Welcome back to Primarily Scripture. I am Cindy Young, and I am so glad that you are here with me. I specialize in helping you go from just reading your scriptures to studying them with super simple tips, so easy that even a kid can do it. We follow the Come Follow Me schedule, which means this year we are reading the Old Testament. For the entire month of March. I'm going to help you learn ways to understand the scriptures better, which is really the very first step, right? If you don't know what you're reading, then how are you gonna get anything out of it? So thanks for being here and let's get to it. All right. Come follow me. This week has a lot of chapters. So many. We are in Genesis chapters 24, all the way to 33. That's 10 chapters. It's like 20 pages that we need to get through. So, so many. Now, if you remember in January, one of my tips for you was to make goals and to figure out how much you wanted to read. Are you wanting to read every single word in the Old Testament, or are you just wanting to stay current with Come Follow Me? This week is one of the weeks when it would be really beneficial to just stay current with, Come Follow Me, because reading all 20 pages might be kind of a lot for a beginner. So just a reminder to think about your goals, and if you need to reevaluate, go ahead. You're always allowed to adjust your goals. Last week I suggested that to understand the Old Testament better, you could use different translations. There are a lot out there, and the church has put out a list of approved translations that you can use. If you want more information about that, go listen to last week. For this week. I want to expand on that thought a little bit. Using the new translations is a really great way to help you learn to understand, but if you're trying to understand the King James version of the Bible, then you need to be sure that you spend time in the King James version. So after you have read it in one of the new translations, I would suggest that you go back to the King James version and read those verses or chapters again, and it will help your brain to connect the dots. Now that you already understand the story, what does it sound like in the King James Bible? Does that make sense? In order to learn how to understand the language of the scriptures, you need to actually use the language of the scriptures. Think about it like different language. If somebody is speaking Spanish, and I say, 'I don't understand that,' and somebody else translates it for me and says, 'oh, they said this and this and this...' Okay... I get the idea of it, but am I understanding Spanish? I'm not. You can still learn something from it, sure! But if you really, really want to be able to do your own interacting with that person, you need to learn that language. The same goes for the scriptures. If you want to be able to interact with them, then you need to learn to be comfortable with the language of the scriptures. So don't leave your King James version on the shelf. Be sure you keep going back to it. Now part of my worksheets puts a few verses into modern day language so that it's easier to understand, but the point of that isn't so that we can ignore the standard verses. We want to train our brains to understand the language of the Old Testament. So besides doing it on the worksheet, I would encourage you to go back and say it in your own words, because if you can look at the verses and say it in your own way, then your brain will start making that connection and translating the scriptures so that you understand it in your head. Let's turn to Genesis chapter 24, verse five. And this is the story where Abraham is getting old and he wants Isaac to have a wife, but he really wants her to be somebody of their same religion, and so he sends his servant off to go find a wife. Verse five is the servant asking a question. Let's read it together."And the servant said unto him, Peradventure, the woman will not be willing to follow me unto this land?" That is a lot of words that we don't usually say. So in order to understand that better, I want you to break it down a little bit at a time, just go one phrase at a time. Let's do that together and be sure we understand what this says. The first phrase is, "and the servant said unto him..." We understand that, that's good, but what about this - "peradventure..." Pause! Anytime you see a word that is so unfamiliar to you, look it up in the dictionary. We all have smart devices in our homes that you can ask and say, "define this word," and it'll tell you what it means. Peradventure is a word that means 'what if.' So the servant asks, "what if the woman will not be willing to follow me unto this land?" So breaking it down one phrase at a time and defining those really hard words will help you to learn the language of the scriptures. Most of the words that you read in the Old Testament are English because it's been translated into English, right? But you are going to find some words still that are in Hebrew, mostly names. There are names of places in the Old Testament that were kept in Hebrew because that's their name, right? But one of the really helpful things about the names that the Hebrews used, both for people and for places, is that they gave names that meant something specific. For instance, why don't we turn to Genesis chapter 29, verse 32, and it says, "Leah conceived and bear a son..."' She conceived" means she was pregnant.'Bear a son' means she had a baby boy."...and she called his name Reuben." Now this is a name and it has a footnote attached to it. So if you look at that footnote, either by reading it or clicking on it, Reuben means" look, a son." That's what it means. She had her first baby, and she named him, "look, a son." These Hebrew names can help us to understand more of what was going on in the story. It adds a new layer of understanding for us. Leah's second son was named Simeon, which means "hearing." She felt like God had heard her and so she named her son something that meant she had been heard. Isn't that fascinating that these names mean something so much more than just a name that they were called? Now, let's talk for a minute about chapter 32. Starting in verse 24, Jacob is all by himself and a messenger from God comes and they wrestle all night long. We don't know fully what the wrestle was. The scriptures say that there was a man and they wrestled all night long, and what Jacob wanted out of this wrestle was a blessing from him. In verse 26, Jacob says, "I will not let thee go except thou bless me." And he ended up getting a blessing, including a new name. And the new name that he got of course was super meaningful, and it was Israel, which means "let God prevail" - that Jacob let God be the most important thing. Now, there are a lot of different lessons from this, and President Nelson spoke quite a bit on letting God prevail and how each of us should let God prevail in our own lives- let Him be the very most important thing. But let's apply this to scripture study. You are going to come across passages of scripture that are very difficult to understand, especially in the Old Testament. It might even feel like a wrestle to figure out what the scriptures mean. But if your number one priority is to feel the Spirit and to get that blessing from the scriptures, then the Lord will absolutely bless you with understanding. It comes a little bit at a time line upon line. But don't give up. Keep going back. So don't forget the tips that we've talked about today. Keep going back into your King James version so that you can get more used to that language. Go a little at a time and say the stories in your own words, and make sure you understand the big words. There's some very big English words that you might need to look up, and if you want added understanding, then you can check the footnotes for the meaning of some of these Hebrew names. Not all of them, but a lot of them, and that can give even more depth to your study. There are a lot of different ways to learn these stories. You can read about them in church magazines. There are picture storybooks that can teach you the stories, and that's a great place to start. But I hope that your goal is to eventually be reading these scriptures directly from the King James version of the Bible, because that is the official version. And if you learn to understand the language of the scriptures, your life will be blessed in immeasurable ways because they'll always be there waiting for you, as a way for you to get messages from the Lord. So remember, of all the different ways you can study this week, be sure that your study is primarily scripture. I'm Cindy Young. Come back next week for even more tips to help you decode and understand the scriptures. See you next time everybody! Thanks for tuning into primarily Scripture with Cindy Young. Don't forget you can subscribe to the newsletter and download free worksheets on the website, primarily scripture.com. And if you like the channel, be sure to subscribe, like, share, and leave a review. See you next time.