What’s The Point | What Is The Bible? - Hebrews 4:12-13 | August 18

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Music.

Well, good morning. Hey, family. How are we all doing? Good.

Good. Very good. Let's see if I remember how to do this. It's been a little bit. it.

I hope you enjoyed the last several weeks as some different voices came together

to proclaim the truth of God's mission.

This is what we are here for. This is what we've been created for.

So this is what we are stepping towards, what we're moving towards as a family, as this community.

We are making purposeful movements towards this. I hope you were challenged

as we talked about the mission so that you're all set to make these kind of

purposeful movements together with us.

The mission is something that we're going to be continually reminding each other

of over the weeks and the months and the years to come, because this is what life is all about.

And this is what we so quickly forget.

It so quickly becomes about other things, but this is what life is all about.

So just know, as we talk about being real people, as we talk about becoming

a real family, as we talk about worshiping the real God, this is what we're

talking about. We're talking about this mission that God has given us.

And at Mountainside, we have written in such a way to say that we want to be

a place where heaven meets earth by proclaiming the universal reign of God and

embodying Jesus to our communities and inviting our neighbors to join us in

becoming real people who are part of a real family who worship the real God.

So that's just the way that we particularly do the words we use to talk about

the mission of God, that a disciple of Jesus exists for those who are not yet

here, part of the family. That's what we're here for. That's just the words we choose.

So as we spent the last six weeks or so talking about our mission,

and as we continue to talk about our mission, what we're talking about are these

purposeful movements of what we're moving towards.

It's not just something that we learn. It's not just something that we commit to memory.

These are steps that we take. And so we're going to be taking these steps together

to be changed, to reflect God's image and glory into the world,

to become who God wants us to be, to become real people, a new creation,

Paul says a few times, right?

People who are filled to overflowing with the life-giving Spirit of God.

And today we're going to be moving on away from that. We're going to be moving

into a brief little series about the Bible,

which, you know, maybe you think all of our teaching series are about the Bible

in which they are to a degree, maybe not so much about the Bible,

but poured out from the word of God, right?

So we're going to be taking a few weeks just to talk about what is the Bible,

what it's not, how do we read it, and some other topics as well.

But that's what we're doing today. We're turning to the Bible.

Perhaps we turn to the Bible every week, maybe every day, maybe not.

I don't want to presume, but I hope that after today that you will fall in love

with the Word of God and that that will be your normal routine.

So why start this series? Why start this series?

Why start it now? And the short answer is that it's really going to set us up

to understand some of the more challenging parts of the Bible.

Let's say the book of Daniel, which is what is going to be coming up after this series.

It's got some really strange parts to it. So this is going to help us be prepared for that.

A more challenging answer for us perhaps is, and please don't be offended by

this, but we read our Bibles wrong.

All of us have ways in which we approach the word of God in less than ideal

manners. And so, we just want to reset and refresh.

And I'll mention this a little later, but in a way, unfamiliarize ourselves with the Bible.

I'll explain that a little bit later, but unfamiliarize ourselves with the Bible.

And there's a reality that when we read scriptures, there's sort of four voices

competing for our attention at any given moment in time.

And these four voices, three of them are less than helpful at the best of times

and pretty harmful at the worst of times.

The first voice is our own voice, the voice of the flesh, which,

you know, it's all right.

Usually it's pretty concerned with self-care and comfort and generally just

me centered, but it has its moments. So it's not completely bad.

Next, we have the voice of our culture, the voice of the world,

which also is not necessarily evil, but the Bible does spin much of its words,

calling us to live counter to our culture.

As we saw in the book of Corinthians, the first book of Corinthians,

1 Corinthians, if I'm saying it correctly, right?

What we saw is that Paul, the instructions that Paul gave to the Corinthians

over and over again was calling them away from the culture because there were

so many ways in which they looked a little bit too much like their culture and

a little too less like Jesus.

And so we are called to live counter to our culture, but that's the second voice

that competes for our attention.

The third voice is the voice of the enemy, the voice of the accuser,

what serves only as a voice of opposition to God.

And the problem is it can be very deceptive.

All it takes is just the slightest amount of tweaking of what truth is.

As we know from the Garden of Eden, right? It's just the slightest tweak away from truth.

So it can be so deceptive to not see the voice of that opposition clouding our view of truth.

Because the devil is very clever at imitating truth. He's very clever at imitating truth.

And so the final voice is, of course, the voice of God. the voice of the Holy

Spirit as he teaches us, as he instructs us within us.

I was recently reading Psalm 103 in verse 20, it says, Bless the Lord,

O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word.

So, O to be counted among the host of heaven who obey the voice of God's word.

That's what we're after, to listen and obey the voice of his word.

And these are the four voices

that are competing for our attention that they are constantly conversing

within us and it can be so difficult to know which is which so we need to distinguish

them from one another so there's also of course a an even deeper reason that

we're endeavoring to understand the depths of the bible and that is because

through the bible god's written word we experience Jesus,

God's living word, the living word of God.

And so we meet the word, we observe the word, and then we learn to listen to that voice of truth.

We learn to distinguish the voices within us, and we learn to perk our ears

up, to listen wholeheartedly to the voice of truth.

We want to make sure that God.

What we believe the Holy Spirit is speaking to us, what he is saying through

this book is somehow connected to what the original authors were trying to communicate.

And so our whole life doesn't become, our whole life of reading the Bible doesn't

just become an exercise in listening to our own voices echoed back to us.

We don't want to, we want to resist the temptation to remake the biblical narrative in our own image.

And so we tend when we read

the bible we tend to start with ourselves rather than what

the original authors intended so we want to break away from that and we

want to to understand the depths of the bible believe it or not there is an

intended way to read the bible it was written in a certain way to a certain

people at a certain time for a certain purpose so there was there is a way that

we need to engage with this so that we are ensuring to the best of our abilities

and as the Holy Spirit instructs us,

that we are not reading into this our own agendas.

But we are mining it for the gems that it most definitely contains.

The gems that Jesus saw in it, the gems that the other authors,

the authors of the New Testament, particularly those who are of Jewish background,

the gems that they saw in it as well.

So maybe the not so obvious question for us today, maybe it's pretty obvious,

but for us to start off with is, what is the Bible?

What is the Bible? Surely you have an answer. So what is the Bible?

Much of us grew up with the Bible.

So we must know what it is, right?

We must have an answer. Perhaps you have struggled over your faith journey to

connect with the scriptures.

You've tried, but you find them to be challenging.

And so, you've struggled to connect with them. You know what? It's all right.

There's parts that are pretty challenging. Maybe you've had a bad experience

where someone in your life, maybe they were well-meaning, maybe they were not.

Tried to use the Bible to correct or instruct you in some way and that kind

of left a bad taste in your mouth?

I think a lot of us probably have been there. There's some of you,

I'm sure, who have been Christians for quite a long time, maybe your whole life

even, and have yet to read the entirety of the Bible through from start to finish.

And I get that. Numbers is a hard book.

Numbers is a really hard book to get through. Even though it is a story,

a lot of it doesn't feel like a story.

Just feel like numbers. That's all it feels like, right?

Here's a Christian pickup line for you. You can try it out. Let me know how it goes.

I was reading the book of numbers last night, and I realized I didn't have yours.

There you go. That's how Jenny married me.

No, I'm much too self-conscious to say something like that. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

So as I mentioned, one of the goals

of this series is to defamiliarize ourselves with the Bible in a way.

What I mean by that is there are so many ways that we take for granted that

we can read and understand these words.

And we forget that it's ancient Near Eastern literature. Like it is literally foreign to us.

There are parts that are hard, hard to read, hard to understand.

And we have to remember that.

It's all right that that's the truth, but we have to remember that.

We have to mine and dig and find the treasure that's there because it's most definitely there.

But but we have to remember that it is literally foreign to us.

My hope is that we will all become this more and more, but my hope is that there

are many of you who already love the scriptures.

You already love the word of God and you're hungry and thirsty for more and

more of it to understand it more fully, more completely, have it to change your life more and more.

Psalm 63, I love this Psalm, but in verse one, especially David says, oh God, you are my God.

So my honest prayer for you is that you would earnestly seek God and the revelation of his word.

And if that's not you this morning, then I pray that you would become that more

and more over the next couple of weeks.

Because I really want you to fall in love with this book, this word of God.

And so maybe, maybe we should take a step back and start with what the Bible is not.

Even though we've kind of already started down the other course.

But the Bible is not a law book.

That's something maybe you've thought of in the past. Maybe all of us have at

some time thought that, that, man, the Bible is just full of a lot of lists of do's and don'ts.

It's not, really. There are, so perspective, there are 613 laws in the Old Testament, right?

That might seem like a lot, but the Bible was never written to be an ancient law book.

It doesn't, stylistically, it was never written to be a law book.

It doesn't resemble any of the law books that we have from that period of time,

like the Code of Hammurabi or anything like that.

So it was not intended to be a law book.

It contains a section of laws, a selection of laws, to be sure.

But if you were to read it as such, you would find it to be lacking, to be incomplete.

And when we talk about Torah, maybe you've heard that word before,

Torah, that's the word that we translate as law. It's also the description of

the first five books of the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.

When we translate the word Torah, we often translate it as law.

But in reality, we could translate it just as easily to be something like instructions

or teachings rather than law per se.

Because the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament even, is not intended to be a law

book. It wasn't written to be a law book.

And so the original author is never intended for you to read it as such.

We'll talk a lot about that more next week.

Interestingly enough, people tend to point to Jesus in the New Testament as

stepping away from the law, even though he said he didn't come to do away with

the law, but to fulfill it.

In the New Testament, there are 1,050 laws, or you might call them commandments,

but nearly double what's in the Old Testament, in the New Testament.

And we don't see the New Testament as a law book. So we shouldn't see the Hebrew

Bible, the Old Testament as a law book either.

What's more, if we could take this a step further, I mentioned that we could

translate Torah as instructions.

The Bible wasn't even written to be a set of instructions, at least not instructions alone.

That's not how it was written. So it's not how we should read it.

So when we teach our kids, I don't know if you've taught your kids this.

I was taught this growing up and realized later in life that it was not correct.

But when we teach our kids that Bible stands for basic instructions before leaving

earth, that might be a clever acronym, but it It only kind of vaguely represents

what the truth, what the heart of the scriptures is all about.

Certainly, we can glean instructions as we read the Bible of how to live life.

The Bible will instruct us, but that is not its main purpose.

If you treat it as such, as an instruction manual, you will find situations

and scenarios that God apparently never thought of to address,

which is ridiculous, of course, because it's not the fact that God's instructions is lacking.

Lacking it's the fact that it was never intended to be

an instruction manual we can't boil the bible down into a

sort of like an insert tab a into slot b conveyance

of information like an ikea instruction assembly assembly instructions right

that's not that's never been the point so what is the point that's what that's

what we're asking through this series what's the point throughout the scriptures

there are wonderful descriptions of what the bible is and does,

Isaiah 55 says, "'My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,' says the Lord.

"'and my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.'" You may be familiar with these verses.

"'For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, "'so my ways are higher

than your ways "'and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.'".

The rain and snow come down from heaven and stay on the ground to water the earth.

They cause the grain to grow, producing seed for the farmer and bread for the hungry.

It is the same with my word.

I send it out and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it

to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it.

So God's word has gone out from since the beginning of creation,

creating and producing and accomplishing everything that God has willed it to.

And his word has the power to accomplish his purposes in your life as well.

Jeremiah chapter 23, does not my word burn like fire says the Lord?

Jeremiah 23 · chapter mention

Is it not like a mighty hammer that smashes a rock to pieces?

So the word of God is also, it's a consuming fire. It's a mighty hammer.

It break down, it breaks down and it rebuilds it, it, it warms and it restores that refines as well.

John 6, 63, Jesus says that the very words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

And Acts 7, 38 says that Moses received life-giving words, that God's words are life-giving.

In them there is life.

First Peter chapter one, you were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth.

For you have been born again, but not to a life that will quickly end,

your new life will last forever because it comes from the eternal living word of God.

As the scripture says, people are like grass.

Their beauty is like a flower in the field. The grass withers and the flower

fades, but the word of the Lord remains forever.

And that word is the good news that was preached to you that the word of God,

it has life and it sustains life.

It upholds and all of creation is upheld in God's eternal word.

It will last forever. Of course, if you're familiar with Psalm 119,

all of Psalm 119 is essentially like a love letter to the Word of God.

And if you've read it, you may be familiar with some of the key verses.

Verse 105 reminds us that your Word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.

And so the Word of God, it guides us in the way that we should go. It shows us the way.

Many people have contemplated these scriptures over the years and have fallen

in love with the word of God and have shared their words with us as well.

Puritan writer Thomas Brooks said that the word of the Lord is a light to guide

you, a counselor to counsel you, a comforter to comfort you,

a staff to support you, a sword to defend you, a physician to cure you.

The word is a mind to enrich you, a robe to clothe you, and a crown to crown you.

It is a bread to strengthen you, wine to cheer you, a honeycomb to feast you,

music to delight you, and a paradise to entertain you.

Oh, therefore, before all and above all, search the scripture,

study the scripture, dwell much on the scripture, delight much in the scripture,

treasure up the scripture.

No wisdom compares to scripture wisdom. No knowledge to scripture knowledge.

No experience to scripture experience. no comfort to scripture comforts,

no delight to scripture delights, no convictions to scripture convictions,

nor no conversions to scripture conversions.

Treasure, treasure the word of God.

John Flavel echoes Brooks's writings, which that sounds like a character from

Harry Potter, so take that what you want.

The scripture teaches us the best way of living, the noblest way of suffering,

and the most comfortable way of dying.

And then Brian Edwards, philosophy and religion and may reform you,

but only the Bible can transform you.

So, the Word of God is so much more.

It's so much more than the law. It's so much more than instructions.

It's so much more. There is power and there are life in it.

The Word of God is life and light to the darkness in and around us. It is life and light.

Perhaps maybe more appropriate even for our time together this morning.

In Matthew 13, there are a series of like rapid fire parables,

all of them around the kingdom of God concerning the kingdom of God.

And in verse 44, Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in

a field, which a man found and covered up.

Then in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

And even though these parables are about the kingdom of God,

many of the church fathers that have gone before us have reflected and contemplated

these these words and use this parable specifically as a way to discuss the word of God.

Here's what Irenaeus says. If anyone therefore reads the scripture with attention,

he will find in them an account of Christ in a foreshadowing of the new calling.

For Christ is the treasure that was hid in the field that is in this world for

the field is the world. But the treasure hidden in the scriptures is Christ.

Since he was pointed out by means of types and parables. So when the law is

read by the Christians and the law is read by Christians.

It is a treasure hid indeed in a field, but brought to light by the cross of Christ.

This idea that scripture, the Bible is the visible is the earthly that points

to the heavenly that points to the eternal that points to Jesus,

that all of scriptures reveal Christ, that we see Christ.

We see Jesus in all of them. All scripture reveals Christ and all scripture is fulfilled in Christ.

Even the book of Numbers, it all points to Jesus.

On the road to Emmaus, after Jesus' resurrection, he appeared to two disciples.

And in Luke 24, it says that, and beginning with Moses and all the prophets,

he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

And their eyes were opened and they recognized him and he vanished from their sight.

They said to each other, did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to

us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?

It says that he opened all of the scriptures and how they all pointed to him,

not just some of them, but all of them, that Christ revealed how all of the

scriptures were about him.

In other words, Christ dug to

find the treasure and it made his disciples' hearts burn, the Bible says.

The Bible is not an end of itself.

The Bible is not an end in and of itself, but it is a means to an end.

It points to a God, the God who has the power over sin and death,

God who has conquered the grave, a God who leads us into his holy presence.

That scripture leads us to experience Christ.

It's all about him. And so the Bible, here's maybe one of a few definitions

I'm going to give you this morning, but the Bible is wisdom literature that

leads us to being rescued, to being,

to salvation in the Messiah, the Christ Jesus.

It's wisdom literature that guides us to an end goal of being rescued. It all leads to Jesus.

So what is the Bible? Now that we've started with the more complex answer,

the simpler answer is that it's a story.

Two-thirds of the Bible is in narrative form.

It's a story. It is a collection of stories.

That's what the word Bible literally means for all those who already knew that

and wanted to nerd out on some of the language stuff.

It's a collection. It's a collection of scrolls, of books, of stories,

all leading to one story, all telling one magnificent story,

the best and greatest story ever told.

So it's a collection of stories written over thousands of years by 40 or more

different authors in three languages, all telling one unified story.

It's pretty incredible for the further and further you dig into it,

how so many people over so many years can agree in so many amazing ways.

Our common misconception with the Bible is that each book is,

is its own thing, its own story, that it's telling their own story.

Kind of like a potted plant, right?

They're separate. They each are beautiful in their own way, but they stand alone.

We need to see them as more connected. We need to see them as more connected

than pots, and plants and individual pots.

I don't want to suggest that we should go around searching for Jesus in all of the stories.

You'll hear some modern pastors kind of suggest that. And while that's sort

of what I'm saying, it doesn't really get at the heart of what it means.

Because you will find stories and you will read them in the Bible,

in the Old Testament specifically, where you're like, how can Jesus be here?

Every story is connected.

Every story informs the larger narrative. And every story is informed by the

overarching storyline.

But you can't always find Jesus per se in them. You can't always put your thumb

on it. The Bible is not a where's Waldo book.

That's not what it was intended for us to look for.

Every story leads us to Jesus.

In some ways, the way that it leads us is by showing us our great need for a

savior. And that's kind of the simplest answer is yeah.

You read some of these stories in old Testament. You're like,

man, those are really horrible people.

And the goal of reading them is for, it's not for you to judge them,

but for you to go, me too, me too.

And we recognize our need for a savior.

So the more accurate way to think of the Bible rather than potted plants as

being more interconnected is something more akin to like a grove of aspen trees.

So if you know about aspen trees, all of the trees grow out of one single unified root system.

Every tree looks distinct and unique, but they are all genetically identical.

It's all the same organism. They're all the same. Each tree is the same tree.

So the Bible is a collection of stories. Here's another brief definition that

are all telling the same story. It's one story.

Each book is inextricably woven together like a system of, like a grove of Aspen trees.

So each book nourishes and is nourished by the next book.

And it all leads us to Jesus. And so here's maybe the last definition I'll give you.

The Bible is carefully crafted Jewish meditation literature with each word placed

intentionally to tell and convey a specific message to tell one unified story,

to bring order out of chaos.

It is a story that is meant to be read forwards and backwards.

It's meant to be read inside and out. It's meant to be chewed on and meditated on.

It's meant to be mined for the treasure that it contains, the pearl of greatest price.

And in the Bible as a story by

and large is a rescue story about a God who fiercely loves his creation.

And so he endures and he suffers greatly in his faithful pursuit of people.

It is a rescue story that leads us to being rescued. So why do we read it? Why do we read the Bible?

All of these might sound like very basic questions that we might ask our children

and some sort of statement of faith that we want them to learn,

but these are all foundational.

And whether we know them or not, whether we have forgotten them or not,

we need to be reminded, why do we, why do we read the Bible?

If we're in numbers, it can seem like maybe I don't need to read this.

I don't know why I'm picking on the book of numbers. I actually like the stories

in it, but it is very weighty to get through.

Why read it? Why do we, why do we gather together as a community?

Why do we pray? Why do we fast? Why do we serve the needy? Why do we do any

of the things that Jesus calls us to?

We do them because we are so enamored with the magnificent living God of whom

all life points to Jesus, the Christ, the son of the living God.

We believe with every fiber of our being that Jesus, the anointed one that he

alone is worthy of our life and our worship.

And we want to, we want to know Christ.

As Paul says, we want to see him more clearly. We want to experience him.

We want to search for him like buried treasure in this life.

That's why we read the scriptures.

I would say even simpler answer is that I read the Bible because I am a disciple

of Jesus and Jesus loved the scriptures.

And so a disciple of Jesus should love the word of God as well.

We should be thirsty for the word of God.

As we read in Psalm 63, that our souls, our flesh with thirst for the word of God.

We don't just drink water when we experience thirst.

We don't just treat water as a life-saving mechanism, as a last resort.

There's many times, not every day, but most days, probably, we drink water throughout

the day so that we don't experience thirst.

So why do we treat the word of God differently? Why do we only reserve it as

a last resort. We need it.

It has the power to change lives. It has the power to affect us in profound ways.

There have, studies have been done that show the astonishing effects that engaging

reading the Bible has on our lives.

If you were to read the Bible four times a week or more, four times a week or

more, depression drops 30%.

Bitterness in relationships drop 40%.

Anger, anger issues drops 32%. alcoholism drops 57%.

Feeling spiritually stagnant drops 60%. Viewing pornography drops 61%.

Those are all, there's many more, but all those are all on one side.

On the other side, sharing your faith skyrockets to 200%. Reading the Bible

four times a week or more.

Discipling others, 230% increase.

The more Christians read or listen to the scripture, the more bold they will

be in sharing their faith and growing in their faith, that your life will begin

to have a profound impact on those immediately around you.

That there will be fewer times that you experience stagnation in your spiritual

growth, that your faith will become viral in a way.

Here's the sad truth. Every statistic has its opposite.

This statistic on the opposite side of this is if you were to read,

those who read their Bible three times a week or less, statistics show that

it has the same impact on their personal lives as those who don't read the Bible at all.

You can think you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.

You can believe that you're justified before God, that you can feel good about

yourself, but still experience no lasting fruit, no life, no power.

And that's just one day less per week is what the statistics show.

Now there's a reason for that, of course, but just one day less a week,

perhaps your life will look no different than those who don't claim to be Christians

at all because four times a week or more, that's more often than not.

More often than not demonstrates what you're after.

It demonstrates a priority three times a week or less is like when I get around to it.

Four times a week or more demonstrates that you're after something.

It demonstrates a pursuit, a saturation point that pours and overflows in your

life and that produces lasting fruit.

God wants to change you. He wants to shape you into his image as you engage

and obey this beautiful word of his, and he is faithful.

He will do it. So the enduring claim, the enduring claim is that this book,

his word contains within it, meaning and implications for the biggest questions in life.

And also for your life today, that this, this all somehow matters.

That's the the enduring claim of the Bible.

This all somehow matters. These are not just words on a page.

It's not just a book to be read and tossed, but it all somehow matters.

Ricky Gervais is a British comedian. Some of you might know him as the creator

of The Office, the British office, but as a result, the American office.

And he's pretty funny, but he's kind of been an outspoken voice against Christianity,

against the Bible specifically.

He has a whole comedy routine where he reads the Genesis story just to add his

color commentary, his witty banter over top of it.

For thousands of people, this is one of his comedy routines. teens.

I once heard him say in an interview, don't just read one book.

Why would you only read one book?

So his advice to us in his wisdom is that we need to expand our horizons.

We need to get out more. We need to read more than one book.

Don't just read one book for the rest of your life. You would be a fool to do something like that.

Get out more, read more books. Folks, my question is where else should I go?

To whom shall we turn? What other book is there? If you know it, name it.

These are the words of eternal life.

In them, there is life. And if there's life, then there will be love and there

will be joy and there will be a heart to obey his word.

So my advice is to give yourself to this word, to this book.

And then your words will become the word of God for others.

If you dedicate your life to these words, your words will be words of life for other people.

And it will reveal to them their own spiritual condition.

Sort of the key verse that we're going to return to week after week,

as we go through this series is in Hebrews chapter four, verse 12.

And it says, it says, 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,

discerning thoughts and intentions of the heart.

The word of God is not a dead word. It is not an ineffective word.

It is, it has life in it. And because it has life, it produces effects.

It will change your life. It reveals to us our true selves.

Are we spiritual or are we natural? Are we spiritual?

Are we born of God and spiritually alive? Are we just deceiving ourselves and

therefore spiritually dead?

Are the thoughts and intentions of our hearts, are they spiritual thoughts and intentions?

Are they just natural thoughts and intentions?

Only the word of God can judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Do we have life in our bones, in our marrow?

Or are we just a skeleton with no living marrow?

Is there spirit or only soul? soul, the Bible pierces deep enough to reveal

to us the truth of our thoughts and of our motives and ourselves.

So we're going to give ourselves to the words of God. I want you to fall in

love with the word of God.

I want you to be saturated with this word. I want you to feast on the faithfulness

of God, to meditate on it and to chew on it so that you may say in the end,

How sweet your words are to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.

Because this story will work on you over time.

It will change the way that you live. It will affect the way that you live.

It will affect the way that you see yourselves.

And it will change the world that we live in.

Thank you for listening to Mountainside Church's podcast. We hope you found

inspiration and encouragement in today's teaching.

To learn more about our church, stay connected or partner with us, visit mcboone.com.

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