Episode Details

Bible Study 101: How Do You Know If It's God Speaking? Hearing Jesus, Devotional

This is the last day of the color method, and yellow is different from every color before it. The first five marked things that were already on the page. Someone could look over your shoulder and check your work. Yellow marks what God showed you, which means nobody can check it but you.

That's exactly why Rachael saved it for last. If she'd handed you all six colors on day one, most of us would have reached for yellow immediately and skipped the work. Instead you spent five days looking at Him before you spent one minute looking at you.

This episode covers what to do with what you heard. Three filters to run it through before you act on it, what Paul meant when he told the Thessalonians not to quench the Spirit, and the two ditches on either side of this road that people fall into.

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Chapters

0:00 The last color

0:30 Why yellow was saved for last

1:27 What yellow actually marks

1:54 The verse her eight year old highlighted

2:51 Why you would have grabbed yellow first

3:25 Five days looking at Him before one minute looking at you

4:04 Reading John 6:1-15

6:00 God speaks in other ways too

7:02 His voice will not contradict His word

8:20 Reading 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

9:30 The two ditches

10:22 What quench actually means

11:20 The other ditch

12:17 Notice the order Paul puts it in

12:41 What to highlight in yellow

13:33 The three filters

14:17 The third filter, and what happened in Babylon

15:04 What biblical meditation actually is

16:13 How to respond

16:59 Prayer

17:57 Homework

18:31 Don't compare your yellow to hers

What is the color method?

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

You take a short passage and mark it with colored pencils or highlighters, one question per color. Green marks the who. Blue marks the supernatural. Red marks the action words. Purple marks timing. Orange marks numbers. Yellow marks what God showed you.

This week the passage has been John 6:1-15, the feeding of the five thousand, one color per day.

What does yellow mark, and why is it last?

Yellow marks what God impressed on your heart. It doesn't come from the page the way the other colors do. It comes from what happened in you while you were in the word.

And that's precisely why it goes last.

The first five colors are observation. You didn't invent anything, you noticed what was already there, which means your page and Rachael's page look mostly the same. Yellow isn't like that.

Yellow also feels like the most spiritual one. The others can feel like English class. Yellow feels like hearing from God, which is exactly why most of us would reach for it first if given the chance and skip the work entirely.

Rachael learned this at home. Years ago she had her kids highlight whatever stood out to them in their daily reading. Her eight year old landed on a verse in Song of Solomon that was wildly inappropriate for her age. She didn't understand it, she just thought it sounded poetic. It was innocent, and it made the point. Impression without context goes sideways fast.

So i