The Bible, Part 1 // Can We Trust the Bible?

Welcome to the Lookout Weekly Podcast.

Church of the Lookout is in Boulder, Colorado, and our vision is Jesus abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with awe-inspiring love.

Visit us online at the lookout.church.

Awesome.

Good morning, everybody.

Good morning, I said.

So good to see you guys.

It's hot out there, kids, so make sure you stay nice and cool this afternoon.

But this morning, hope you're feeling good.

We're gonna jump into the word.

Before we do, one church family update.

Um, just so you guys are aware, and I just want to set a little context for the next couple months.

Um, some of you are aware that in our children's ministry we're in a transition.

Carla Denke, who has been leading and directing our children's ministry, she has been um uh she's been up against some health challenges, some real health challenges, and so her time as children's director is gonna be coming to the end in the next couple months, and we're gonna be blessing her into a new season, and we want to honor her as she transitions out.

She's laid a beautiful foundation this last year, and we are excited both uh, you know, as we're praying uh into the next season as we look forward.

We believe that God's heart for our kids is huge, and we believe that, like Amy was saying, we want to set a foundation that continues to launch them, invite them into their identity that God has given them to walk boldly and strongly.

So we are praying into the next season.

In the meantime, one ask that we have of you, we're kind of in this transition season.

One of the tricky parts right now is that we do still need teachers to serve once a month or so.

And as we're in this transition season, as we're kind of holding a place for the new leadership to come in, we're asking you as a church family to be open and to be willing to lean in with us as a family to hold the space so we can create a solid foundation to build from as we end this year and come into 2024.

So, what I'm asking you is this some of you um we've we've kind of done things and teased out volunteer, you know, asks and invitations.

I'm asking you, this is one of those times as a church family that you just gotta dig in, all right?

There's some things that uh there's some things that you feel called to.

I feel called to do this.

There's some things around the church that nobody ever feels called to, but you do it again because it matters.

You do it because it's important, and we you you put on your boots and you do it because we are about what's good for this family.

Amen?

And and so we're not asking you to volunteer for your lifetime.

We're not even asking you to volunteer for a year.

We're saying for the next three to four months, would you do once a month?

And would you hold a space?

We'll give you everything we need, you everything you need for success to lead these kids well.

We're not gonna throw you into a den of lions, all right?

We're going to give you everything you need to win.

And uh, and it's gonna be good.

But uh, but some of you uh I I just want to ask that you just commit to like three, four times over the next four months as we transition, and together we're gonna go into the future with confidence, with hope, believing that God has great things in front of us.

Amen.

So if that's you, you're probably going to be invited by somebody around.

If you're not invited, but you you know, like I'm willing to do that.

Um, just go to the lookout.church slash connect, look for the link that says volunteer and select children's ministry.

We'll get a hold of you.

And again, it's not a lifelong appointment, all right?

So chill out.

Um, it's gonna be okay.

It's gonna be fine.

In fact, it'll probably be a little fun, it'll probably be more fun than you think.

So, amen.

All right.

Let's settle down.

We're gonna open the word together.

If you have your Bibles with you, open up to 1 Timothy chapter 3.

1 Timothy 3 · chapter mention

That's where we're gonna start today.

That's where we're gonna start today.

1 Timothy chapter 3.

1 Timothy 3 · chapter mention

And this is Paul writing to Timothy, who is one of his spiritual sons, the Apostle Paul, as the churches being established across Asia Minor, he's writing to Timothy.

And he says, But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from what you learned it, from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Father God, I pray this morning as we open your word that all of these things that Paul is talking about would be true, of our experience in your word today, Lord God.

That you would encourage us, you would correct us, you'd rebuke us, you'd train us in righteousness, God.

That we may be equipped for every good work.

We thank you for your word to us this morning.

Let it sink in, let it seep into every fiber of our being, God.

Not empty words, but have a profound effect.

We thank you, Jesus.

And it's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Some of you, I just want you to think about the first time you ever had an encounter with the Bible, the scriptures, in a way that actually affected you.

I just maybe you have a memory, maybe you've never had that before praying that that happens for you, but for maybe some of you in the room, you've had an experience where you've opened the scriptures and there's something that happened in the scriptures that was beyond the scriptures.

I remember the first time it happened for me.

I was probably in sixth grade.

Um my parents had just freshly given me a um a forest green NIV study Bible.

Um, and uh I was tearing through that thing, and and uh I was reading a lot of good things that were all very you know helpful.

But I remember one particular experience where I opened up and I just randomly opened up to a guy named Jeremiah, had no idea what that meant or who he was, uh, but opened up and I started reading, and in the first few verses of Jeremiah, um, Jeremiah is having this conversation with the Lord, and the Lord says, Before I formed Jeremiah, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you and I appointed you to be a prophet to the nations, and Jeremiah is like looking around, he says, Me?

And he says, I'm I I what am I gonna do?

I'm so young.

Um, I can't do anything.

And uh, and and then God has to correct him.

He says, Do not say that you are too young, because I'm giving you a voice and making you a mouthpiece, and and you're gonna do what I ask you to do, and it's gonna have a tremendous effect.

And I remember reading that, and of course, not knowing anything about the context, not knowing anything about when Jeremiah lived or any of the details that I would later find out and appreciate more.

But for me at that point in time, it was almost like within the book, something as I was reading the page as a hand reached out from within and pulled my heart and insucked me right into the story.

And I remember at that point that this book was no longer a book.

It was something that was having I was interacting with, there was something that was pulling me deeper, and I realized that this book is it's more profound than I had ever thought and ever imagined, and it changed the way I approached it from then on out.

Have you ever had a story like that?

And some of us know what that feels like.

You know what it means to read a book that's actually reading you back, and that's what it means to be a living Bible.

And that's what I want to talk about today and for the next couple weeks.

Um, the basis of our faith comes from a book, this book, it's the most influential text of all time.

It has affected civilizations more than any other writing in history.

Many have given their lives, not just for the sake of Christ, but even defending this book, insisting that it be translated into worldwide languages, made accessible not just to the powerful church elites, not just to the theologians or the keepers of the book, but to everyday people that um that didn't quite know what to do with it.

And so people over the last couple of thousand years have given their lives just to have access.

There's villages in Asia where people will will travel miles just to, because they have uh single chapters of some of the epistles, and they don't have access to the scriptures.

They'll travel miles to sit around a fire and around communion and read a chapter of the text together and just worship God, thanking him for his revealed word to them.

That's how powerful this book is.

Also, on the flip side, many of you know this by this book has been misinterpreted quite a bit and over the last couple thousand years, uh, used as a weapon, not to just uh uh used as a weapon to justify both holy wars, slavery, oppression of people groups.

And it quite frankly, for a lot of people, it's just a complicated book.

And maybe that's your experience as well.

Maybe you've been dramatically affect for the good, or maybe it dramatically affected not for good because of its misuse.

Maybe you have a complicated relationship with the Bible because certain individuals have used it maybe against you, maybe to control you or manipulate you in your life for their own agenda.

That that happens, it actually happens.

And so if that's your case, if that's your story, I you know, I'm I'm I'm with you, I hear you.

God hears you, and I'm sorry if that's your story.

But I want to contend for the power of the revealed word of God.

It can be it is a sword, it can be used in a lot of different ways, but it can be used to have a powerful effect.

It is the foundation from which we we perceive what God has done, who he is, and our role and his story on this earth.

Amen.

Maybe you love Jesus, but have a hard time knowing what to do with all the confusing passages and even the violent passages of the Old Testament.

Listen, I get it.

There's certain certain parts of the Bible that are just simply bizarre and hard to understand.

For instance, why did Ruth sleep at Boaz's feet?

Who knows?

Who are the Nephilim?

Are they actually rock monsters?

Do we need to be watching out for them?

Why did the prophet Elisha have 42 children mauled by a bear after calling him bald, right?

Um that's confusing.

It's weird.

It's like, wow, I don't know what's going on there.

So wherever you find yourself in the journey with scriptures, the truth is what we believe about the Bible and the scriptures has everything to do with the way that we're making our way through some of the complex issues that we're facing in our society today.

What we actually believe about this has everything to do with how we have certain kinds of conversations.

And so I realize that on a Sunday morning I'm preaching to the choir a little bit, right?

Because you're the ones who are actually here to listen to a 35-plus minute sermon from the Bible while everybody else is biking and hiking and gardening.

Okay?

I get that, all right?

But I also don't believe any longer than it can be assumed that we are even all on the same page on what the heck to do with this book.

Okay?

Statistics would show us that even in the church, we're not actually all on the same page with what to do with this book.

We live in a time it can't be assumed.

So I'm gonna show you a couple stats.

If you're not a stat person, just hang on, hang with me, all right?

We're gonna get through this, it's gonna be okay.

So, first of all, according to the Cultural Research Center, most Americans, about 68%, still consider themselves to be Christians.

So this is a fascinating statistic across the United States.

No matter kind of how faith actually works in your life, about 68% would say, Yeah, sure, I'm a Christian.

Okay?

Now, of that 68 though, of that 68%, only 6% are said to have a biblical worldview.

Okay, out of the 60, so about 7 out of 10 say, yeah, bomb in.

But about 6%, less than 1 out of 10, actually thinks and lives in such a way that the Bible has any bearing on their life.

Okay?

And so what is what is that, what do I mean by that?

Let me show you three more statistics.

Okay?

Now of the of those who consider themselves Christians, that 68%, let me show you three more statistics.

Number one, 58% contend that the Holy Spirit is not real, a real living being, but is merely a symbol of God's power, presence, and purity.

So let me so out of the 68% who say I'm a Christian, 58% of those don't believe the Holy Spirit is an actual part of the Godhead or the Trinity or a person.

They think he's a magical force, a genie in the bottle that just kind of poofs from here to there, giving us like, you know, you know, like Chinese proverbs, like fortune, fortune cookie, words for the day to help us live a better life.

Let me just tell you, the Holy Spirit is real.

He is real, he is not a figment of your imagination, he's not a hologram that kind of hangs out in the background when you need him.

Okay?

He's not AI.

The Holy Spirit knows the mind of Christ.

So, but 58% are not even sure about that.

Another 58% believe that if a person is good enough or doesn't does enough good things, that they can earn their way into heaven.

I'm just telling you, that's not a biblical worldview.

I'm not saying that people aren't don't do good things.

You don't have to know Jesus to do good things.

It's just that our own goodness and righteousness, as the as the writers of scripture would say, aren't enough to earn us the gift of salvation for eternity, that our sin has separated us from God, and it's because of what Jesus has done in his sacrificial love that we can't, we don't know God based on our own righteousness, it's based on his righteousness alone for us.

Okay, we have to settle that because at the core of what we're talking about is an acknowledgement, a biblical worldview is an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong with the human condition, and our own intellect is not going to solve it.

We actually need God.

Okay?

All right, last one here.

52% claim that determining moral truth is up to each individual.

There are no moral absolutes that apply to everyone all the time.

So again, out of the people who claim to be Christians, half of them say there's no moral truth, and it's really just up to each one to uh you know to um decide what morality is for all the time.

And so uh we'll get into that in just a second.

Okay, another statistic, out of all this 85% of US households own a Bible, and the average uh household owns 4.3 Bibles.

You probably have at least 4.3 Bibles.

The point three is probably the one that's just the Psalms and Proverbs, right?

The New Testament, right?

And um and uh and and and the reality is probably most of us have Bibles in around our houses.

Uh the problem is where we're at culturally, most of us are either find the scriptures too complicated to engage, too confusing to understand, um, or just not compelling enough.

We just we just see them as irrelevant.

I have other things to do and other things to learn.

Yes, this is great, but that was for a specific period of time.

I have a life to live.

And so it's fascinating where 500 years ago, men and women would actually be burned at the stake so that people would have access to the Bible.

We live now where we have 4.3 Bibles on our shelves and we have other better things to do.

Now I'm not here to cast this heavy yoke on us, but I want to set a page though that we have to reset, we have to kind of reset the engagement of how we actually read the scriptures.

Because without a biblical worldview, the likelihood that we're entering into another worldview is is is extremely likely.

Um it said that there are seven major worldviews that Americans are most influenced by.

That would be biblical theism, that's what we're talking about, Eastern mysticism, Marxism, moral therapeutic deism.

That's a complicated one, but in the states that's huge.

Nihilism, which is basically is everything is meaningless.

It's it's just it's just we're living and just it's all just happened, but it's not really for a greater story or moral.

Postmodernism and secular humanism, those are kind of like seven contenders for worldviews.

And George Barn, a statician, uh uh famous statician, said this.

He said, most Americans blend their beliefs to create a customized worldview.

That is the world we're living in right now.

Most people who claim to be Christians or of any kind of faith probably aren't actually uh you know uh sold-out believers of that particular worldview.

We're living in a time where we customize a worldview like we customize anything.

And we're gonna take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, let's take some of the Zen Buddhism mindfulness.

We're gonna take a little, let's do the karma thing, you know, uh what goes around comes around.

Let's do the Jesus ethic of the care for the poor.

We love that about him.

Let's go with that, and we're gonna kind of blend, let's do a little new age in there.

And so what we end up with is this whole kind of soup, this hodgepodge of kind of a mix and match, choose your own adventure kind of spirituality, okay?

Where there's no actually ultimate authority or truth, it's just discernment determined by whatever seems right to a person.

Okay, you guys with me?

So, why does that matter that we talk about that?

Because number one, we all have a worldview.

You have a worldview.

Okay?

You we it's not it's not optional.

You have a way in which you view the world.

Your worldview is a filter that you use to see and understand and experience and respond to the world around you.

Every single decision that you make flows through your worldview.

It's actually a picture of how things actually work.

And it's how we make sense of the problem of evil, how we are to live in the world, kind of our sense of ethics and uh and right living.

It all comes from a worldview.

So it's not if you have a worldview, it's which one and how is that working for you and is it leading to life?

Okay?

And as you can imagine, this makes it really difficult, nearly impossible, to then take some of the cultural and societal topics like politics, sexuality and gender, racial reconciliation, care for the poor, immigration, all of these huge things that our society is dealing with, and know how we are to discern the will of God if our whole worldview is a mix and match of whatever seems right at the particular moment.

Okay?

For instance, we have phrases in our culture like love is love, which on the surface sounds fantastic.

And uh, and and live and let live.

And and usually what this means is as long as your worldview doesn't bother anybody else, um, uh, you know, just just go ahead and do your thing, right?

And certainly we we do believe in free will.

God gave us free will.

Everybody has free will, nobody's forced to do anything.

But when it comes to a phrase like love is love, it really comes, we really have to backtrack and say, but what kind of love are we talking about?

And is your definition of love the same as my definite definition of love?

And what happens if our definitions of love actually differ from one, actually actually start to be different from one another, then what do we do at that point in time?

And who's defining what love is and what love isn't?

Okay, and so we have to get into some of those kinds of questions because what some one person calls loving, another person calls unloving.

So what are we talking about?

The same thing is said in a way we hear this phrase, you know, as long as I'm not living in a way that's harmful to another person, um, you know, that's really the way we make our way forward.

And certainly I don't think anybody in this room wants to live in this way, this heavy hammer imposing your life and worldview and just kind of being this Bible thumper type of person on anybody.

Like I don't know anybody who actually wants to live like that.

But um to live in a way that doesn't harm everybody, again, that assumes that we all agree on what harmful is and what is hurtful and harmful.

And we're at a point in time where we don't actually agree on what's hurtful and harmful to another human being.

And so we have to come back to what is the source of our definitions, or what is our worldview as it relates to love and it relates to harm and as it relates to the solution for brokenness.

Because if we don't get to that, then we're in a soup of good ideas that never actually lead to life.

Every thought has a source.

And here's the question this morning: what is the source of your worldview?

How did you start to think about what you thought about?

Okay?

Two things that you need to know right up front as a church.

We are Orthodox Christians, okay?

We are a non-denominational church, but we are orthodox.

On our website, you will find a link to, you know, in our kind of about us section, you'll see a statement of faith, but then you'll see a link to the Nicene Creed, which is one of the earliest agreed-upon confessions of faith.

It's regardless of the baseline of Orthodox biblical view since 325 AD.

It's it's a it's a series of statements that the early church fathers agreed, like this is um, this is how we are orienting and indexing our lives and our churches, okay?

So while we're non-denominational, I just want you to know uh we're entering into a story.

None of us just decided what was in the Nicene Creed.

This is something that was long before us and was universally accepted by believers in every major denomination across the world.

So we're Orthodox in our faith.

Number two, though, we are evangelical.

And I tread lightly there.

That's kind of a dirty word these days, and um it's and what I mean by evangelical, I don't mean the American.

Voting bloc, the conservative voting block.

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the original kind of Greek word uvangelion that actually just meant good news.

We believe that the scriptures and the gospels are meant to be good news for us and for the entire world.

Okay?

I just want to make that very clear.

So when I say evangelical, I'm not just talking about Republicans or conservatives, okay?

I'm talking about a biblical view that the way we when we read the scriptures, we read we're entering into a story that is actually about unleashing the goodness of God in all of the heavens and the earth.

It's about the restoration and renewal of all things.

And so we're entering into good news and responding to it, and the good news becomes a worldview that then shapes our lives.

Alright?

Okay, I gotta keep moving.

I got you wouldn't believe the amount of editing I had to do on this one.

Okay.

So what exactly are the scriptures when we talk about the Bible, what we call the Bible, this kind of big thick book?

What are we talking about?

As a simplistic, overly simplistic definition.

It's actually not a book, it's a collection of books.

The Bible is a library of 66 God-inspired books, letters, histories, prophecies, biographies, poetry, and songs written by 40 or so authors over 1,500 years on three continents with one talking donkey.

Okay.

It's written by real people in real places with real context and real encounters with God.

And they all had their own reasons for why they wrote what they wrote.

It started in ancient Israel as oral tradition and storytelling, passed down generation to generation for hundreds of years.

Eventually the authors began to write it down specifically as they were being taken captive and led into exile.

They had to record what they were actually believing and teaching.

And so we're not in an oral culture, so we don't quite understand that, but there was an incredible amount of precision in an oral culture.

And um and here's the thing the authors of the Bible didn't know that they were writing the Bible.

This is so important to understand.

How crazy would it be to be writing something and then later on realize, whoa, really?

This is the Bible?

That would freak me out.

I don't think I'd ever even start.

If I knew that what I was writing was gonna be the but the Bible, right?

So these authors were everyday people.

Um, they weren't trying to say everything that could be said about God.

They actually had various reasons for why they wrote what they wrote.

They had to make conscious decisions of what to include.

Uh they had to choose and edit and decide what parts they wanted to keep.

One example is in the Gospel of John.

Towards uh somewhere in the middle of the Gospel of John or towards the end, uh John makes this kind of passing comment.

If everything that Jesus said and did were to be recorded, it would take up every book in the world.

It would consume all of the books, uh all the libraries in the world.

And that's just a long way of saying I had to cut some stuff out, all right?

I didn't get to say everything.

Here's some of the most important things, but there's a lot of other things that were really important too.

But here's here's kind of the basis of what you need to know.

John actually, as a human, he had to actually kind of decide, he was writing a biography of Jesus.

He had to decide what to keep and what didn't make the cut.

Luke was the same way.

Dr.

Luke, when he was writing his biography of Jesus, he just made it very clear up front why he was writing it.

He wasn't writing to solve all of the world's problems.

He said in Luke chapter 1, verse 3, it seemed good to me also, having followed all the things closely for some time, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus.

Luke 1:3

So he's writing his biography of Jesus to a guy named Theophilus, um, that you may have certainty concerning the things that you have been taught.

So for Luke, it literally comes down to this.

Ah, it seemed good.

It seemed good to me to write an orderly account.

I thought I'd just make sense of all the things that we've been saying about Jesus, and I just thought I'd write it down.

So he would write the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, and he'd put it all together.

He didn't know what he was writing.

It was later considered authoritative by church fathers.

But these men, uh the authors of the scripture, um, they were doing their best to capture their encounters with God and in whatever form, be it a history or a biography or a song or wisdom literature or prophetic or even apocalyptic view, and we see in Revelation, um, to put it down, not knowing who is going to be reading, not knowing that in 22,000 years later, on the other side of the world, that a bunch of Americans were gonna be trying to figure out what they meant, which is a challenge.

Okay, and it's amazing when you think about it, and a lot of people say, Well, I don't know, the whole thing seems made up.

I'm just telling you, if you were gonna make up a religion, it would not be this one.

There's so many other things you could come up with.

You would not make up a religion that says, if you want to follow me, come take up your cross and die to yourself.

That's not captivating to people.

Go die.

Enter into the death of Jesus, go to the cross and resurrect on the other side.

That's how you fall.

Give up everything you own.

Okay, if you're gonna make up a religion, that's not the one.

All right, start over.

That's and that's why it's it's it's it's that's why it's so captivating and magnetizing because it's there's a mystery involved in the being with the scriptures.

So why can it be trusted?

For a lot of reasons.

Um, first of all, earliest complete manuscripts are less than a hundred years from the time of writing, and this is actually unprecedented for that for ancient literature to have earliest manuscripts within a hundred years of the time of writing.

For instance, in high school, probably all of us read the Iliad from Homer, right?

Um we don't even, we don't, nobody has questions about its authenticity.

That was the earliest manuscripts are like 500 years later after it was written.

Okay, same thing with Plato and Aristotle, it's closer to 900,000 years later.

And with a lot of ancient texts, nobody questions the authenticity.

The scriptures have the the closest window of authentic translations, and historians agree.

I mean, it's it's it's really uh it's it's compelling, even from a historical credibility point of view.

When the writers of the New Testament were composing the letters to each other for instruction and encouragement, it wasn't until the fifth century or so that church fathers decided that they would be part of what we now call the Bible.

In the New Testament, when it refers to the scriptures, they're referring to the Old Testament scriptures, the Torah and the prophets and the law.

So when the scriptures God breathed, when Paul's writing to Timothy, all scriptures of God breathed, he didn't know what he was writing would later be called scripture.

He was referring to the scriptures, the prophecies.

And but later on, as the New Testament was unfolding, it became clear that these letters, these early church fathers' letters, that um that they would they had life on them.

They were full of the spirit, they were also God inspired.

And so by about the fifth century it was agreed upon what would be considered part of the canon of what we now call the 66 books of the Bible.

Um, and it wasn't because that these guys, it wasn't because a bunch of rich white men chose to make these ones authoritative.

It was because they identified the books that were already regarded as authoritative and decided to just name what was already happening.

And there's a lot of history there.

I can't go into it, but I just want you to know, as they were deciding, as they were making decisions on what was going to get it, it was a holy process.

It was a process that had unanimity to it.

And uh, and so today we believe that this collection of books, this library books, as we live into them, as we see them as authoritative in our lives, um uh actually uh have a bearing, that they're the only infallible um uh foundation.

God still speaks, God still speaks through prophetic words even this morning.

God still inspires text, God still inspires movies.

You can go watch the chosen.

I believe it's inspired by God.

It's God breathed, it's God inspired, but we see the scriptures as kind of the bearing of the baseline for which we measure the heart of God, the person of God, and the Father, Son, and the Spirit, his work in time, in times past, and his work present and moving into the future.

Right?

We trust the scriptures because this is a big one, Jesus trusted the scriptures.

I know that seems so basic, but can we just kind of can we just lay that as a little building block here?

Jesus had a high view of the scriptures.

So Jesus, his lifestyle was living in the scriptures, memorizing them, being with them, arguing in the temple with the Pharisees, picking up apart, questioning them, just breathing them out.

Well, we he was in the desert.

We see him as as he's facing temptations from Satan, he would respond with scripture.

He didn't respond with good ideas, he responded from the well of his heart of what he had memorized in the scriptures.

That was his defense against the temptations of Satan.

And you never see Jesus uh referring to the Old Testament and offering a little caveat of, like, well, you know, actually, you know, they weren't quite as enlightened as we are now.

We know a lot more now than they did back then, so take it with a grain of salt.

He never caveated what he was saying.

It's just he had a try, he had a high view that God was revealing himself in scriptures and they were a good enough foundation for Jesus to live into.

We're 49 times in the new in the Gospels we see him quoting the scriptures.

How often are we sprinkling in the scriptures in our everyday conversations in our lives?

Have you hidden the word of God in your heart that it just flows out in your conversation without having to think about it much?

I believe God's inviting us back to that.

That it's so inside of us that our conversations are sprinkled with the gospel, the good news of how God has revealed Himself to us and how He has called us to live into His kingdom.

We believe the scriptures are authoritative, and if we give themselves to we give ourselves to them, they're transformative.

A couple a couple things here, a couple ways at coming at the scripture.

I just want to polar opposite views here.

One, some people believe that this book is um the literal word of God, right?

And it's this idea of biblicism or what some call the golden tablets view, that this this Bible was simply just letters hand-delivered by an angel to people and say, go do this, right?

But this the truth is the scriptures are God-inspired, but required human participation.

You see a lot of humanity in these in these letters.

You see Paul forgetting details and realizing, oh, I forgot I baptized more people than I told you I baptized.

You see, you see the the character, the personalities of these authors come in, and we have to understand that that means that we can't just take this and open it up and all of a sudden say, go and do that, right?

Everything we do, it actually requires careful thought, a care a careful humility coming to the scriptures, realizing I'm not coming from an ancient Middle East culture.

I'm not coming from a Hebrew background.

I don't know exactly what that means on the first hand.

And so, like the story I shared at the beginning of the message, well, God can just come to us when we flip open and look at a passage.

Most of the scriptures requires thoughtfulness and humility because they were specific people writing to a specific audience at a specific time.

Some of you have heard in the church over time this kind of phrase uh, God said it, I believe it, that settles it, right?

How many of you have heard that phrase?

God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

I love the heart, I love the confidence, the boldness of yes, we're standing on the word of God, but you're missing kind of an important part.

God said it, God said it, we interpreted it together, and I believe it, and then that settles it, all right?

And so interpretation requires this communal coming together to actually be in the word together, to actually know what the heart of God is, what he's trying to say.

Um, and so uh and and also so sometimes when we read this as the literal thing, I should just be able to flip open something and do it exactly what it says, it's actually gonna leave us pretty disappointed.

A lot of people want it to be authoritative in a way it's not offering to be authoritative.

It's not actually an instruction manual.

I remember growing up in youth groups, somebody used the acronym Bible, basic instructions before leaving Earth.

I'm like, oh, really?

It's an instruct, like an IKEA guide, right?

Do this and then do that and then do this, and you're gonna voila.

And I started doing that.

I'm like, this is the worst instruction manual of all time.

I have no idea what it's saying here, right?

There's there's some parts that are a little more clear, but there's some parts that, man, you gotta wrestle it down.

You gotta know what's going on.

And so what I'm saying here is it's authoritative, but the way it's authoritative is different than what we think.

Now, on the on the opposite side of this kind of literal, I just gotta open it up.

It's like no human participation.

Literally, God handed golden tablets and said, This is what I want you to say.

The other opposite end of the spectrum, which I think probably where most of us are at, is that the scriptures are they are inspired, but mostly as a literally uh historical or literary text for good moral living.

Okay?

This is probably where most Americans are at.

And so we see it as historically respectable because it's it is astonishing, even to academics or scholars, that read the scriptures to kind of get um uh historical accounts on what was going on with these people groups.

We see it as inspirational.

We'll read it to kind of you know get something that can be put on a coffee mug later, and you know.

It's just a word of encouragement.

I can do all things through Christ that strengthens me.

Then I just move on with my day.

Okay?

So we read it historically, we read it inspirationally, and then we read it practically.

It's just good old advice for good clean living, right?

Good country living.

It's just practical, you know.

Uh love your enemies.

Great, let's go do that.

You know, care for the poor.

Yes, let's go do that.

So we can see it's practical.

Do this, don't do that.

Sure, that's great.

And that'll that, and actually, you can read it like that and actually draw a ton of life from that.

But here's the thing you can read it historically, inspirational, practically, and actually never encounter the living God.

This is the danger.

Here's how Eugene Peterson puts it.

We'll put this quote up on the screen.

He's commenting on these three ways of reading the Bible.

He says, you can, he says, I do want to call attention to the cons uh conspicuous fact that in whatever group you find yourself, you will be using the Bible for your own purposes.

And those purposes will not necessarily require anything of you relationally.

It is entirely possible to come to the Bible in total sincerity, responding to the intellectual challenge it gives, or for uh, or for the moral guidance it offers, or for the spiritual uplift it provides, and in no way have to deal with the personally revealing God who has personal designs on you.

And so what that means is I think that we're in a time where we don't have a high enough view of the scriptures and actually giving ourselves to the understanding, the interpretation, the living and to see the Spirit of God and His work within the Scriptures.

But when we come in humility, yielding to the God who has revealed Himself as the Word, not coming primarily to read something, but rather to be read by them, something begins to happen from the inside out.

And I'm I'm I'm wrapping up here, guys.

I'm wrapping up.

But I I just this is this is the invitation, this is the call for us today.

Many of us read the word like a newspaper, or we read the Bible in a way that we're we're not, we're we're seeing it as a wall instead of a window.

We're not seeing through the scriptures to the God it's revealing.

It's it would be like going to a restaurant and looking at the menu of all the food to order and then just eating the menu.

We're not holding it thoughtfully enough of what is this lead, what kind of encounter is this leading me to?

And that affects the way that we see and experience the world.

Now, in the last book of the Bible in Revelation, John has this revel he he has the revelation, it says revelation, and he's it's a bizarre, wild book that requires an incredible amount of interpretation, by the way.

In chapter 10, he has this encounter with an angel, Revelation chapter 10.

Revelation 10 · chapter mention

And he says, So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll.

He said to me, Take it and eat it.

I will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.

So he took this scroll from the angel's hand and ate it.

It's and again, it's just like on f on surface level, it's like, wow, that's weird.

But when you can you when you hold that, when you hold that in your spirit before God, this idea of the scroll is not just meant to be read, it's meant to be eaten, it's meant to be consumed, it's meant to come in from the and it transforms us from the inside out.

And that's the thing is with the word of God, we we have to move beyond just fitting it in to our day.

We have to do the hard work of eating it, chewing it, maybe even gnawing on it a little bit, wrestling it down with the Spirit of God in community, and then as we do, we find that it actually is nourishing us from the inside out.

Bill Johnson said it like that.

He's commenting.

Some people read the Bible and they're like, I didn't get anything out of that.

How do I know if it's working?

He said, Well, or he's or you know, people will say, I don't remember anything I read.

And he commented, Well, do you remember what you had for breakfast last week?

But it still worked, right?

You don't remember what you had for breakfast last week, but it still nourished you.

There is something about showing up time and time and time and time again, developing a history with God, trusting that as you stay with him, he will nourish you from the inside out.

This is what we're called to do.

This is the people we're called, and we rejoice today because God has not made us guess what he's like, he has given us his word, he has revealed himself in language over thousands of years, and we're in a company of saints that have gone before us, that are on this journey, and those who will come after us, and we're standing on the word of God as a baseline for truth and salvation and for and for freedom and for and for right living before God.

And I believe we're in a time where God wants to ignite a new hunger in us.

If maybe you've lost the passion for the word of God, I believe, and I'm praying, I'm praying that in this season God reignites a passion for his word because we need it, and without the word of God, we have nothing else to stand on.

So, what does that mean for us today?

Dad, you can come up.

A couple next steps.

It's so simple, but I I just don't know how to do it any other way.

I'm just saying, guys, open your Bible every day.

Open up the scriptures every day.

Every single day.

Don't miss a day.

Every day.

Get your 4.3 Bibles off the shelf and thank God that He's given you His word.

And this isn't to be a heavy burden on you.

I know I poked fun at kind of doing the verse of the day thing.

Listen, do what you have time for, but then grow in your appetite.

Do a little bit more tomorrow, do a little bit more next week.

This isn't a heavy yoke, this isn't supposed to be burdensome.

We are, this is amazing.

We get, we get to know God.

We get to know him without having to guess or make it up.

Everyone's deciding to make it up, anyways.

We don't have to do that.

We actually can go to him thanking him.

Thank you, Jesus, thank you, that we get a clear picture of you.

You are the image of God.

Take the scriptures, bring it into your family, bring it to your dinner table.

Read a verse at your dinner table, bring it into your church groups, your community groups.

Don't do it alone.

Don't just manhandle it alone.

Bring it, talk about it with your friends.

And again, don't read it as a newspaper.

Read with holiness and humility and see what God will do.

Amen.

Okay, okay, all right, all right, all right.

Alright, let's do this across the room.

We're we're wrapping up.

Um across the room, just close your eyes, close your eyes with me.

Take a deep breath.

Take a deep breath.

I'm gonna read just a couple passages, and I want you just to receive them and let the Holy Spirit speak to you.

I don't know what he'll speak to you, I don't know which of these passages will stick out to you, but the moment you hear something kind of ping or resonating with you, just stop there and ignore everything else I say and just let the Lord unpack it.

Maybe if you have a phone, you can write it down any notes.

If you have a journal, you can write it down too.

I just want you to listen to anything the Lord wants to say.

Holy Spirit, we invite you.

We thank you for your word.

We thank you for the holy scriptures.

God, we're all on a journey.

We don't claim to be experts here, but we're willing to submit ourselves to your word.

Would you speak to us, God?

John 1, 1 through 4.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made.

Without him nothing was made that has been made.

In him was the life.

And that life was the light of all mankind.

Psalm 119 105.

Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path.

Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light on my path.

Hebrews 4 12, for the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

So is my word that goes out from my mouth, it will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

But by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

So today, Father, we thank you for your word.

And we trust, Holy Spirit, that even across the room right now, that you're speaking specific things to our hearts about your word.

It's a light.

It's bread.

It's a sword.

It doesn't return empty.

It's our breath.

I pray this morning, God, as we hear your word, we wouldn't leave this place with just a bunch of cool new stats.

I this is a work of the Spirit, and I pray that even now, this week, you would catalyze something deep inside of us.

Fan the flame where we already have a hunger for the word.

Fan the flame even more to perceive your thoughts, to perceive who you are, so that we can live confidently and powerfully in this world to be a people of all-inspiring love, God.

Establish this in your word.

We thank you that you are the word, Jesus.

And we love you today.

And it's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

We okay?

All right, let's stand together.

Let's stand across the room.

Stand across the room.

And then listen, as we're ending our time together, we invite you.

You don't have to be line for the back.

Okay.

If you need to, go for it.

But we're gonna have uh some people up front on both sides with badges around their necks, a prayer ministry team.

This morning, I we we believe that God is present, he's here, and we want to be available to you to pray for you.

And some of these people that are gonna be coming up front, um, uh, as you come to them, they are willing to pray over any sickness or anything going on in your body or anything else in your life um that feels that feels weighty, or just you know, just want someone to be with you in prayer.

These are people you can trust to do that.

In the back of the room, you're gonna see a sign waving in the back that says connect with us.

If you're newer to the church and kind of still trying to get a lay of the land, you want to talk to a pastor, go meet at the back sign.

It says connect with us.

They're gonna take you to the connect hub in the north floor here and chat with you for a bit and uh give you a free gift.

We have actually an amazing free gift this time around, all right?

So uh uh definitely go do that.

And if you have kids, go get them as soon as our service is over and bring them back up for some conversations.

And let me just pray one last blessing over you, okay?

May the Lord bless you and keep you.

May He make his face to shine upon you, may He be gracious to you and give you rest.

Go in the peace and the strength of the kingdom of God.

Love you guys.