This week’s message, “Formed by the Word,” explores Joshua 1:1–8 and 2 Timothy 3:10–17 and invites us to discover how Scripture can move from information we know to truth that actually forms the way we live.
Studying the Bible doesn’t have to be complicated. In this message, Rev. John Arnold shares two simple practices that can help anyone approach Scripture with greater curiosity and a willingness to respond to what God is teaching us.
📖 Scripture: Joshua 1:1–8; 2 Timothy 3:10–17
🎙️ Message: “Formed by the Word”
⛪ Series: Core Practices of the Christian Faith — Study
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In this episode:
— Why spiritual growth requires intentional practices
— Why Bible study is about formation, not just information
— How the Old and New Testaments point us toward Christ- Why curiosity is essential for spiritual growth
— How Scripture moves from something we know to something we live-
Two simple questions for your daily Bible reading
Try this: After reading Scripture, write:“
A question I have is…”
Then: “I think today God wants me to…”
Key Takeaways
–Spiritual growth rarely happens by accident.
–Scripture is meant to form us, not merely inform us.
–Curiosity opens us to continued growth, while action helps truth become part of our lives.
–And meaningful Bible study can begin with just a few intentional minutes each day.
TRANSCRIPT — Formed by the Word
Joshua 1:1–8 · 2 Timothy 3:10–17
Study Isn’t Glamorous, but It’s Necessary
As we begin this new unit — we’re looking at study for the next three weeks — I’ll admit there was part of me that dreaded announcing it, because study just isn’t a glamorous topic. Nobody hears “we’re going to learn about studying” and gets excited. When I think about studying, I picture sitting in a library with a textbook and a highlighter, notes in the margins that are mostly doodles, or a study group quizzing each other. It doesn’t sound fun. You’re never going to hear someone propose a study date — “Let’s go to dinner, then come back to my place, get out a book and some highlighters, and mark it up together” — that’s the kind of plan that gets someone walking out the door.
Study, like fellowship, is a word we’ve watered down. When we talked about fellowship a few weeks ago, I said the word had lost some of its depth — we’ve reduced it to mean just being together, when in a biblical sense it means belonging to one another in Christ in a deeply devoted way. Study deserves the same kind of widening. Over these three weeks, I hope you’ll see not just its importance, but its breadth — that it isn’t just about sitting down to learn scripture, even though that’s one of the best places to start.
Informational vs. Transformational
Here’s the heart of it: studying scripture isn’t ultimately about gathering information. It’s not about winning at Bible trivia or knowing a lot about the Bible. At the end of the day, it should transform us. It should be not just informational, but formational. I’ll tell you by the end of this message how simple that shift can actually be — we don’t need to overthink what it means for scripture to move from informational to transformational.
But first, let’s pause and consider how important this has been to God throughout all of scripture.
Joshua: Be Strong, Be Courageous, Don’t Neglect the Law
Go back to Joshua, in the Old Testament — hundreds of years before Christ. Joshua is Moses’ successor. Moses has led a grumbling, weary people through forty years in the wilderness, and now, famously, he doesn’t get to enter the promised land himself — one of those questions I intend to ask God about someday. Moses dies, and Joshua inherits what might be the hardest assignment given to anyone among God’s people at that time: leading a whole new life in a new land.
At the heart of what God tells him, once he gets past “don’t freak out” — which is how I read “be strong and courageous, and do not be afraid” — is a call to obey the law given to Moses. And it’s not enough for God to simply say “obey it.” He underscores it again and again: don’t neglect it, meditate on it day and night. This was likely just the first five books of scripture — maybe even just the Ten Commandments themselves. And still, God emphasizes it with an almost threefold insistence: read it, read it, read it. Keep it in front of you, because it’s the key to a good life in this new chapter.
Timothy: Scriptures That Point to Christ
Fast forward hundreds of years. Jesus has come, died, risen, and the early church is emerging into its second generation of leadership. Timothy is a young man coming up as a leader, mentored by Paul, who treats him almost like a son and is now passing the mantle to him.
Paul first tells Timothy that he has followed his example — his patience, his faith, his way of life. That’s worth noting as part of study too: looking at people who have lived faithfully around us, studying their patterns and their character as living examples of scripture lived out. Someone once said your life may be the only Bible some people ever read, and there are people who embody their faith so fully that they become exactly that.
But Paul doesn’t stop there. Timothy didn’t have a Bible he could pick up at a store. He likely had access to the Pentateuch, maybe the Psalms and some of the prophets — probably not even in his own possession, but heard read aloud again and again at the synagogue, or learned by memorization at the feet of a rabbi. And yet Paul tells him that the sacred writings he’s known since childhood are able to make him wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
Sit with that for a moment. Paul is talking about Old Testament scriptures — writings that predate Jesus by decades, some by centuries — and telling Timothy that they point toward salvation and faith in Christ. What that tells us is that the whole trajectory of God’s word, from the very beginning, has been aimed at what God was doing in Jesus Christ. That’s where the story was always headed.
The Old Testament Still Points to Jesus
I had a friend in college once tell me she didn’t understand why anyone would bother reading the Old Testament. I couldn’t imagine not reading it. Everything in it prefigures and points toward the redemptive act of the cross. You don’t get the full depth of what that love means, or how long God was working toward it, if you skip over it. The word “testament” means covenant — and when we look at the old covenant alongside the new, we’re really looking at the continuous arc of one relationship God has had with his people all along. That’s exactly what Paul is reflecting back to Timothy: those sacred writings from his youth point to salvation in Christ.
So when we study scripture, somewhere along the way it needs to lead us toward a deeper understanding of what God has done in Christ. If it doesn’t get there, we’ve stopped short. Moral teaching for its own sake isn’t a bad thing, but it leaves us with informed heads and hearts that haven’t actually been transformed into the likeness of Jesus. And it’s that transformation people end up “reading” when they see our lives lived out — even people who’ve never opened a Bible themselves.
What Makes a Sermon Great
I was listening recently to a snippet from pastor Timothy Keller, who talked about riding home from church with his wife and hoping she’d say it was a good sermon. One day he finally asked her outright how often, on average, his sermons were actually great. She said maybe one out of every four or five. But she explained what made the difference: his sermons were always well put together — rational, structured, intellectually engaging. But the great ones were the ones where, partway through, after telling the congregation how to live well, he brought Christ into the picture and reminded them to do these things not to earn anything, but because Christ had already done everything necessary for them.
That distinction stuck with me. Hearing “you should do better” tends to just produce guilt. Hearing “do this because Christ already gave his life for you” is what actually changes something.
Knowing Christ
I’ll admit the working title for this message was originally “Knowing Christ,” before it became “Formed by the Word.” Both point to the same thing: scripture, Old and New Testament alike, should ultimately point us toward faith in Christ. Study that stops short of that — that becomes only informational — leaves us with full heads but hearts that haven’t been renewed into Christ’s likeness. Study that goes all the way there is what actually forms us.
It Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated
I could go much further into this, but I want to land here, because this is the bottom line: it doesn’t have to be complicated.
I went to seminary and paid a great deal of money for people to make it complicated. I learned Hebrew and Greek, translated a lot of scripture, and genuinely enjoyed the process — especially Hebrew, which felt earthy and rich and contextual, unlike Greek, which always felt like something you could just run through rules on a computer. I remember getting frustrated in class because the answer to “how did you know to translate it that way?” was so often just “context” — which told us nothing and everything at once. I don’t say any of that to knock what I learned. The historical-critical method, exegesis, twenty-page papers unpacking historical and literary context — I loved the depth of it, and we could talk about it all day.
But honestly, my most formative days in scripture happened in college, with a beat-up paperback Bible. Every day, I’d open it, read a small section, and jot down a few things: my first impression, what the passage might have meant to its original audience, what it might mean for us today — and then two things that turned out to be the most valuable practice I ever built, though I had no idea at the time.
Two Simple Daily Questions
The first was finishing this sentence every day: A question I have is…
That was golden, because the key to learning and growing is curiosity — coming to God’s word with an open heart, wanting to know a little more. Sometimes a passage looked completely straightforward, and I’d sit there until I could find a real question in it anyway. What I discovered is that writing the question down opened a door for the Holy Spirit to step in and surprise me. It’s a little like the way your brain suddenly notices every Subaru on the highway once you’ve started shopping for one — the thing was always there, but now it’s on your radar. Once I had a question sitting in front of me, it was remarkable how often, a few days later, in scripture or in conversation, an answer would show up. My understanding kept moving simply because I’d shown up curious and open.
The second was finishing this sentence: I think today God wants me to…
Some days the answer flowed naturally out of the reading — a story about the prodigal son, or the good Samaritan, and I’d realize I knew someone facing a similar situation I could quietly help. Other days I had no idea what God wanted from that particular passage, but I didn’t let myself off the hook. I’d sit and pray until I landed on something concrete and tangible, whether or not it obviously connected to what I’d just read.
Growing in God’s word really can be that simple. You don’t have to learn another language — that’s a good and enriching thing to do, but it isn’t required. I just showed up daily, a little at a time, consistently. I think that’s exactly what God meant when he told Joshua not to neglect the law, to keep it on his heart day and night — just show up, spend a few minutes, and do it with curiosity and a genuine desire to live it out.
Formed by the Word
That’s it. Curiosity, and a yearning to live it out. The Holy Spirit fills in the rest, gradually and then, it seems, all at once — until one day you look up and realize you’re a genuinely different person than you were six months or a year and a half ago. God works that way, quietly forming us as we go. That’s what I mean by being formed by the word — at the end of the day, it should shape us to be more like Christ.
Blessings on your journey, and praise be to God that he gave us his word — let’s make use of it.
Amen.