Hi, my name’s Grace Clibourn. I’m part of the team here at GOD TV. Welcome to God Today. Today, I’m going to be speaking to you briefly about having accurate knowledge of the word of God, and in order to do that, I’m going to be bringing up a couple points, such as the difference between exegesis and eisegesis, and why we need to have accurate knowledge of the word of God.
So in case you are not familiar with the terms that I just used just now: exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis is going into the biblical texts and discerning the original intent of the word and the original intent of the text. Eisegesis is placing an interpretation onto the texts, usually because of our own cultural backgrounds or our own personal experiences, so on and so forth. I think it is important that we have our devotional time with the Lord where, you know, the Holy Spirit can be with us while we’re reading. He can give us, you know, some personal words for our life, for our day through the word of God. But when it comes to really studying, we need to be very careful not to do something like read a text and say, what does this mean for me? I think what the important thing, the important thing that we need to do, if we need to interpret the word of God accurately, is exegesis, which is looking into the biblical, like the historical and cultural context, the original language of the time, even where a book or verses placed within the biblical texts. These are all very important things to be looking at. And without looking at those things, I don’t think, well, I know that we actually can’t know the true meaning of the biblical texts.
So I think it’s important for us as leaders or, you know, even if you’re not a teacher or a pastor, you are still a Christian, which means you have influence over the people around you. And so, you having accurate knowledge of the word of God is incredibly influential, not just for your life, but for the people around you. So I just want to encourage you, I believe in, you know, continuing to learn, continuing to take classes or courses, and reading different books, different commentaries, different dictionaries in order to continue to learn and to keep that super sharp and not to place our own, you know, cultural things onto the texts, not to place our own personal experiences onto the textbook, but be really careful not to do that, especially in this time. I mean, I think it’s always been important for us to know truly what the word says, but right now it’s very important that we really know how to dissect the biblical text.
So I just want to encourage you today, even if it feels humbling, sometimes we have to humble ourselves and just be like, you know what? I need to sharpen that, I feel a little bit rusty. And that’s good. I think humility is an important quality of a leader. So I just wanna encourage you today to, exegete don’t eisegete as much as possible, and really be in the word because the people around you need truth right now. So bless you.