You're listening to Catholic Sprouse, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouse. Today is Wednesday, April 10th, 2019, and we are still in the fifth week of Lent.

This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are once again looking at Jesus Christ, our great teacher and example.

And this week, we narrow, zeroing in

on what he teaches us about prayer. We've already discussed how prayer is simply coming into the

presence of God, something that we can easily do many times a day, how Jesus shows us we need to pray first, not last. And yesterday we talked

about how Jesus encourages us to use beautifully perfect memorized prayers, like the Our Father,

which he gave to us himself. Today, we are going to look at another thing that Jesus

encourages us to do because he did it all the time. And that is to know scripture,

memorize scripture, and use scripture, not only when we're talking about our faith, but when we're defending

ourselves against the temptation of the devil, or even when we are trying to pray to God and

figure out what his will is. Now, we see Jesus quote scripture so many times in the gospel. If you don't know, Jesus was Jewish. And of course, he didn't have the Bible like we have. Because, of course, the gospels weren't written yet. Jesus was still alive. But he did have a holy book. He was Jewish, so he had

something called the Torah. Now, the Torah is essentially what we see as the Old Testament. So it

includes the books of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, also the Psalms that David wrote, as well as the books from

many prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah, and many others. So Jesus knew these books well, and in fact,

he probably had many passages memorized because as a devout Jew, his parents took his

education in their Jewish faith very seriously. They studied the Word of God and they knew it.

A lot of the times when Jesus is teaching in the synagogue, he teaches or explains

certain passages in scripture. And a lot of times he's explaining how that passage that is

actually prophesying him and how he is fulfilling it. So it's a very rich way to understand what Jesus is saying,

to understand what he is citing and then understand how he is explaining it.

So this is a very big topic.

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