Everybody, what is going on? You know what time it is. You're listening to join the Journey podcast with your host, Emma, daughter.

Thanks for joining. Today, we are taking a look at Numbers 15. And a good question for us to ask is, what does it look like for us to prepare well?

Now, that question might surprise you coming out of this chapter, but hang with me.

I'm going to show you why I'm pulling a question of preparation from the text. Now, throughout various

stages of my life, studying or preparing for tests and exams has looked different. When I was

young, maybe in middle school, a teacher would give out a study guide, probably one page front and back,

you'd use the textbook to fill it out, I'd review it over and over again, and then mom or dad would

quiz me until I had the information down. But when I was an English major in college, studying looked

like reading a lot. I remember in my British lit class, we'd have to, on exams, read an excerpt from a piece

of poetry or prose, then identify the author, the title of the work, the time period it was from,

as well as the significance of the line. And this became especially difficult when all of the

works we were being tested on were from the same era. So preparing looked like reading a lot

and making up cheesy, helpful acronyms to remember what all belonged together. It was unrealistic

to prepare by memorizing every poem because that would have been nearly impossible. Instead,

I needed to prepare by memorizing how different pieces of the puzzle related to one another.

When I went through the Watermark Institute, preparation for our big stand-and-deliver exam looked like a lot of repetition.

Repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, practice made perfect, so to speak, or at least practice made you prepared.

How and why we prepare matters.

If we fail to prepare, we're probably going to fail.

And if our preparation is motivated by fear, pride, or any other sinful driving force,

we might pass the exam, but morally, will be decaying.

How and why we prepare matters.

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