Episode Details

Why Did Jesus Walk Away From a Crown?

This episode is part of Bible Study 101, a short series teaching a method Rachael calls the color method. The idea is simple. You take one passage, and instead of reading it once and moving on, you go through it several times marking different things in different colors. Each color answers a different question, and by the end you can see things on the page that you'd never catch reading at normal speed.

This week the passage is John 6:1-15, the feeding of the five thousand. Today's color is red, and red marks the action words. Once the whole passage is covered in red, you can go back and ask a question that changes how the story reads: who is actually doing all of this? The answer is that Jesus starts every single thing, and everyone else responds. Which makes the very last verse land differently, because it's the one moment the crowd tries to move first.

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Chapters

0:00 Where we are in the series

0:30 Red is the color people overthink

0:59 What counts as an action word

1:56 The picture test

2:50 Reading John 6:1-15

4:46 Marking the passage verse by verse

5:16 When a word needs more than one color

7:45 The words that could go either way

8:14 Repetition is not an accident

8:42 Verse 11, and why John slows down

10:20 The last action in the passage

10:45 What all that red tells you about the kind of writing you're in

12:09 Why verse 11 is the center of gravity

12:38 Now go back and look at who is acting

13:31 Jesus initiates. Everyone else responds.

14:32 Verse 15 and the crown

16:11 Prayer

17:22 Homework

What is the color method?

It's a way of studying the Bible that Rachael developed years ago while teaching sixth and seventh graders who had never been shown how to read Scripture for themselves. She later published it in her first book, She Hears.

You take a short passage, ten to fifteen verses, and you mark it with colored pencils or highlighters. Each color stands for one question. Green marks the who, meaning every name, title, and pronoun. Blue marks the supernatural, the things only God could have done. Red marks the action words. There are three more colors coming later in the week.

The point isn't the colors. The point is that you can't put a color on a word without making a decision about that word, and you can't make a decision without slowing down enough to actually read. Most of us skim familiar passages without realizing it. This makes skimming impossible.

What passage are we in?

John 6:1-15, the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus is followed by a large crowd, He asks Philip where they'll buy bread, Andrew finds a boy with five loaves and two fish, and Jesus feeds thousands of people with it. The passage ends with the crowd trying to make Him king.

We're spending the whole week in these fifteen verses, adding one color a day.

What does red mark in the color method?

Red marks the action words. The verbs.

But red is the color people overthink, so use the picture test. Could you watch this happen? Would it show up on a video? Running, walking, sitting, healing, handing something to someone. If you can see it happening, mark it.

Technically words like is, was, and had are verbs too. You can't picture "was," so leave it alone. You can picture "sat down," so