Podcast | The Practical Disciple - Part 3

Posts in Category: podcast

Six Questions You Should Always Ask When You Study the Bible [Episode 30]



Welcome to the first ever Five Minute Friday podcast!

Every Friday I’m going to release a quick discipleship tip. Each post will be short, five to ten minutes at most. Now for today’s tip.

You can create a quick overview of a bible passage by asking six simple questions journalists ask when writing a story.

Just ask these six questions:

  1. Who?
  2. What?
  3. When?
  4. Where?
  5. Why?
  6. How?

Concrete examples of how to answer these question are in today’s super short Five Minute Friday Podcast.

What you’ll get out of these questions:

1) Greater Knowledge: You’ll spot details you might otherwise overlook.
2) Deeper Understanding: You’ll take more away from the

Read More

Lessons I have Learned about Reading the Bible after 35 years of Daily Reading [Episode 28]


 

 
A recent reader, Kristy, shared the following comment,

I have never found the right Bible reading plan, so have tried to read at my own pace and feel that even though I am not following a plan, that I am behind simply because I still have a lot to read by the end of this year and I have this thing in my head that I have to finish the Bible by December 31. It ever seems like what I read is enough; sometimes I read a lot, but it doesn’t seem like it is enough.

Read More

The Ugly Truth No One Wants to Hear about How to Get People to Church [Episode 27]


 


 
In a prior church I served, one Valentine’s Day we had 27 children attend a parent’s night out program at our church. That figure is remarkable when you consider a couple of facts. We were a modest sized church with four or five children present on Sunday mornings and maybe eighty to ninety people in attendance on an average Sunday. The vast majority of the children who attended the Valentine event weren’t from our church. So twenty-seven is a rather huge number.
 
Why so many kids?
 
Did we pay for a bunch of ads?

Read More

Three Simple Strategies to Refresh Your Prayer Life [Episode 26]


 

A stale lifeless prayer life can happen to anyone. But you have choices you can make to breath new life into new routines or resurrect your prayer life if it’s completely dead. In today’s podcast, I share three simple strategies anyone (and really everyone) should apply to praying to keep things fresh.

In short they are:
 

1. To Keep God Front and Center in Your Prayer by Including Praise

This may sound like an odd thing to say about prayer, but it’s easy for us to start going through the motions of just getting prayer done and treating it like something we need to check

Read More

How to Keep a Sabbath (and Why You Should)


 

 
A number of years ago I asked a medical doctor,  “What is the most common reason people come to see you?”  She talked about a variety of health issues and then said something to the effect of, “While those are the things people come to see me, by far the most common problem I see in my office is depression.  People come to me for other things, but a huge number of them are suffering from depression. It’s just not the presenting condition that brought them in.”

We proceeded to discuss why so many people were depressed.  I proposed that a major contributing factor is that we

Read More

Four Do’s and Don’ts of Marking Your Bible [Podcast Episode 24]


 

 

1. DON’T: Use ink.
DO: Use colored pencils.

I use colored pencils because they will not bleed through the pages and they give you lots of color options. Pens tend to smear or bleed through and can make a mess of your bible. Also, colored pencils can be erased if you make something incorrectly.
 

2. DON’T: Simply mark what grabs you.
DO: Create a system of meaningful symbols.

For example, in the picture above from my current study Bible, I marked the words “prayer” and “supplication” with a red underline that sweeps up and to the right and ends in an arrow.  I choose

Read More