Speaker: Pastor Ryan Rench with his wife, Jamie Rench (both speak; her parts are marked)
Happy Mother’s Day weekend! We are so excited to launch my wife’s new book, Turn Ye, Turn Ye, a study through Ezekiel. We are recording this before the books have actually arrived; we have a couple of sample prints here, but we are super excited to pass this out to the ladies of our church. So today’s video will just talk through it. If you are new with us, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, and this is my wife, Jamie, the author of the Joy ladies’ devotional and now the Ezekiel ladies’ devotional. We have test prints of another one coming for their ladies’ Bible study this summer, but that is a few weeks away. Right now, this is last year’s book, and Jamie is going to tell you about it.
Why Ezekiel?
Jamie: I cannot believe we are about to launch the second devotional. I have been blown away by how God has used this Joy study over the past year. It has been a huge blessing to hear specific testimonies from ladies. Honestly, to all of that I can only say, praise the Lord. Truly, I am just thankful. Why Ezekiel? A few years ago I was reading my Bible and had gotten almost halfway through the book of Ezekiel, and I stopped and said, “What is happening?” It does have some really strange things in it. God tells Ezekiel to lie on his side for a super long time, make a diorama and act out these scenes, bake food with manure, and cut his hair and chop it into tiny pieces, and that is just the first few chapters. I honestly was not sure what was going on. Then there are chapters and chapters of God describing His judgment, and I thought, “Could we not get the point in just a few chapters?” There are multiple books in the Bible describing God’s judgment, especially on Israel, and the detail had to be there for a reason. So I decided to start all the way over at Ezekiel chapter 1, and this time I opened a Google Doc and titled it “Lessons from Ezekiel.” I was determined to learn something, but I was not expecting some of the hard-hitting truths God would reveal to me. This study has four main lessons, a month-long focus on the idea of God calling the heart back to Him. Through the study we cover topics like covetousness, guarding your eyes, and the sin of Sodom, which might not be what you think. Over and over we see the heart of God. He does not judge because He is impatient or raging; He is a loving Father who is merciful and patient. His cry throughout the book of Ezekiel is clearly stated in Ezekiel 33:11: “Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” Let us not fall into the habit of spiritual motions without genuine heart change. That is really what the whole book is about.
Inside the Book
Ryan: I am reading through this and going, “Man, this is hard-hitting. We have to soften it up, make it pink, and try to make it feel like a ladies’ devotional, but it is so good.” So I wanted to step you through some of the interior. Here are the intro pages. We even put in this little image of Ezekiel looking down, with a heart for his people below. Because of the location, we looked up specific flora and fauna from the area and included pictures of desert plants that might be exactly what Ezekiel was walking through. There are a couple of intro pages here explaining what she just stepped us through, why this book goes through Ezekiel. You do not typically see that in a ladies’ devotional. Then week number one. This is formatted similarly to the Joy devotional. It is broken into four weeks, and each week into seven days. The first two days of each week go over the same lesson she taught our ladies, and days three through seven are follow-up texts that coincide with that lesson. Basically, we took her lesson outline notes and the fill-in-the-blank handout she gave our ladies and expanded on them. If the lesson was extra long, we split it into the two days. The lesson she taught in week one was almost entirely on covetousness. This is not an exact transcription, but it is her notes on covetousness, with a few little journal prompts along the way. Do you want to talk about the hymn you incorporated?
Jamie: Every week we sang “How Firm a Foundation” at the opening, because I truly wanted this to be an example of a study in a book that, as I already mentioned, seems kind of crazy, right? It did not make a lot of sense, but the Bible is there for a reason. God puts everything in there for a reason, and I wanted us to come back to that firm foundation of the Scripture. So every week we talked about the hymn “How Firm a Foundation,” highlighting a different scriptural truth, and we put that truth and promise from Scripture, with the verses, in a handout for the ladies, and we have included that in the devotional as we march through the book.
Ryan: So each week focuses on a different verse of “How Firm a Foundation.” Verse one is about the truths of the Word of God, and each verse is a different truth the hymn focuses on, so each week of the book includes one of those callbacks to the hymn, with some of the Scriptures you see here. Day two is the second part of the covetousness lesson. If you are going through this devotional, you start by reading the entire passage and then go over the devotional portion and fill in your notes. There are notes along the sidebars too, so you can add extra notes if you are prone to writing more or have extra thoughts. There are very hard-hitting, really pointed questions, and if you really stop and think about these things, they can be life-changing. You have to do the work for any kind of spiritual growth to happen, but a devotional like this is not just fluff. It is not going through some silly questions; these are real, deep, probing questions, and I appreciated that about this book in particular, going through Ezekiel. At the close there is another little journal section, and at the close of each day is a prayer or action step, something to do. So days one and two wrap up the lesson, and then days three through seven follow a different format: a different passage to read with a theme at the top, encouraging you to reflect on days one and two again. The lesson stays fresh and stays with you, but you go to various portions of Scripture and get it from different angles, not just the Ezekiel angle. For instance, day three here is from Matthew chapter 6, with some tie-ins to the lesson, journal questions following up the Matthew 6 study, and a closing prayer or practical action. For example, on day six: “Today, every time you feel envy, worry, or covetousness, immediately pause and recite Psalm 37:4”: “Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” So there is Bible memory and Bible meditation and all kinds of action steps. We want to make the Bible meaningful and bring the Bible home, as we say at our church, and this is a good way to do that.
Week two is when she taught the lesson on the eyes. It is the same format: we broke the lesson into two days with journal questions and another hymn prompt, day two being the second half of the lesson, and then journal prompts each day for days three through seven. All four weeks of the book go like that. The week on Sodom, as she said in the intro, is not about the sin of Sodom you might think. It is a surprising sin that hits all of us. It is just such a good lesson, a helpful study for anybody. I recommend it for ladies, and if some man secretly buys it and goes through it, I think that is totally fine. It is worth that as well; it is a good Bible study. And finally, the last week focuses on God, bringing it back to the whole crux of the point. Give us a little summary of the final lesson.
A Loving Father Calling Us Back
Jamie: Yes, week four brings us back to the conclusion: it has been God, this loving Father, calling His people back to Him because He loves them. In it I share a story of our daughter Charlotte when she was younger, a moment when we were going back and forth over something. I remember going into the other room and being broken over the struggle we were having. It broke my heart, and I remember thinking, “I am not just some mean person who wants you to do what I said. I just want what is best for you. I want you to learn that I love you, that you can trust me. I want to help you.” I wanted to communicate all those things to my little girl, and I was trying to, but in her mind she just could not compute that obeying me was for her best good. That is what God is telling us in Ezekiel. He wants our best, and when He calls us back to Him, it is not because He is an angry father trying to dictate His will and make us conform to what He wants. It is because He loves us and wants what is best for us. And through His best, the world can see that He is a loving God, and that we did not earn salvation, because we are terrible people. It is just a beautiful picture of what God’s redemption not only does for us but how it proclaims His goodness to the world. It is a powerful final chapter.
Ryan: Yes, that is a good conclusion to the book. It is a call to repentance, hard-hitting on sin. What is it all about? It is really all about God. So it is a great conclusion and a great book. I recommend it to everybody, but especially if you have some ladies who might be interested, check it out. And this is just the start. Once you get to the end, four weeks is not the only Bible study you do; you keep going. So that is the quick breeze through the book Turn Ye, Turn Ye, available on Amazon. We are really looking forward to getting the word out about it. If you have purchased a copy, maybe put a review on Amazon, and check out the Joy book as well, in hardback or paperback. These are just a wonderful addition, with more to come in the future, and I am really excited about the next one coming up as well. God bless you, and we will see you in the next video.
