Latest / Read, Do, & Tell / Ep 1: Introductions & What is Bible Literacy?

Transcript

Ep 1: Introductions & What is Bible Literacy? · Read, Do, & Tell

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to this Reading Mamas podcast.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: This has been a long time coming.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: I would say I've been dreaming of, praying over, frustrated with the fact that I've not started one, but really wanting to, but kind of lacking a vision maybe for what it would look like.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I have a dear friend who I'm going to introduce in a minute who I was sharing this with, and she said, I'll do a podcast with you.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: So we're doing it together.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't know who I am, my name is Becky Spence, and I have been blogging at This Reading Mama since 2011.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm married, been married for 25 years, a little over 25 years.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: I have four kids, one of which is in college, two that are in high school, and one who is in her last year of middle school.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, oh, they're getting so old.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: I started blogging at This Reading Mama again at 2011.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: I was new to homeschooling.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: I had been a classroom teacher, and I loved the the environment I was in as far as uh the teachers I worked with.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: There was a lot of collaboration, a lot of sharing, a lot of you just got to share your creative ideas.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved that.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: I had a teacher I worked with that I absolutely loved.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: And when I came home to homeschool, it was a little on the lonelier side, I would say.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I really felt like I wanted a place to, a platform to share my ideas and to even hear from other people.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: I was around some homeschoolers and was very adamantly against it initially, until a good friend said, What if you just homeschool your son for one year?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to homeschool him for all of his years.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: That was my oldest at the time.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Oh, that's a good point.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: I could just do one year.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that turned into however many years later it is now.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: I never took a blogging course.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: I just started doing it.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: And um before blogging, really, I could look at a computer and it would shut down or give me an error or blow up.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it just I was not any good with technology.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: So God really grew my blog in unimaginable ways.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things I really like to do, I discovered I really love to do is to make printables or to make uh resources.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: First, it started out as making resources for other homeschool moms because I really felt like some of the stuff they were using to me seemed very dry and boring and that the kid would hate doing it.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so I decided I want to make something that's engaging, especially for my own kids.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: So then when they were young, I kind of just created their curricula for them and we went from there.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so, out of the overflow of creating things for my own kids, I decided, well, maybe somebody else might want to use this with their kids.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then it just really exploded and grew from there.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Recently, back in 2024, I opened a membership that I call the library, and that's because the blog platform isn't a platform that lends itself to finding things very easily.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I was getting weekly emails, sometimes daily emails of people asking, where is this printable?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Where is this resource?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it just can be hard to navigate.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I really felt like since I've got so many printables on the site, it was a good place to put all those in a really easy way to find them so they wouldn't be buried on the blog.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: So in 2020 and 2021-ish, uh, my interest shifted a little bit.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I know I've been blogging for almost 15 years now, or I can't, yeah, almost 15 years now.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not this math mama, I'm this reading mama, I'm horrible at math.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: So for 15 years, I've I've been blogging really kind of in the same field or whatever you want to call it.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: And my interest began to shift.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a good thing.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think if we get stuck in one thing, we always want to be growing and learning.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: My interest really shifted to Bible literacy.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: I went ahead in 2023, beginning of 2023, I signed up to get um a certificate in Christian apologetics from Biola.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: I really enjoyed that.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was recordings of old recording, older recordings from like Greg Kokel and um Lee Strobel and Craig Hazen, a lot of these people that I just really, really enjoyed the depth and learning about these things.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and these are things my dad, my dad wasn't a still is into apologetics.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was just fascinating for me.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Off of that, springboarding off of that, I started picking up creating Bible printables again.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: I really did have some early on the blog, I think 2012, I created a curriculum that I kind of got a little stuck in and my son grew past it.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so it wasn't, I wasn't creating it out of the overflow anymore of what I was already doing with my own kids.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then life got busy.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: I had four kids, and I just kind of stopped creating that curriculum.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: I hope to pick back up with that someday, but I have a lot more things out now.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, also, so when I was doing this, I was like, oh goodness, do Bible and literacy really go hand in hand?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because I was really struggling with the vision of where I was gonna go with with the blog or with my website.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started reading books, reading, reading, reading, reading.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And um, there are two here that I read uh probably in 2024-ish is when I read these books.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I really began to see that Bible and literacy, they go hand in hand.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you have like our own church history, you've got Saint Jerome in 380 AD-ish, if that's a word, AD-ish.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: I made my own word.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he he translated the Bible into Latin with the Vulgate because that's the language the people were speaking.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: So we wanted to have the Bible translated into a language that the people could read.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not a lot of people could read.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Literacy was pretty low back then.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: So, but then you have Wycliffe who comes along, you have William Tyndale who comes along, both of which were killed for trying or martyred for trying to translate the Bible into English, the language of the people.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it makes me think of the missionaries we support that are Wycliffe missionaries, they their goal is to go into a group of people who don't yet, it may not be for every missionary, but for the what the couple that we support, they go into a culture that doesn't have a written language, and they they go in, they learn the language, they learn the idioms of the language, the quirkiness of the language and what things mean, and then they create a written language for the people so that they can tran they can take their language and create a Bible for them.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then they have to teach the people how to read the written language so they can read the Bible for themselves.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I really began to see that Bible and literacy do go hand in hand.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty awesome.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things I learned in the process as well was Alex Newman.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: He talked about how the Puritans, when they came to America, one of the very first laws we had on the book regarding education was the Satan, Old Satan Diluter Act, I believe is what it was called.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the Puritans basically said that we need to teach these kids how to read, and people need to know how to read so that they can read the Bible for themselves.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the first laws we had about education in America.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty fascinating.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: And at that time in history, because liter illiteracy was higher, they wanted people literate.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: They wanted people to be able to read English so they would not be deceived by Satan.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought that was rather interesting.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now in 2020, I got to know my dear friend Amy, and I want her to introduce herself.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, my name is Amy.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: I am married.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: My husband and I have been together for 23 years.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: We have three children, two adults, and the baby's going on 16.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very excited about joining Becky on this podcast.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Becky and I met about six years ago, but our history is a little older than that.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe 10 years ago we met for the first time.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I met her.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if she really met me.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: She was standing with a mutual friend of ours, and I said, Hey, and I waved from across the hall at the church where we both used to go.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And my friend waved back at me, but Becky did not.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Oh, she's not a very nice person.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I never said hi to her again, and we never spoke after that.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because our crop our paths just never crossed.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: So in 2020, when the churches closed down, um, I our mutual friend had invited me to a house church, and I was really excited about that and said, Yeah, sure.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then she went on vacation.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so my husband and I were searching for churches that were open.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: We went to one church to visit on a Sunday, and um, Becky's family was there, and we recognized one another.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: We said hello.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: She's actually a very nice person, and she invited us to the house church that they were having in their home.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so from there, our friendship has grown.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: She is my beloved sister in Christ.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: We have read through the Bible together and held one another accountable.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope that as you all come along with us on this journey of biblical literacy and why it matters, that you have a newfound passion for reading the Bible and sharing what you learn with others.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: I hope I'm a nice person.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: So let's just briefly talk about what Bible literacy is, it what it even is.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Amy and I have had a conversation about this, and there were just three things that really popped out.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: There may be more things, but this is something that popped out to both of us was that the Bible, that Bible literacy is understanding one of the one of the tenets of it, is understanding the overarching storyline of the Bible, understanding how all the stories fit together, that it's one, it's one story.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: I know that years ago when my kids were very young, I only had two.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe my oldest was like three or four, and I had a newborn.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I can remember going to a women's study, Bible study, and they were doing a year of the overarching story of the Bible.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: And we got to um, it might have been the minor prophets or the major prophets, I don't remember where we were.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I turned to the lady beside me and I said, So the they only the Israelites only went into captivity with Babylon one time, and she was like, Yeah.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, You're sure they didn't go over and over to Babylon?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, No.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I mean, I'd always just gotten your Sunday school small bite or whatever you would call it, you know, just bite-sized Sunday school lessons.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing wrong with those, but I never understood how the Bible all fit together as one story that I didn't know where all the pieces fit.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I do believe that it's important because when you're reading a passage of scripture, it's important to kind of know where that happened in the storyline of the Bible.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not talking story like a made-up story, this is real history.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say that's the first one.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Right, I would agree with that.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think that um back in 2019, I had done a study in a book through a book called The Footsteps of the Messiah by Arnold Fruchtenbaum, and that is where I learned that is a complete story of redemption from Genesis to Revelation.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the Bible proves itself over and over again.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you read it and you can see that that overarching storyline and the the um the constant reminder that God wants to redeem us and bring us back to him, it it just ignites you to want to know more about how much he loves you.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: You want to study more about the God who made you and everything else, and it helps you to understand who he is and who you are.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that it's really important to have that perspective when reading your Bible.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the third thing we would say is how to apply God's word in your life.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it's great to understand the overarching story.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to read, study, and understand it for yourself, but we don't want to just be hearers of the word.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: We want to be doers of the word, as James said.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we want to be applying God's word to our life.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: How does it affect our heart and then overflowing to our mouth and our attitude and our behavior?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's the hard one right there.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: That can be really hard.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: So in Ezra chapter 7, verse 10, it says, Now Ezra had determined in his heart to study the law of the Lord, obey it, and teach its statutes and ordinances in Israel.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: So let's be determined to be like Ezra, to read, do, and tell the word of the Lord.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.