Well, I have shared very much of my story about becoming a Christian and going off to Bible college and eventually becoming a pastor. But when I was young, if there was one thing that influenced me the most, it is what this whole next series of videos is about. Hello church. Today’s video is a little bit different. I recorded a class over a year ago for the Global Baptist Bible College that they have used for an overseas extension program, but they allowed us to use these files however we would like. So, today we are kicking off a 20-part video series on Bible study. And I preach most of these lessons as sermons to our church. And typically these videos are addressed to our church where I pastor. But since these were originally recorded for another audience, they might feel a little bit different from our usual setup. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench. I am the pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. So today’s video is an intro to the Bible study series where you will hear my personal testimony and then what to expect from the series and then one crucial principle. We are going to close with what I think is just the most important principle of a Christian’s life.
And so with that, let’s enjoy this week’s video.
Welcome to the Class
Well, hello and welcome to the class. This is a video format, so it is a little bit different than I am used to. I love interacting with people, but I cannot interact obviously this way. So I will try to do my best since it will feel probably more like a sermon. I will just be talking directly to you and will not really have chance for questions and answers and feedback and all of that. So, I will try to make this as thorough as possible and try to do my best. And I want to start by introducing myself and then introduce the class and a little bit about what to expect with the class and then kind of set up where we are going to go with the series. If the Lord wills, then we will try to get through this and I want it to be a help to people. because I wish I could meet you and hopefully one day we will get to meet and I would love to meet you one day and spend some time with you and hear how God is using you and taking you on your journey as a Christian to dive into the word of God and to learn more about him from the Scriptures.
That is my biggest goal. This is such an important class because we get to study the Bible and even learn how to study the Bible a little bit better. So my name is Ryan Rench. I am a pastor here in California, United States and I was saved, I became a Christian when I was just 5 years old. my dad was a pastor, he was a Baptist pastor and had been all of my life and started the church when I was about 6 months old and so that is where I had grown up. And I grew up kind of thinking that I was a Christian already just because my dad was a pastor and I knew the Bible stories, I knew all about Jesus, I knew about the Bible and just kind of figured, well, I am I am good to go. And I thought I was a Christian because of that. As being a part of a Christian family, I thought I had kind of just morphed into Christianity that way. And my brother and I were talking actually on a Saturday night bath time, and he just straight up asked me or he straight up told me actually, “You are on your way to hell.”
My Testimony
And I said, “No, I am not.” He said, “Yeah, you are.” And we argued a little bit back and forth about that. And, he was 9 years old, I was 5. And yet, he knew the Bible, man. He was explaining to me Well, he asked me this question that that really struck home for me. And he asked, “Well, when did you get saved?” And that was for me, it was the first time that it had struck me that I had never been born again. That I had never made a personal decision. And I thought growing up in a Christian family was okay. But when he asked me when I had been saved, I did not have a good answer for him. So he stepped me through the Scriptures. And in childlike faith, I trusted Christ as my savior right there as a 5-year-old boy. Went down and told my parents, and they, verified all of that to see that I fully understood it. but I remember that vividly. I remember repenting of my sins, realizing that I could not get to heaven on my own. And just placed my faith in Jesus Christ at that time.
And so, since then, I was never perfect, obviously. still had issues in my own Christian walk. But since then, it has been a constant series of growth. It is kind of been a progress of growing in the Lord. So for that, I am really thankful. I am thankful that I was raised in a family where I could study the Scriptures and could keep on growing. So that even by the time I was in high school, 14, 15, 16 years old, then I was getting more and more of a passion for God. And when I wanted to follow God more, then that ultimately led me to want to be in the Bible more. So I learned to kind of have this hunger for the Scriptures that I had never had before and actually study and read it for myself. And not just academically, not just to win an argument with a Mormon or something like that, but actually to know God. So in the mornings before school, I would wake up and my bed was kind of suspended from the ceiling and I had a chair underneath that and so I would jump down from my bed, had a little coffee pot under there and learned to drink coffee so I could be awake in the mornings and turn the coffee pot on, sat there in my chair, read the Scriptures, and bowed down and prayed, and learned to do that every day.
And I loved it. And it was like the more that I did that, the more I wanted to do it. You know what I mean? It became this passion in me that maybe even though I did not understand what I was reading every single day, at least I was reading something and I was growing in my faith and I was walking with the Lord. And it became something I just learned to develop and nurture and the strength through just the discipline of being in the Scriptures every day was just really, really helpful. I am going to get into some of the practical tips a little bit later on how to have a walk with God and encourage you to set aside a little bit of time every single day personally to do your own Bible study and to do your own Bible reading as well. So we will talk about the reading side of it, we will talk about the study side of it, and that was that was something that I learned over time that I needed both of those sides. So once I got out of high school, then the Lord called me to preach and I did not know whether I would be a missionary or a pastor or just a Christian worker or what that might be, but felt like I wanted to pastor and even as a 17-year-old wanted to develop that but then went off to Bible college and it was my freshman year of Bible college that I really got a passion for the word of God just from other classmates who were inspiring me in the Scriptures and would show me things that I had never seen before and I started to get a better grasp of the Scriptures as a whole not just as a bunch of individual Bible stories like I had learned growing up in Sunday school, but as one big story of the Scriptures and I loved seeing it from start to finish that it seemed like Jesus Christ was all the way through the Scriptures and it was all a story of the fall of mankind and God revealing himself to mankind and God sending his son Jesus Christ to forgive us of our sins and then ultimately one day bringing us back to himself.
And so starting to see how we fit into the flow of Scriptures really helped me in my study of the Scriptures and then the desire to study the Scriptures. So coming out of Bible college then worked in a church for a couple years and then came back to my home church and started working at my home church where I grew up and so I served under my dad.
My Family and Our Church
Right out of Bible college in 2008 I graduated and then about a month later got married to my beautiful wife Jamie and so here is a picture of my wife and my family. This was taken just about year ago and so you see my the church where we serve kind of in the background there and you see my family here. I think it just kind of gives you a little bit different flavor I guess, or a little bit different focus of who is teaching when you can kind of see the family behind the teacher. So this is my family. I am so thankful for my wife, Jamie. And we have been married several years now since 2008. And then my kids, Abraham there in the middle, Abe, is as of this recording, he just turned 10.
And then Charlotte is there on the left. She is the next one down. As of this recording, she is 8 years old. And then Gwen is my youngest, Gwendolyn. So she is 6 years old. So, that is 10, 8, and 6. And I love my kids, trying to raise them. I was just talking to my son Abe last night about having a walk with the Lord and about through our Master’s Club program, our our children’s program on Wednesday nights. just trying to encourage him to actually develop a prayer life, even as a 10-year-old. And to spend time with the Lord and to study the Scriptures, not just for checking off boxes, but truly to know God and to spend time with God. So I really love my family, love to introduce them to you as well. So I just never get old to looking at these pictures of them. as of 2010, I said we came back and then just about a year ago now for me, I became the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church. Here is a picture of our our website. And just a beautiful church family. I love them dearly.
They love the Scriptures. They love the Lord. We are not perfect, but we are just trying to connect our lives to God. So this is where we are now. And it started way back in 2010 when we came. You see me up there in the top left there in the blue shirt. Look a little different with hair and with no beard, but that was when we were first starting and here is just a picture of some of our youth group. We were I became the youth pastor when we moved to our church here and my wife is down there in the bottom right. And several of these young people are just doing really well today. The one standing next to me in the back middle there is Christian Saldana. He became the youth pastor after I left. He was my replacement in our youth ministry of our church and he was one of our teenagers and several others are Christian workers. There is a church lady on church staff there down in the middle. The one one of the ladies in the front there is in our church.
Another lady in the front there is a missionary in Nigeria now and so just beautiful memories that I have from those early years and then the years of ministering in the youth ministry and it came to the point where when brother Christian took over the youth ministry for me then it became the time for our church to transition. And on our church’s 34th anniversary my dad, our founding pastor, retired from the full-time work. He is still in our church and serving in our church and teaching a Sunday school class and ministering as pastor emeritus, but he is not in the office every single day anymore. So this is a picture from our 34th anniversary celebration and there is me and my family and then my dad and my mom there. So I am thankful for the heritage that they left. I am thankful for the work that they put into the ministry here and again for our church family that God’s blessed us with here at Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California and that is the United States and I am just so thankful for what God’s doing here. And I really just want this to be a place of the Bible.
What to Expect in This Series
You know, when I took over as of the time of this recording it has been about a year since I became the pastor and I have I have really just wanted our church to become a place of the book to love the word of God and to cherish the word of God and that is what I want for you too. I want this series to be a inspiration to you to study the Bible and to learn how to study the Bible and so I am going to spend several lessons. All of these first few lessons, maybe five or six, maybe eight or nine of these lessons will be on just talking about what the Bible is for us and what the Bible is to us and I want us to have a firm foundation of what the Scriptures are and so we will talk just about the importance of the Bible. And not necessarily yet how to study it but establishing why we study it. So it might seem like, well, I signed up for this class because I wanted to learn to how to study the Bible but I think inspiring you to know why you should study the Bible is equally important.
What really drives Bible study is when you have a heart for the Scriptures. So at first our Bible study series will just be studying the Bible first. We will look from from some passages in 2 Timothy chapter 3. I think 2 Timothy 3 and 4 are some of the most powerful passages on an older man, Paul, establishing a younger man, Timothy, in the direction of his ministry. And of all the things he could have focused on, the main thing the Apostle Paul passed on to Timothy was that, look Timothy, you need to be a person of the Scriptures. You need to love the Bible. You need to pass on the same things that I passed to you. So we will spend several messages several class times just talking about the Scriptures and focusing on the Bible. Another one of the books that we will go through and that is been a real big help for me and I am teaching through it with our church as well is a book called Understanding the Bible for Yourself. This is an appropriate book for us as we are going into a Bible study series as well because the title of this book is pretty much the goal of this video series as well.
Understanding the Bible for Yourself. This is by a missionary, David Cloud, who loves the Scriptures. He loves studying the Scriptures. So this has both real practical explanations and again some step-by-step instructions on how to study the Scriptures for yourself. Another book that I am going to be bringing up is one that I wrote for our teenagers when I was a youth pastor. I was teaching a Bible class at a Christian school and then preaching through this for our teenagers and in preparation for a missions trip, I wanted them to be in their Bibles every single day and to qualify for the missions trip that we were taking, then I wanted to have some kind of systematic teaching or a check-in system that they would do every day that would then that we could then follow up with and not only make sure they were in their Bible but also equip them for staying in their Bible long term so that they were not just getting into the Bible just in order to qualify for a missions trip but that it but that it could be something that was long term and foundational for them and really helpful for them.
So I wrote the book BIBS after teaching through the lessons on that. BIBS just stands for big idea Bible study and I have here this original cover that we had. It was just a devotional that they would then fill out every day and answer some questions from the Scriptures every day and so we have updated the cover since then but you have my proof there but the new cover here just has BIBS, Big Idea Bible Study, and this green one here is not the devotional format but this is actually the instruction format as well so this teaches how to use the book these devotional books. Now these devotional books are the ones that that the young people would fill out and they would do the work day by day and they would kind of progress through through the structure day by day and have a spot there for taking notes and we will cover some of this as the series progresses as well but the Big Idea Bible Study format is the way that I think of Bible study. It is the way that I approach preaching now.
It is the way that I approach my personal devotions. It is a way that we will talk about trying to get the Scriptures that you studied into almost a one-sentence statement. So if somebody says, what did you read about in your Bible today?” You can say, “Well, I read about and we should we should praise the Lord for his truth and his mercy. So I am just thinking about that today. I am thinking about God’s truth and I am thinking about his mercy. And boy, it is just making me praise the Lord all day long.” And so, something like that from a chapter or from a whole text, if we can kind of boil it down to a single statement, a big idea then that is the point of that. So Big Idea Bible Study is kind of taking the Scriptures and from that grows a tree, grows a thought. And we will try to figure out how to determine that thought. About halfway through the series is when we will jump into that. Another book that I have been using just, personal in my personal study, is a big thick hardback book called Introduction to Biblical Interpretation.
I would not agree with everything in this and so, this would not necessarily be our textbook. I think whenever anyone casts doubt on the Scriptures or calls into question or puts us as the authority, then we just, we do not really want to set ourselves up like that. We want to allow the Scriptures to be our authority and we want to study the Bible more than putting ourselves as the authority. So sometimes books like that will need to use some of our discernment and pick out the portions that are not edifying to us or that would cause some kind of spiritual doubt in us. So I will not reference that one quite as much as the other two that I would really really trust. So, for the series, again, we will be talking about the Bible quite a bit. probably the first third of the classes will be talking about the Bible, and then we will get into how to study the Bible, and we will use a what is called an inductive method. We will We will start broad through observing, and then we will narrow it down to find the meaning of the text, the interpretation of the text, and then we will broaden it again and apply the meaning of the text to our lives and kind of learn how to do that.
And so, I am just hoping that by the end of our classes by the end of the time that we have had all of these lessons together then then you will be personally ready to study the Scriptures inspired to study the Scriptures, but also equipped to study the Scriptures as well. So, that you will be able to open up basically anywhere in the Bible, and confidently be able to look at that and say, “There is something in here for me, and I am going to dig it out.” There is a whole lot in the Bible that seems to be really confusing. It seems to be a little bit daunting, a little bit scary frankly, a little bit boring. Sometimes you will look at it and go, “What in the world does Leviticus have to do for me? Why do I care about sacrifices and about the way their clothes were made?” And why? So, we can learn from learning how to study the Bible what Leviticus has to say to us, and Numbers has to say to us as Christians, and Deuteronomy, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and the prophets, and the epistles, and the parables, and all the ways that the Bible is written for us.
We should be able to open up the Scriptures and read from anywhere and be able to interpret it and say, “God, what do you have in here for me?” And so, that is the big goal of our Bible study series, and that is what I want to accomplish through that.
The Scriptures Are Sufficient
I want to just spend the next few minutes talking from 2 Timothy chapter 3. If you have a Bible, you can turn to 2 Timothy chapter 3. And I want to read some Scriptures today. And look at 2 Timothy chapter 3 and verse number 13. The Bible says, “But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.” So, the world’s not necessarily getting better, it is getting worse according to the Apostle Paul writing to this young man, Timothy. But he says in verse 14, “But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them.” So, Timothy, you have learned the Scriptures. I taught you them. Your mom and your grandmother, your godly influences in your life taught you them. So you continue in those things.
You keep going in the Scriptures. Well, how is he going to do that without study? How is he going to know what the Scriptures say without study and without getting into the Scriptures for himself? Because the Apostle Paul said in verse 15, “And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.” And I love that he brings Timothy’s mind back to the moment that he was saved. You were saved, Timothy, by the Scriptures. They were able to make you wise. They were able to show you what to place your faith in. And then he says in verse 16, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” So, every part of Scripture you turn to should be profitable. All of it as a whole, and then every individual Scripture as well is profitable. So all of it as a whole, he says, is profitable. It is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. That basically sums up anywhere you can need an answer, any question you might have about life can be answered from the Scriptures.
And I believe that. I still believe that today. I hope you believe that as well, and want to learn to search the Scriptures for every answer that you might have. Because the next verse says, “That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” So, the Scriptures are sufficient for Christians to be able to live a mature Christian life. We do not need dreams and visions. We do not need extra revelation from God. We do not need that. We have everything that we need to live a fruitful Christian life. We can be thoroughly furnished. We can be fully satisfied by the Scriptures thoroughly furnished unto all good works. We need basically nothing else. Yes, you need your church, and yes, you need godly friends, and yes, God will bring godly people into your life to help you. I am not saying those are not good things, but the Scriptures here are teaching that look, foundational to your life is going to be the Scriptures. Sometimes I get caught up reading books, and I am studying books like this all the time, and reading about the Bible, and reading about how to study the Bible, and I am trying to find answers all over the place, and I am reading I read business books to help me be a better leader, and a better thinker, and I am constantly trying to develop myself, and to keep on growing as a Christian.
But the more that I look around at all these books that are out there, and the things that books have to offer, the more I am just thankful for, you know what? I just mostly need the book. I just mostly need the Bible, and we have something so powerful in our hands that when we open the Scriptures, we are hearing the voice of God. We are actually studying God’s word when we study the Bible. So encouraging people in biblical change it is going to be the work of God. And to have spiritual growth in your life, that is to be the work of God. And it is not going to come except by studying the Scriptures. So, at our church and hopefully in your church, we have a huge emphasis on Bible preaching and on Bible study and on calling people to give their lives to the Scriptures and focusing on preaching. Because the preaching of the word of God is going to be foundational. Moses was a preacher and Jesus was a preacher and Paul’s final words here are essentially about preaching and the primacy of preaching and taking the words of God and proclaiming them to people, proclaiming them first to yourself and then proclaiming them to people as well.
And so, I think I am going to spend the next class period going into a little bit more of the background of 2 Timothy chapter 3 and why Paul would emphasize preaching so much and emphasize the word of God so much to his young protégé, Timothy. And I am thinking, man, if these are the last words of the Apostle Paul, one of the greatest Christians who has ever lived, then I want to figure out what drove his ministry. I want to figure out what drove his life. I want to give my life to the same thing the Apostle Paul gave his life to. And I want to give my life to the thing that he wanted to have Timothy give his life to as well. I want the same kind of passion for generational ministry that Paul wanted to pass to Timothy and he wanted to pass to faithful men that they could teach others also. So, focusing on the Scriptures, it is so important that we know the Scriptures and that we love the Scriptures and that we study the Scriptures and so over the course again of these next few lessons we are just going to talk about that for a little while and focus on why we study the Scriptures and let that be our driving motivation to keep coming back to this class.
I hope that is a blessing to you. We are going to wrap up this morning’s lesson and that will be all for this morning. Hope that is a blessing to you. Well, thank you for watching this video from our 20-part series on Bible study. I realize this kind of content or our Baptist perspective might not be for everyone and I do not want to waste your time but if you did find it helpful or enjoyable, would you subscribe to our channel? We are releasing videos every Monday at noon Pacific Standard Time and I just want to help you bring the Bible home. So, we will see you maybe in person this Sunday at our church. That is it for now. God bless you church, grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
