Eat this Book: Setting the Table | Part 1

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

We're starting a new series today, Church.

If we haven't met yet, my name's Chris, and to start this brand new series, I'm gonna show you a picture of my cute son, because you know, I've got the mic and the moment here.

So let's show this picture of Jude.

This is Jude, he's a little over a year now.

We love him.

This is him eating.

Uh, and that's what we're doing with him now, right?

He's eating solid food if you've had a child or babies had a child.

He starts to introduce solid food and they start to stop drinking milk as their primary sustenance.

And, you know, feeding this little guy for how cute he is.

He can be a little bit of a sneaky monster where he's just totally eating everything or throwing it all on the floor or a mixture of both.

This is how you eat when you're 15 months old.

And it's interesting because, you know, he has no idea what's good for him or what's bad for him.

He just knows kind of what he likes in that moment.

He's just arbitrarily feeding himself and shoving food in his mouth.

And we, as the parents, are trying to give him the most balanced diet, right?

We're trying to give him like the what the food pyramid.

You remember the food pyramid?

It's like, you know, a balanced diet, little sugar, not much sugar, a lot of like fruits and vegetables and good meat and things like that, right?

And that's what we're trying to introduce to him, but he doesn't really care or know.

And, you know, I'm telling you this because it's actually similar to um how you and I think about information that we take in.

Okay, so you might have dietary restrictions.

You might have certain things as an adult that you've grown up liking and disliking, trying to take in certain things, trying to reject certain things.

Have you ever thought about that for how you take in information or how you take in wisdom?

How you take in what it is that your phone is screaming at you for all the time?

All of us have different technology pieces in our lives that are assaulting us with information.

Do you have, like a food pyramid, a wisdom pyramid?

This is what my friend Brett McCracken says.

He's got this wisdom pyramid.

And he says that we have to think about how we take in information, just like how we think about how we take in food or teach our children to take in food.

And his suggestion, he's got this new book coming out called The Wisdom Pyramid, that I'm excited to read.

But in this, he says, really, the Bible should be our primary diet.

We should be consuming more of the Bible than everything else.

He's got things like local church tradition, wise people in your life, nature and beauty taking in what God has created to let that speak to us, um, good books, then the internet and social media should kind of be the sugar, right?

The just like minimal intake of those things.

And you know, I think in this time we're in right now, where like a lot of Christians and non-Christians are like falling into things like conspiracy theories or misinformation, it's it's important to revisit this, just like it's important to revisit our diet in the new year, right?

Some of you are doing that, going whole 30 or something like that.

Have you thought about do you have a wisdom pyramid?

And would you maybe agree with my friend Brett here, who suggests that the Bible should be your primary source of nutrients when thinking about wisdom?

That's why we're starting this new series.

We're calling this new series Eat This Book, because the Bible actually talks about God's word and talks about itself a lot as food for similar reasons as what I'm talking about with this wisdom pyramid and the dietary pyramid or the new uh the pyramid uh of food, is that we don't often think that we should be finding our main sustenance from scripture.

Just like you and I eat three times a day or multiple times a day to sustain our bodies, we should be feasting on God's word to sustain our minds and our souls.

Our heart for this series is that you and I would eat this book, that we would feast on the word of God.

And over the course of the next three weeks, um, we're gonna talk about why is the Bible important?

And Christina, our campus pastor, is gonna talk about how and why we should get into God's word and feast on it every day.

And finally, Felicia is gonna talk about reading the Bible in community.

We're excited to take three weeks to really figure out why it is important?

Why is the Bible essential?

Why should it be at the bottom of the pyramid?

Well, let me show you a couple of examples of scripture talking about eating this book because it's common in scripture.

Okay, one of the oldest examples is from Deuteronomy 8.3.

Deuteronomy is a set of sermons that uh Moses delivered to really make sure before the people of Israel go into the promised land that they understand what the Lord was teaching them through those many years.

So he gives these sermons, and one of the things he says in one of his sermons is this profound line: Man or mankind, human beings, they don't live on bread alone, but on the very words of the mouth of the Lord.

The words that come from the mouth of the Lord, that's what you live on.

More than bread, more than food.

That's the importance Moses gave to God's word.

That's one of the oldest examples.

Um, the psalmist later says, or sorry, not the psalmist, but Jeremiah.

He was a prophet, uh, maybe a thousand plus years after Moses.

He was a prophet to Israel.

He received God's word and he spoke it to the people.

This is how uh Jeremiah thought about God's word, particularly the Old Testament.

He said this, Your words were found and I ate them.

Your words became to me a joy and a delight of my heart, for I am called by your name.

Have you ever considered that just as much as you should focus on eating every day, you wake up, you're like, I'm hungry, that your soul and your mind should wake up and think, I'm hungry for something real.

We settle too often for sugary substances of social media and news algorithms that assault us with daily headlines without considering is what I'm eating for my mind and my soul good for me?

Why should the Bible be at the bottom of the pyramid?

Why should the Bible be our ultimate source of sustenance?

Let me just show you a few more examples in scripture of how the Bible talks about the Bible, right?

Because if the Bible was like, eh, God's word is like pretty good, you should kind of listen to it.

That'd be one thing.

We should listen to that.

But what if the biblical writers talk about other biblical writers with weight and importance?

See, that's exactly what they do.

Look at what the psalmist says in Psalm 1830.

It says, This God, he's perfect, his way is perfect.

The word of the Lord proves true.

He is a shield for those who take refuge.

So just like God's nature and character is perfect, that means the words that come from his mouth prove true.

That's how important the psalmist thought of God's word.

How about New Testament?

Paul, one of the great biblical scholars of all time, he was a Jewish scholar who became a Christian, a religious teacher.

He says this about the Old Testament.

He says, All scripture, and what he's referring to, because he's currently writing the New Testament, he's referring to the Old Testament, saying the scriptures, they're God breathed, and all of them are useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

All scripture, it's breathed out by God, and it's very useful.

But where we should actually go is to the greatest biblical scholar of all time, Jesus of Nazareth.

Have you ever thought that Jesus Christ, being God and being a rabbi, is what Dallas Willard called him the smartest man who has ever lived?

You know, we think about Jesus as being good, we think about Jesus as being kind and compassionate.

Have you ever thought about Jesus being the smartest person to have ever lived?

When you take his divine nature into consideration, and on top of that, the fact that he trained as a rabbi until the age of 30, going through various schools and linguistic schools and theological education, that this man with his divine and human nature is the smartest person to ever exist.

Don't you think his thoughts on what the Bible really is and how important it is, don't you think we should listen to those?

Especially as Christians, this is our God, this is our king, this is our teacher, this is our Lord, our master.

What he says about Scripture should be of utmost importance.

And when he rose from the dead, he had this moment where he's interacting with those who witnessed the resurrection.

A couple of disciples who were walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and in Luke 24, he actually rebukes them when they're like, they're trying to figure out the resurrection.

They go, We don't know what it means.

He says, This, you're foolish, oh foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?

And look at this, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, that's a way of saying all the Old Testament, Moses, the first five books of the Bible, the prophets, the writings that came after that.

Beginning with those writings, he, Jesus, interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

When the early disciples were wrestling with the meaning of the resurrection and who Jesus was, Jesus didn't point them to anything but scripture.

He said, You would not be confused and you would not be foolish if you were reading and properly interpreting your Bible, your Old Testament.

That puts a ton of weight on scripture.

I mean, here's Jesus in the resurrected body.

You'd think he'd say, uh, you need understanding, just look at me.

I just got up from the grave.

But he actually goes, if you need understanding, let me let me give you a Bible study.

And Jesus takes them through a Bible study and he interprets the whole Old Testament man to be there, to be there sitting at Jesus' feet as he interprets the scriptures and says, This was all the plan all along, if you would just see.

Um you see, Jesus was pointing out something important about the Bible.

It's that the Bible is not the point of faith, actually, but it points to the point.

The Bible is not the point, it points to the point.

What do we mean?

See, Jesus said, You're foolish because you're not believing the point, me, the Messiah.

But let me show you what would point to the point.

You see, we don't worship the Bible, okay?

As Christians, we don't think it's this magical, remarkable book that we bow down to and sing about.

No.

We bow down, worship, adore, acknowledge Jesus.

But it's the Bible that points us to that, right?

And it's the Bible that leads us to Jesus and the Bible that points us to the true revelation.

So taking all of this into consideration, why is the Bible important?

The Bible is important because it is a unified, definitive story with unmatched wisdom that reveals Jesus Christ as savior of the world.

Let me say that again.

The Bible is important because it's a unified, definitive story with unmatched wisdom that all reveals Jesus Christ as Savior of the world.

The unmatched wisdom, the beautiful story that Scripture tells is all to show us Jesus.

The Bible's not the point.

The Bible points to the point.

And if you want to know more about the Bible and if you want to dive deeper, this series is going to be great for you.

But there's going to be a lot that's left on the table.

So we have exciting opportunities through our school of faith that I want you to be a part of.

If you want to know more about the Bible, how is it constructed?

How do I study it?

How, how, how was it constructed and how can I trust it?

And what about like the things in the Bible that are weird?

How do I interpret those?

I want you to come to our one of our core classes or a couple of our core classes coming up.

You can go to the website here on the screen and sign up for those.

And I also want you to join a Bible reading plan that's rolling out February 1st.

We also have one for kids that our awesome kids ministry is developing.

We want you to get in the Word through the School of Faith events and through the Bible reading plan so that you can know the unmatched wisdom and the unified story that comes through scripture.

So let's look closely at this sentence I just gave you about the Bible and its importance.

The first piece of that sentence is the Bible tells the definitive story of life.

I said that the Bible is a unified, definitive story.

It's a story.

You know, your Bible actually, it's not one book.

This is a library.

The word Bible, which is right here on my Bible, that word, you know that literally means little books.

And your Bible's just a compilation of 66 smallish books.

It's not its own volume.

It has many volumes.

But these many volumes, they tell an overarching story.

And every summer here at Awakening, we host a class called the Biblical Narrative, where we walk through the story in scripture from Genesis to Revelation.

And would encourage you to take that this summer.

But this by the Bible's story, this library, the Bible story, it's universally accessible.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that the story the Bible tells is about a particular people, the people of Israel.

But it's strange how this particular story has shaped most of the known world.

Okay, here's what I mean.

Did you know that Christianity is the most diverse, worldwide, and popular religion, and that this book is the most translated, sold, and read library of books that has ever existed?

More people have read this book in more countries and more languages across multiple histories and time zones and continents than any other book in all of human history.

You see, this unified story that the Bible tells is actually accessible to all cultures.

I remember I've had so many profound experiences with this.

I remember I was at a prayer meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, and I heard the pastor read Philippians 2 in Turkish over this prayer meeting.

And I didn't understand a word of it, but I saw the power that it held for these Turkish people, of which the population is probably 1% of Turkish population is Christian.

They're holding tightly to God's word in that moment.

I can remember being in Nicaragua with a group of students, and we were partnering with an organization that was rescuing young girls out of trafficking in Central America.

And at a prayer meeting there, these young girls recited the Lord's Prayer from Matthew 6 in Spanish, some of them weeping and crying because the word of God in their own language was shaping their cultural experience to redemption.

I can remember being in China a number of years ago, and I was meeting this artist.

He had this incredible work put out on the street, and he gave me his business card, and below, in Chinese signatory in the Chinese language, and in parentheses in English, there was a small citation of a Bible verse.

This young artist from China somehow God's word was shaping his life to the point that on his business card, in the country that is not famous for promoting Christianity, he needed his patrons to know that the most important thing to him was this verse.

That God's word was shaping cultures from all these separate spaces.

There's a great example of this.

Tim Mackey, who runs the Bible project, I was fortunate to be in seminary and learn from him.

He's this great mind, and he he told this story about going to this church in Nazareth.

Nazareth is where Jesus is from.

And there's a church there called the Church of the Annunciation.

It's a Roman Catholic church, and he says that in the courtyard there, uh, there's all these paintings of Mary and Jesus.

And they're all in different interpretations and cultures.

It's fascinating.

You see Vietnam and Thailand.

You see, the Church of the Annunciation is marking the moment where the angel told Mary that she would be pregnant with Jesus.

And all these different paintings, uh, the Roman Catholic Church commissioned all these cultures.

Look at this, Ethiopia, France, Bulgaria, all these different cultures to interpret the Madonna and child, which is Mary and Jesus, in their own uh cultural artistic expression, but also uh through their own skin and fashion.

And you can walk through the Church of the Annunciation and see literally every culture represented.

I mean, it's fantastic, it's crazy.

You know, I haven't been there, but Tim Mackey was telling us about this.

And it makes you think that for all of the ways we might think there's cultural appropriation of Jesus, which there is.

There is the white Jesus that is on the felt boards or in every church in America.

But you have to realize as you travel that it also works the opposite way.

It's not just that we appropriate our culture onto Jesus, which usually yields not very great results sometimes.

It might be that the reverse is true.

That Jesus' story has actually appropriated itself onto many cultures throughout many times, many places and many continents.

When you see the Word of God having this unified story, you realize that this is not just a European religion.

And the Bible is not a book that was originally written in English.

That actually we are the recipients of this movement of God's story.

And the Bible's importance is essential because it reflects the reality you and I experience.

And people in Vietnam and Korea and Central America, Brazil, and Italy, and Eastern Europe and the Middle East and cultures all over the world have seen the story of Jesus and said, this reflects the reality of my experience.

This story, this story of one particular culture has transformed many, many cultures across the world.

And it might be the Bible's story, it might be because the Bible's story includes deep darkness and unyielding beautiful light.

And the Bible's story includes unimaginable pain of murder and uh sexual immorality and corrupt leadership and political misgivings and kingdoms rising and falling, unimaginable pain, sickness and disease, and yet unbelievable hope.

God's power, God's grace, God's love, it does reflect the reality we experience.

We live in a beautiful and a broken world.

And the Bible's important because it shows us the world we live in.

But it's also because the Bible gives a transcendent message to humanity.

So not only does the Bible reflect the reality we experience, and not only does it tell the definitive story of humankind, but it also gives a message to us as human beings.

You know, I often say that the Bible puts the majesty of God into understandable language.

Puts the majesty of God into understandable language.

I've sometimes called the Bible God for dummies.

What do I mean by that is that when we actually meet God, we're gonna be blown away.

Everybody who meets God in this book is thrown to the ground.

However, God has chosen to use understandable language to communicate his incommunicable attributes to us in understandable language.

And he shows us that through stories, through songs like the psalms, through short bits of wisdom like the Proverbs, narratives like the book of Job or Ruth, through historical uh reportage like the gospel narratives, through correspondence and letters like the epistles of Paul to the Romans and the Thessalonica Church, all these different places and spaces and genres are revealing a transcendent message.

It's transcendent in two ways.

One is the Bible gives us transcendent wisdom.

So why is the Bible important?

Again, back to the food pyramid.

Why should it be on the bottom of the food pyramid?

Well, it gives you transcendent wisdom, it gives you a path for wise living in books like Proverbs, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Sermon on the Mount gives just beautiful wisdom about forgiveness.

And, you know, you'll have this experience when you read your Bible where you'll be wrestling with a problem and you'll realize the Bible already figured it out.

Like you'll be stressed about political situations in this country.

And then you'll read about political situations here, and you'll be like, oh, okay, the Bible knows this.

I just didn't know it.

Or you'll be struggling with a relationship and Becoming embittered towards someone.

And then you'll read about the Bible's wisdom of forgiveness.

And you'll be like, oh, the Bible's, yeah, they've already figured this out.

You see, it's transcendent in wisdom.

And this is where I've got to tell you, just as your pastor, that you need to have a primary relationship with this book.

A lot of us have a secondary relationship with the Bible.

You maybe are in this space where your predominant understanding of scripture comes through podcasts, blog posts, uh, sermons like this one.

Okay, I love sermons.

I'm giving a sermon right now.

But at some level, this me telling you about God's word is nothing compared to having the primary relationship of reading this for yourself, of opening it up and learning to interpret and learning to study, coming to our class about what is the Bible and joining the Bible reading plan, that brings you into a primary relationship with scripture.

And so long as you have a secondary relationship with scripture, you won't see its transcendent wisdom.

Because right now, in a secondary relationship of reading something or listening to a podcast, listening to a sermon, it gets you a step closer to scripture.

But nothing will be like you engaging with scripture.

So I have to ask you, do you have a primary relationship with scripture?

Or is it secondary through books and podcasts and articles?

Because it's time to develop a diet for yourself that is a primary experience with scripture.

It's transcendent in wisdom.

And the only way you'll know that is through a primary relationship with scripture.

But it's also transcendent in revelation, in that it reveals something.

You see, the Bible, it's not so much like a lens that we look through.

There's a lot of talk about a biblical worldview.

The Bible sort of sort of works as a lens, but much better, the Bible is a mirror because the Bible predominantly reflects and reveals two things.

It reveals who you are, who I am, and it reveals Jesus.

It's revealing in two ways.

You see, the Bible gives us this remarkable wisdom for how to live, but it also reveals to us that we don't always walk in that wisdom.

And then, even better, it reveals that God loves us when we don't walk in the wise ways that the Bible tells us to.

Bible gives us wisdom, we don't follow it.

The Bible also shows us how God loves us when we fail at living the wise life it's told us to live.

You see how good and important that is in your life?

This is why you need to have a primary relationship with scripture so that you are revealed your own folly and your own foolishness and sin and misthinking.

But also you need to be seeing and being revealed the goodness of who Jesus Christ is to you.

You see, your Bible, best thing about it, it talks back to you.

It even assaults you in some ways.

It preaches to you things that you don't believe.

It will show you the majesty of believing it.

It'll say things like, Nothing can separate you from the love of Christ, not even death.

That's a that'll preach.

When you open that and read that, it's a transcendent revelation because you and I naturally, earthly, believe that the only way God would love us is if we perform for him.

But scripture tells the story that God has loved us not because of what you perform for him, but what he has performed for you in Christ.

That's a revelation only scripture gives.

That's a revelation you will only get if you spend time in the Word.

This is why one of the earliest followers of Jesus made this remarkable statement, 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 16.

2 Peter 1:16

This is Peter, one of the closest disciples of Jesus.

He says this we did not follow cleverly devised myths.

We didn't follow myths, we weren't following random stories.

When we told you about the coming of the Lord Jesus in power, but we were eyewitnesses, we saw his majesty.

But look at what he says.

This is crazy.

And we have something more sure.

The prophetic word to which we will do well to pay attention as a lamp shining in a dark place.

This is unbelievable.

He's equating seeing Jesus with the prophetic word, being more sure.

The prophetic word is more sure than seeing Jesus.

This is the same thing Jesus did.

I told you the story of the people going to Emmaus.

When they saw him and they were questioning what was going on, what did they say?

What did Jesus say?

He didn't say, look at my body.

He said, Look at my word.

Because Peter's argument here is the thing that will be revealed is Jesus to you.

When you open this, you will see Jesus.

The Bible offers a word announced to humanity.

The Bible is not a nice book with advice.

It doesn't have good ideas.

It is not in the uh it doesn't have good ideas in the sense of like good ideas to just think about and consider.

It's not in the genre of religious literature.

It is an authoritative word.

It is news.

It is the announcement of this.

God is good.

God is here, God has come in Christ to save us.

The Bible you and I open every morning is above the landscape of human ideas.

It is not considerate of editorial pages and social media algorithms, financial markets, or trending topics on Twitter.

It does not offer you ideas to be considered.

It invades you.

It even assaults you with a gospel of grace that tells you God is here, God loves you, and the transcendence of that revelation is something you and I need to have most in our diet right now.

We do not need more articles.

We do not need more podcasts.

We do not need more uh videos to stream and watch.

We need a word.

We need an announcement.

We need something to be coming from heaven to tell us the way life is and who we are and who God has become for us in Jesus.

You see, you don't open your Bible to get good thoughts or good vibes.

You open your Bible to hear what is true, what has been told to you.

You're hearing a transcendent message.

And don't get me wrong, this is not something that happens every time you open the Bible.

You don't open the Bible and a light comes from heaven and everything is revealed.

No, it's a slow process, which is why you need to start the habit of daily getting into scripture.

Because slowly over time, you will read this book and slowly the revelation I just talked about will come true in your life.

And sometimes, sometimes that moment might happen, but the Bible reading we take every day, it can be a slow revelation.

And that slow revelation is exactly the Bible's profound purpose.

And the reason you need the Bible as your primary dietary intake for your mind and soul is to be reminded of this exact fact.

The Bible is important because it shows us we need saving.

I want to go back to that scripture I actually started with where Jesus is on the road to Emmaus, Luke 24, 27.

Remember, he says, it says, in the beginning, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

Remember the Bible study that I was talking about?

He interpreted all the things concerning himself.

They had this incredible Bible study.

Well, Jesus leaves after that moment, and the disciples have this private moment together where they're talking.

And in their conversation, it says this, this is five verses later.

They said to each other, Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened us the scriptures?

Did not our hearts burn when he opened the scriptures to us?

I think this is my experience with scripture.

That when properly interpreted, and that's an important caveat, when properly understood, when properly interpreted, like Jesus properly interpreted it and properly read it, your heart starts to burn.

You start to realize you need something more than you.

That you need something more than good advice, that you need something more than helpful suggestions, you need something more than an inspirational moment or song.

You need a God.

And this craving that the disciples have is the craving I hope we can have together.

Our hearts burn within us when we open this book, not again because this book has some magic power.

Our hearts burn within it because when we open these pages, we see Jesus.

And we actually meet Jesus in these pages.

We start to understand who he is, reading stories about him, prophecies about him, reading about the creation of the world in Genesis.

As we read scripture, our heart starts to burn for God Himself.

The Bible is important because sitting before you here is an encounter with the true and living Word of God.

Did you know this?

Jesus was called the Word, the living word.

It's like the pages of the Bible became enacted through the human life of Jesus while he was on earth.

It's like everything you read about here and everything that this book speaks to, it speaks to the word that was made flesh of Jesus.

And so why do Christians today fall into foolishness?

Why maybe have Christians fallen into conspiracy theories and misinformation, obsession with political events and right speaking and who should say what, developing a kind of cancel culture against a certain assortment of people?

It's because their wisdom pyramid maybe has been flipped and they have taken in more internet than Bible.

They've taken in more political rhetoric than scriptural announcements.

And for us today, Awakening, the call is to eat this book.

The call is to not be like my son in a toddler seat, kind of arbitrarily picking and choosing food as he pleases and throwing it on the floor.

The call is to become adults who have proper restrictions to their wisdom diet so that we can meet God and know God and so that our hearts might burn within us as we come to know him through scripture.

Let me pray for you.

God, I pray that for us at Awakening, we would be people whose dominant dietary intake would be your word.

And that as we take in that, you would transform us into your likeness.

As we know you and follow you in Christ's name.

Amen.

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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