's account
3. Matthew 20:29-34 Matthew's account of two blind men leaving Jericho, read and compared with Luke and Mark
4. 1 Peter 5:7 cited as the Bible telling us to cast our cares on God because he cares for us
5. Matthew 19:1-12 Pharisees testing Jesus on divorce, read in detail alongside Mark's account
6. Mark 10:1-12 Pharisees testing Jesus on divorce, read and compared with Matthew's account
7. Genesis 1-2 God made them male and female, and it was not good for man to be alone, quoted by Jesus in the divorce discussion
8. Psalm 143:10 used as the benediction, teach me to do your will for you are my God

Talk about it

1. The pastor used the image of yellowed, oxidized headlight lenses to introduce the idea of hermeneutics, the lens through which we read scripture. What lenses do you think you bring to the Bible, and where did those lenses come from?
2. The three Gospel accounts of blind Bartimaeus differ in details like whether Jesus was approaching or leaving Jericho, and whether one or two blind men were healed. How do you personally tend to respond when you notice differences like that in scripture, and how does that response affect what you take away from the text?
3. The pastor described the man who stayed overnight at the church as someone who expected to be rejected, and so rejection was what he saw even when it was not what was offered. Have you ever come to God, to the Bible, or to a church expecting rejection? What shaped that expectation?
4. Jesus told the Pharisees that Moses allowed divorce because of hardness of heart, and the pastor said hardness of heart is really what the whole passage is about. Where in your own life do you notice your heart hardening, and what has helped soften it?
5. The pastor closed by saying the goal of God is not just to remove a guilty feeling but to remove actual guilt, and that God is willing to atone for our flaws and failures if we will trust him. What makes it hard to trust that God's intentions toward you are genuinely good?