Hello and welcome to the She Reads Truth podcast where we open our Bibles and talk about the beauty goodness and truth we find there. I'm your host Amanda Bible Williams. And I'm your other host Rachel Myers and this week is our third week in the presence of God series. We are joined today by Whitney caps.

A friend of ours really just from ministry circles Whitney what I love about her is that she just loves helping women have light bulb moments. She has an online training resource called simple seminary which we'll get to talk about with her a little bit right at the beginning.

This episode is going to carry us through sort of the second half of us tracing the presence of God in scripture man so many honestly so many light bulb moments that will have y'all let's just get right to it.

Whitney do you do a lot of this a lot of like online teaching and is that what you guys do in simple seminary or are they pre record videos.

So we do both we pre record the curriculum that is in our site because it's self-paced and so some people move faster than others and so you get a year of curriculum.

But then we do live we call them Bible study lives which we do via zoom so that people can ask questions and it's just a free for all of whoever can be live at that time and then we take that and move it into our website to what we call in the classroom so that if you don't get to watch it live you can watch it later.

Yeah yeah so yeah back up because I want Whitney will you explain simple seminary because it sounds pretty self explanatory but you and your dad have a program online call simple seminary will you just like explain that to us for sure.

Yeah so simple seminary is an online learning platform for women who have maybe always wanted to learn theological ideas or concepts maybe thought about going to seminary but kind of couldn't jump in for various reasons.

So many reasons yeah for so many reasons and I'm actually one of those women so I'm not a seminarian I'm not an academic my dad is he has a doctorate and a PhD and I tell people all the time I have bootlegged all of the stuff that I know about the Bible and I just wanted to be able to provide women access to somebody who knows all the things and can explain all the things in a really accessible kind of way and so that's what we do we let women here and learn theological concepts and biblical studies curriculum in an online environment.

So you get to do it at your convenience and at your pace it's pretty rad it's one of my favorite things that I get to do I love that and so when you say simple you're not saying because it's easy.

Oh no no no no that's one of the things we want at least to build into the culture of simple seminary is that this thing that we're doing is actually quite hard and sometimes women who are really excellent Bible teachers and scholars can sometimes make it look really easy so much so that the rest of us feel kind of stupid when we're around them.

It's not intentional they just never intentional gift but it's actually something I think that we don't see the sweat equity that earned them that kind of ease but yeah we can think oh man there's something deficient I'm missing something and so at simple seminary we say no it's actually really really hard to study the Bible and so if you walk away with more questions than answers I kind of think you've done a really good Bible study I think we should be a little bit cautious if we walk away and are like

well that was lovely I know I understand that's right anyway so we don't say that it's simple seminary because we think it's simple the Bible is actually quite difficult it's worth the work but it is a lot of work but simple comes from Acts chapter 4 verse 13 where they had been walking with Peter and John and they say that they realized that they were unschooled ordinary men some translations will say simple and I'm a very simple woman I'm not a scholar or an academic but we believe that knowing biblical

truth is accessible for every single woman because we're simple but we have the Holy Spirit who is the great interpreter who really wants us to get it right and so it's one of the things I love that you guys do is that you ask us to do hard things and don't expect that women need it to be kind of the gummy version of taking our scripture pill you know I love that and you were saying like they were simple men but the thing that set them apart was that they had been with Jesus they had been with Jesus that's exactly right that's what they said

they knew that they were untrained ordinary men and listen if there was a description for my life every single day particularly 2020 it's I am at best ordinary you know most days probably

so far but ordinary is the reality of my life but scripture was written for the ordinary and I think it was we just forget that we forget that's great yeah and I love Whitney that you actually I've heard you say that you like to help women have light bulb moment that's right and so you know we're walking into our

third week in this presence of God series we you know took a week to kind of dig into some of those concepts yes of what you know sort of the various aspects of the presence of God and then last week we talked about the

garden and we talked about you know the Ark of the Covenant the tabernacle the temple all of those things and so that's kind of the framework for where we're picking up today and I'm so excited

hopefully to have some light bulb moments to kind of go into that I think light bulb moments are really exciting it's the same feeling that I get when I stumble into home goods and I find that little treasure that I want all my friends to know about you know that's kind of how I feel

when I'm studying God's word and I have one of those light bulb moments I want every I'm like did you see this did you know that connection had you ever read that before and so it's one of my favorite parts of

studying God's word and I think women collectively get really excited about those light bulb moments and so anytime we can have them or we can help one another see and have them it's just a really rad experience as far as community Bible study goes I love that so let's go into what we're reading today

day 15 let's talk about so this is I mean it's not a happy day the title of day 15 in the reading plan is God's presence leaves the temple that's right so we've had this beautiful build up where like the presence of God has led the people of Israel

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