The Bible Speaks: Eat This Book | Associate Pastor: Matt Armstrong

We've been uh today is the last Sunday in our our uh late summer series called The Bible Speaks, and we've been looking at what is the Bible.

Russ has walked us through four different aspects about what the Bible is.

The Bible is the unique word of God.

There is no other book uh like the Bible that speaks with the authority and the revelation of the one true God.

The Bible is powerful.

The book of Hebrews, the author of the book of Hebrews, says that Scripture is living and active.

It's not simply an ancient artifact of the past where we glean ancient wisdom.

It is a living word through which the Holy Spirit speaks to us as individuals, as God's people in our current situation and setting.

The Bible's made up of a variety of genres.

I loved uh the title of his sermon was The Bible is literal, the Bible is figurative, the Bible is personal.

Often we can get kind of into these um, you know, one or zero kind of um whatever, bipolar things.

Is it literal?

Is it uh figurative?

The answer is yes, depends on genre, and it's helpful to know that to interpret it well.

Finally, he preached on the Bible as one big story.

It it really helps our understanding when we realize that these 66 books taking place over hundreds and hundreds of years, is really authored by one author, the divine author, telling one story.

It's it's the meta-narrative, it's the story that contains all others, including our own.

We are taken up in that story and uh asked to live our life within it.

The reason I recap these, and the reason these last four weeks have been so important, is they are paramount, foundational for what we were talking about this morning, which is how do we read the Bible?

Why do we read the Bible?

What happens when we read it, and how do we read it well?

The Bible's an incredible gift for all the reasons we've just listed, but pastorally speaking, it's important for us to come back to it on a regular basis because it's easy for us, I think, to take the Bible for granted, right?

It's it's the most sold book in the world.

We you probably have ten in your house, or if you don't think you have any, I bet you'll find one if you if you search for it.

It's easy to buy, free online.

We have multiple copies, we can hold it in our hand, we study it.

Uh, all of these things can dull our appreciation of it and our understanding of what it is.

And so it's just a great thing to come back, reacquaint ourselves with it.

This morning we are talking about how do we read it, why do we read it.

I'm excited about this subject.

Um, but there's four sermons in this one sermon.

I'm just I'm just giving you a heads up.

So each one uh could be longer.

Just just let it wash over you.

Uh take some notes if you want.

It's a bit more didactic than normal.

But let's uh let's jump in here.

Point one, eat this book.

What do we do with the Bible?

We are to eat it.

You heard uh the Ezekiel passage read earlier.

God tells the prophet Ezekiel to take the scroll and to eat it.

And this is a divine metaphor.

It's it actually occurs multiple places in scripture, not just in Ezekiel, where God tells Ezekiel to eat the scroll, and he says he took it, he ate it.

It was in his mouth as sweet as honey.

Why does God use this metaphor?

Well, I think the author Lanta Davis in her book, Becoming by Beholding, I think she captures the metaphor well here.

She says, the word of God nourishes us with our spiritual food.

And in taking and eating it, we allow the scriptures slowly to course through our body and become part of who we are.

Beloved, we come to the scriptures, we read the scriptures, whether we hear it read, we hear it preached, or we read it for ourselves, we come less to understand, less for information, and more to be transformed.

Just like that phrase, you are what you eat, right?

We consume things constantly.

We talk about this on a regular basis.

We consume the news, we consume entertainment, we consume information for our work, and and that's fine.

I I would I do it, we all do it.

But what shapes us, what forms us, how healthy are we spiritually, we could uh talk exactly the same way about the food that we eat.

I love Chick-fil-A.

I and and lots of food that is bad for me.

Um and it's great to have it every once in a while, but if that is my primary diet, I'm I'm not gonna live very long, I'm not actually even gonna enjoy my life very much because my body will be unhealthy.

And so, as Christians, our first point is simply this that we are to consume God's word.

Or to eat it, to digest it, and even to understand and play with these metaphors to help us better understand what it means.

So the first point, read the scriptures, eat the book, consume and commune with the God who speaks.

And we can hear his living and active voice in it.

All right, second point, we dig into the word as a meal.

So we come, when we read the Bible, we come to know who God is, we are changed by him.

But where do we start, right?

The book can be an intimidating thing.

We just open to page one and start reading.

We, you know, we've made this joke before that you know, you begin these reading plans, read the Bible in a year, and you you get to whatever Exodus, Leviticus, and you just hit a wall and you're like, well, that was good while it lasted.

Or we know the book of Genesis really well because we've read it, you know, so many times in January.

Um but there's a variety of ways.

It honestly, where do you start?

It doesn't matter.

Just start.

But but here are some here's some practical uh recommendations.

You can follow a reading plan.

If you just go and go on the internet and do a quick search, you can find hundreds of plans, which which may make you know it just as hard.

Um there, but but there's um a variety of ways to read the Bible.

You can read the Bible in the year.

The only thing I would say about that is it's less important how much you read in a sitting that you read it on a regular basis.

So reading the Bible through in three years may be better than reading it in a year if you're able to digest it.

But you can read the Bible chronologically.

The order of the books of the Bible isn't necessarily chronological, but there are reading plans that will allow you to read through the Bible in chronological order.

There's a book we have in our bookstore.

Uh, it's not on the table right now, but it will be again next week, called When You Don't Have the Words.

And it's a book about reading through the Psalms on a monthly or a regular basis.

And I I read that book a few months ago.

I liked it so much, I bought it for our bookstore.

But it talks about the benefit of repeatedly going through the Psalms on a regular basis, the prayer book of God's people.

I've I think I just finished, today's the 31st, my third or fourth month of reading through all the psalms in a month, and I've already begun to see the benefit of that regular washing, you know, even once a month through these particular psalms.

That when an event arises in my life, that the psalm just comes to mind.

That by regularly taking it in, being reminded of it, um, the Lord speaks to me out of those comforting and challenging words when the time is right.

Now we live in the technological smartphone era, and so there's an app for that.

There are apps like the Bible app is a free one, um, or maybe it's called the U version.

I don't love that name.

But um it is full of full of reading plans.

They even have themed ones if you're dealing with anxiety or anger, you know.

Go to an app like that and it will um give you some things to uh just Bible reading plans, just to jump in.

A second approach is to look at the Bible, look at the books in the Bible, and pick one that you're interested in.

Right?

There are um there are incredibly diverse range of things.

If you like uh you know apocalyptic writing, right?

The book of Daniel has these crazy metaphors.

Whore of Babylon, the book of Revelation, the dragon and the woman and and um you know the whore of Babylon.

How often do we get to say whore in church?

All right, let's talk about apocalyptic writings.

Uh you can read Paul's letters to churches 2,000 years ago that remind you that people don't change, that they're dealing with the same types of things we're dealing with today.

You can read about Jesus' life through the Gospels.

You can read the chaotic downward spiral of the book of Judges in the Old Testament.

You can wonder why God loves these people.

You can read about the life of David in 1st and 2 Samuel.

Um, just again, the Psalms, the Proverbs, searching for daily wisdom.

You're more likely to read something that you have an active interest in.

So just pick something.

There's no shame in just finding what you're interested in and starting there.

Third is memorization.

Uh picking verses or passages of scripture and committing them to memory simply by reading them over and over again is a powerful way of taking and storing God's word in your heart.

And again, just like I was saying about the Psalms, when the time arises, they are there on the tip of our tongue, bringing us comfort when we need it.

Fourth and finally is listen to the scriptures, right?

For for a majority of the life of the church and even into God's people, Israel, most of God's people have been illiterate.

And so the way that they consumed God's word was through the ear.

They heard it read, they heard it preached and expounded.

And so you can find recordings of the Bible free online.

You can purchase other ones as well, and you can listen while you hike up the mountain or while you're driving in your car.

It's a great way to consume God's word.

So there's a variety of ways to eat this meal.

Pick whichever one you're most likely to consume right now.

Point three, enjoy the meal.

We've decided to eat.

We've decided what to eat.

Well, how do we eat it?

A couple simple methods.

Um, if you're if you don't feel any hindrance here, you're happy to just read and consume.

More power to you.

But some people even stop here and they say, Well, what do I do when I read it?

Here are a couple helpful methods to get you started.

The first is kind of the classic Bible study method.

If you were involved in a youth group or a college ministry, this is typically what you're taught.

My wife and I were on staff with Campus Crusade, and we taught people, kids this all the time.

It's three basic steps with a fourth that we add here at Redeemer.

Uh, observation, interpretation, and application.

Observation, simply, what does the passage say?

Pay attention to what's in the passage.

Second, interpretation.

What does it mean?

Is there a deeper meaning?

Is there a spiritual component that is being hinted at or a metaphor going on in the passage?

Why is the passage there?

And then third, application.

What does this passage have to do with my life?

Does it speak to, is it call me to faith?

Does it call me to action?

Does it rebuke me or chastise me or encourage me?

That we believe again that the Bible speaks to us today.

But I want to add this fourth one.

Um, and this I rarely do this, but I want to point it out because of that.

Revelation.

Uh, you know, pastors like to use, you know, cute words.

This is a cute word.

All right.

Revel.

That word revel, right?

When we revel in something, we just enjoy it.

And the point, the reason God gave us the scriptures is to tell us the message of the gospel that he dearly loves us.

Right?

That's the that's the bottom line.

There's lots of details, there's lots of sin and gore and excitement and joy, but the underlying message is that God loved us enough to take on flesh, to live our life for us, to die for us on the cross, to resurrect a new life, so that by faith we can be with him for eternity in the new heavens and the new earth as his beloved.

And so anytime you read, the one of the things we we often miss is if you end every time you read the scriptures or a sermon for that matter with application, it subtly teaches us that what God cares about is really what I do.

Right?

How do I apply this?

Am I living rightly?

Now God cares how we live, absolutely.

But the way that we live rightly is by living out of God's love for us.

So, yes, observe, interpret, apply, but then revel in the gospel.

So this classic Bible study method is primarily about understanding.

We want to understand God's word.

And just like getting to know another person, this is vitally important.

It's like going on a coffee date and asking questions about the person, learning their history, their experiences, their background.

So as we sit and we do this Bible study method, we are getting to know the Lord.

What's important is the posture of reception.

Like Mary sitting at Jesus' feet and simply receiving what he had to offer.

We glean much from coming to the Lord, asking these questions of the scriptures.

Now, the second method I want us to look at is called sacred reading.

And ironically, this is a much older approach to scripture than the classic Bible study method, but it may be new to many of us in the Protestant tradition.

Sacred reading or Lectio Divina, in its aim, is less on the mind and more on the heart.

Now, in Christianity, the heart and the mind are never disconnected.

They are not opposed to one another, but the emphasis in Lectio Divina is about communion with the God who knows us and loves us.

And we come to the scriptures not so much to learn, but as to enjoy.

It's a heart-to-heart connection with the Lord.

Now, as we talk about this method, we're going to come back to this metaphor of eating.

Lectio Divina is often described in four movements or four courses, like a four-course meal.

You pick a passage of scripture.

Typically it's on the shorter side.

You don't want to do whole chapters or whole chunks, but a little passage of scripture, maybe a psalm.

And in each movement, we read the passage and then we do something a little bit different with it.

The first movement in Lectio Divina is lectio, which means to read.

And it's it's like taking a bite.

It's literally taking the food in.

And just like in observation of the previous method, we're simply taking the message in.

But here the emphasis is on slowness, eating it slowly, like the slow food movement a few years ago.

We want to enjoy the food.

We want to savor what is on the table with us.

And so there is no hurry like when you're going on a date with someone.

You're not, you know, you know, you're not just there to gather a bunch of information about this person and move on.

You're here to enjoy time together.

The second movement is meditatio or meditation.

And this is chewing on the food, mastication.

It's enjoying, like the cow that chews the cud, we ponder each word of the passage.

We taste its sweetness and we find joy and nourishment for our soul.

So again, each one of these is a movement where we read the passage and we take something different from it.

In in meditatio, we're engaging the imagination.

We may place ourselves in the story if we're reading an Old Testament or a New Testament narrative.

We may uh ponder the wisdom of a proverb or the joy and exaltation of a psalm.

But we sit in it in meditation.

In the third movement called oratio, this is prayer or oration.

This is now that we've sit sat and taken in God's word and we've meditated, we've we've listened to God, now in this third step, we speak back to God in prayer.

We take what we have received, and in some ways we speak it back to Him in thanksgiving.

Because we have been shaped by listening to God's word, now our desires and our prayers will be better aligned with his desires and will for us.

Finally, in the fourth stage, contemplatio or contemplation, it's digestion.

You ever gone out for a great meal, your favorite meal, and you've you've enjoyed, you've eaten to your full, and then you just sit and you just sigh.

Ha! What a good meal.

That's part of the meal.

To enjoy, to digest.

Um, as one author put it, contemplation is simply enjoying the stillness of being full of God's goodness and love.

Beloved, I I encourage you to try this method if it's if it's new to you.

On a Sunday morning or on a weekday when you have time to put aside, to simply be with the Lord through his word.

Now we've taken a little bit of extra time on this because I think it may be new to us.

But however you come to the scriptures, bring yourself, present yourself open to the Lord.

All right, as we're wrapping up, fourth and final point, I want to speak a little bit about interpretation.

Russ talked about this a little bit when he talked about genre, um, but this is a little bit of a different angle, and I think it's it's important for us as well.

The question is, when we come to the scriptures, whether it's Old Testament or New Testament, right, it is this ancient text.

And the question is, how does that ancient text connect to me today?

How do I interpret and understand it for myself, for my life and my context today?

Let's take an Old Testament example.

You may have heard this one before.

We're gonna take the passage of David and Goliath, right?

You're probably familiar with this story.

Israel is facing off against their old enemies, the Philistines.

And the two armies are there on the battle, but they're kind of they're kind of waiting to engage in battle.

The Philistines send out their biggest and their baddest soldier, Goliath.

And he's huge, right?

He's described as a giant.

Um, and everyone in Israel is petrified.

And it's kind of this um, I'm blanking on the word now, but you send out your champion, they send out their champion, they fight.

Whoever wins kind of wins the whole battle.

And so, but no Israelites want to go out and face this huge giant.

It looks like certain death.

Well, now young David, a young man who isn't even in the army yet, he comes bringing food for his brothers who are there.

And because he's so passionate about his relationship with the Lord, and he's so enraged at this uh you know pagan army and and the insults they're hurling at Israel and their God, and he's he's angry at God's people for being unwilling to stand up, he volunteers to go and face the giant.

And without getting into more detail, we know he goes out with simply his sling and five smooth stones, and he kills Goliath.

It's an incredible story that you know we refer to today, right?

A great David and Goliath story.

Well, what does that story mean for you?

What does it mean for me?

One message that we would often hear is well, David was passionate about God and willing to do courageous and dangerous things for God.

Is that what we should be?

Should we be a David?

Is that why God gave us this passage?

Well, it's true that we should.

Be courageous and do things courageously out of faith for God, but that is not why this passage is here.

Here is, here's a here's a bit of a whatever.

You'll see, to help us understand.

We don't want to go directly from the passage to ourselves.

So first we need to understand the meaning of the passage for its original audience.

Why was this passage, after we've read it, which we've just done, we've just recounted it.

Second, we want to say, what did this, why was this story given to its original context?

And interestingly, side note, the original audience isn't David and the people of Israel in front of Goliath.

It's the people who the story was written down for later.

David was not just any Israelite.

Prior to the story, David has already been anointed as the future king over Israel.

God has rejected Saul, though Saul still sits on the throne.

And so in this passage, even as a young man, we are seeing that David is unique.

He has been set apart by God and that God is uniquely with him.

He is the man after God's own heart, and he is the one through whom God will work through his unusual zeal.

Well, is that uh right.

So that's what it meant for the people of God, that God provided a king who would lead and who would save Israel.

But now, on the other side of the cross, we Christians know Jesus taught us that all of Scripture is about him.

And so if we're gonna rightly interpret any passage of Scripture, we have to ask the question: how does this passage point to or is fulfilled in Christ?

Well, what we know through Jesus' ministry is that he is the perfect son of David who came to sit upon the throne of Israel forever.

And in fact, that throne now encompasses the whole world.

Jesus is our rightful king, the king of the whole earth, and he defeats our enemies, the enemies of sin, death, and Satan, while we watch in awe from the sidelines.

So the message of David, the story of David, was sent to comfort and teach Israel something about God, and then through its fulfillment, in the way it points to Christ, it teaches us about God's greater story of the gospel.

And then forth and finally, coming from that, we can see what it means for us.

It teaches us that by faith, Jesus is our Savior and King.

So rather than teaching us to go out and do courageous things, it teaches us to both worship and put our faith in King Jesus.

David points us to Christ.

And we revel in the God who gave himself for us.

We put our faith in him, and it is renewed and strengthened.

Now, there are two ways that people interpret that lead us astray.

First, we're going to call allegory, and that's when we go straight from the passage to ourselves.

Uh, and maybe you've heard this sermon.

David, when he was confronted with Goliath, he went out and he gathered five smooth stones.

Those five stones uh reflect five spiritual virtues, and these are the five spiritual virtues, and you should have those virtues.

Okay, go home and be holy.

Now, that may, through the grace of God, be a fine sermon, because those may be true five true spiritual virtues Scripture teaches us.

But that's not what those five smooth stones mean in the story.

That's just a detail in the story.

When we go straight from the passage to ourselves, even if the message of the sermon may be good, it is a poor use of interpretation and can often lead us astray.

Second is when we go from that original meaning to ourselves, and that's often moralism.

And that's what we were looking at before.

Be a David.

This is what David did.

You should go out and do it.

And say, well, when you're anointed king or queen over Israel, maybe that's something that you can do.

But for the rest of us, the scriptures themselves teach us that the point of the story is to point us to Jesus.

So this is quick.

Uh this may raise more questions than answers.

But what I want to put in front of us, as we come to the scriptures, as we eat it and as we digest it, there are some simple interpretive rules that scripture itself teaches us that can help you in your own Bible study.

Beloved, God has given us his word as a gift.

Just as God became flesh and dwelt among us, he gave himself to us in the flesh, so he gives himself to us in his word.

Now the scriptures themselves don't save us, but they tell us about and they point us to the one who does.

The scriptures are God's voice, God's word.

And just as in any relationship with people with whom we commune, we have communication, we talk back and forth, we listen, we speak back.

The scriptures are that conduit because it's living and active through the Spirit.

When we come to the Word and we meditate on it, we read it, we ingest it, we digest it, we commune with God, and we are changed into the image of Christ.

If you have any questions or if you need prayer, I'll be down front after this service.

So please come and meet me.

Let's pray.

Our Father and our God, uh, Lord, what a gift you've given us in the scriptures.

We we can often become bored with your word.

Lord, we repent of that.

I repent of that.

Uh and we can often um neglect it, Lord, and and we repent of that.

Thank ye that you love us in Christ more than we deserve, more than we can imagine.

Uh, and you invite us, you don't guilt us, but you invite us to come and sit with you and to be changed.

For that we rejoice, and we say thank you in Jesus' name.

Amen.