Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] I.
[00:00:02] If you haven't noticed, the songs about the Word and about the Word of God, it's a song. Those are songs we sing when we start from very young, very early on. We're singing the Bible. The Bible. I love the Bible. Isn't that one. I remember patting the Bible. That's my earliest memory. I don't know what's in this thing, but I love it.
[00:00:33] I love the Word of God.
[00:00:37] I love Scripture.
[00:00:40] Some of the most beautiful things that have ever been written are in this book. And they're about odd situations. And there's stories that don't make sense at times and are confusing at others.
[00:00:56] Some stories that why did she kill him? That way. You can ask that question about stories in scripture. We grow up drawing these, like coloring them. And they're fun. Kids like to color. That's what it boils down to. They like to scribble it first.
[00:01:20] They bring it to you after class. They say, here, look what I did.
[00:01:26] As if to say, here, you're gonna have to throw this away secretly.
[00:01:33] We don't. We've kept every single one of them, Macy.
[00:01:39] But the Word of God, like these stories about just these wonderful characters and these beautiful things God did in other people's lives. And we learn those stories.
[00:01:55] That's a big thing, at least for me. Growing up in the Church of Christ was. I wanted, or they wanted me to know my Bible, that the Bible was incredibly important.
[00:02:10] And there are things, even in the moment, even when I was growing up, I remember 6th, 7th grade, hearing my teacher say something and thinking, that doesn't track.
[00:02:21] And I didn't have the wisdom to say, well, maybe I'm wrong.
[00:02:30] So I searched it out and hoped to find something interesting. I always did. The Word of God has always been powerful in my life. And it's thanks to people I largely disagree with now, and I am grateful for them, that where we might argue about something here or there about Scripture, or they might consider something vastly important, and I think it's not important at all.
[00:03:04] Matters of doctrine and interpretation, we differ.
[00:03:10] But praise God to those who taught me to love His Word, who pointed me to Scripture to say, what matters is found in here.
[00:03:28] The passage they always used was 2nd Timothy 3, 16.
[00:03:34] All scripture is inspired by God.
[00:03:40] And all scripture is useful for teaching and useful for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. We particularly liked the correction part.
[00:03:56] That was a fun one.
[00:03:58] When you could pop your Bible magnifying glass out and look at everybody. Oh, well, look at you.
[00:04:06] I found Guess what? Some sin.
[00:04:12] All Scripture is useful, is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. All of it is. Open up your Bible. Let's just. We're going to do this. Ready?
[00:04:29] All scripture and all the people got up as one saying, we will not any of us go to our tents, nor will any of us return to our houses. We are staying here today.
[00:04:48] I really did pick that out at random. I just thought I could figure out what to say next.
[00:04:56] Now, you know that I can't just plop open my Bible and go. And you hear stories like that. Someone says, and the Bible fell open to this one passage.
[00:05:06] Oh, my goodness, that's just what I needed. You're like, bill, that's the concordance.
[00:05:14] I didn't mean you, Bill. Sorry.
[00:05:18] Those are maps.
[00:05:21] But you have. You can find so much in here. And it's crazy, honestly, how many times I've just picked a spot and God spoke to me through that spot.
[00:05:32] God moved me or shaped me through that psalm, typically, because the way the Bible falls, it's just the Psalms, but all Scripture.
[00:05:43] Now we know that sometimes you're gonna get to numbers.
[00:05:51] And you know what numbers is mostly. Although there's some great parts of numbers.
[00:05:56] Take a guess, kids. Guess what numbers is mostly.
[00:06:00] Just the first thing that comes to your mind. It's numbers.
[00:06:06] It's the closest thing to a spreadsheet we have in scripture.
[00:06:12] And 14,000 here and 14,000 there and 10,000 there. And they begat, begat, begat, begat, begat. That's the Porky pig versions.
[00:06:23] Scripture.
[00:06:25] Sometimes you get numbers and you just have to move on, like pick another passage.
[00:06:30] Not every scripture, not all scriptures were created equally.
[00:06:37] Not all verses were like. There are some that just strike you. And then sometimes you're gonna open your Bible and it's not quite all that useful. What Paul is saying here is something bigger and deeper, and we'll get to that in a little bit. But Paul is often quite confusing like that. Peter even says so in second Peter 3, 15, 16 says, in regard to patience of our Lord, his salvation. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all of his letters. Now, what we're about to read in second Peter 3:16 is the only time the New Testament comments on the New Testament.
[00:07:23] Now, Paul wrote all scripture as God breathed before all that scripture had been taken into account.
[00:07:32] This is the only time that the New Testament comments on another part of The New Testament, at least in concern of the letters, speaking as he does in all, there are some things in them, in Paul's letters hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures. Now, timeout. This is not an excuse to call people with whom you disagree about the Bible ignorant and unstable.
[00:08:08] This means that when we aren't fully mature, a lot of times things are confusing because we want the Bible to. To make sense to my life.
[00:08:21] Really what we want is the Bible to support my life. How do I live?
[00:08:26] Maybe that's the way I need to live.
[00:08:30] We want scriptures to justify how we feel about people and our frustrations. And Anne Lamott says, when you find that the God you worship loves all the people you love for the same reason you love them, and hates all the people you hate for the same reason you hate them, you are worshiping a plastic God.
[00:08:57] The God of the Scriptures is doing something bigger than just giving us lists of sins and struggles that the world we must tell the world about, we must rebuke them, we must correct them. And sometimes it's confusing and they're confused by it, but they're unstable, they're ignorant.
[00:09:22] But then the Word does something that surprises us.
[00:09:31] I go from pat in the Bible, that was an early way of worship.
[00:09:36] We spelled the Bible the B I, B L, E. Yes, that's the book for me.
[00:09:43] I stand upon the word of God, the B I, B, L, E.
[00:09:50] Hopefully, as we mature, we go from standing on scripture to standing under it, to being affected by it, letting it point us to a certain place. Because Scripture's tough to understand sometimes. As Peter notes about Paul.
[00:10:17] Do you realize that, like when someone says, you know, my Bible says, have you heard that My Bible says that you're not supposed to tell judge me.
[00:10:29] Okay, well, no, but also no, because what you have in your hand or on your phone, what I have in my hand here is an English translation of an ancient document that has been compiled and collected over millennia that this has been put together and structured. The fact that you can say Galatians Chapter two points to a time in history where they decided that that was chapter two.
[00:11:19] If you go back and read the earliest Greek manuscripts, they are all capital letters and there's no spaces.
[00:11:29] It looks like just an awful word find.
[00:11:34] You don't know any of the words.
[00:11:38] They'll get to the end of a section and they'll get all the way up to the end of the paper and they'll just jump down and start the neck. They'll split a word from one. No dashes even.
[00:11:55] They'll just split a word and move down.
[00:11:58] It's incredibly confusing.
[00:12:03] Now, none of us can read it like that, but unless some of you can. I don't know you.
[00:12:10] But none of us can read it like that. But there are people who can, and thank God for people who can translate the Bible so that we can have it in our hands in English, that it goes through these long processes of, like. Well, in one manuscript. And. Right. We don't just have that one holy manuscript of Galatians.
[00:12:34] We've got a bunch of them.
[00:12:38] Occasionally one is discovered and it looks pretty old, and it doesn't have that word that that other one had.
[00:12:47] Scripture.
[00:12:49] Even just getting it to this bound book is complicated.
[00:12:57] It takes some effort and it takes argument, I think it takes a spirit that is driving it, but it takes a lot of work.
[00:13:09] Men sitting around a table. A lot of men and women sitting around a table trying to decide if that's a horatory subjunctive.
[00:13:22] You don't know what that means, and that makes you a good person.
[00:13:30] But just the journey, not just from this page to my brain, is complicated, and that's complicated, too. Have you met your brain?
[00:13:43] Not just that, but just the journey to get it here into English, into the. Into the New Revised Standard Version or whatever. You have the New English Version or the King James Version, if you got the King James Version. Your Bible talks about a unicorn with a straight face.
[00:14:08] That word is translated differently in most other versions. But what fun, all of that to say.
[00:14:18] I was talking with a young man one time at an event where we were just discussing Scripture like we do. And I said something and he said something, and a lady came up. It was at a large garage sale at our church in Mineral Springs. We had this big. We would collect clothes throughout the year, and then we had this. We turned our church into this big store, and people would come in and they would pick out clothes, and it was just all free. Just come get what you need. It was just one big event. It was called the Great Giveaway, and it was exhausting. Well, it was in the middle of preparing for this that we were having this conversation. This woman I didn't know very well, she did not go to church with us. Almost peeked through the clothing like a child at Walmart who had been hiding, peeks through and goes, I don't think that's right.
[00:15:12] And I said, well, yeah, most New Testament scholars agree that this is a touchy issue. And it most likely is the case that she goes, I don't listen to man. I only listen to the Bible.
[00:15:28] Now, you may feel the same way, but you know what? You know that you're a human and all the thoughts you have, from paper to eyeballs to brain counts as the thoughts of man.
[00:15:51] No one just reads the Bible.
[00:15:56] No one.
[00:15:58] You don't just, oh, well, I know it and there it is. I have it. You filter. Every single one of us filters everything we read in Scripture through our own lived experiences. And God's grace saves us even then, because the word of God, when we open it up and study it, is complicated at times, difficult to understand.
[00:16:27] It's translated, it's ancient. It took place in faraway lands with different languages, different cultures, different places, different fields.
[00:16:37] They just were different.
[00:16:42] And so for it to get from the mouth of Paul, the mouth of Matthew, or even from the pen of Ezekiel, to my heart, that journey is through choppy waters. It makes it. Praise God, it makes it.
[00:17:10] But no wonder we get so divided about Scripture, because we're reading our Bibles and we go, well, that's clear. And someone else reads their Bible and goes, well, that's clear. And we disagree completely.
[00:17:27] Well, that has nothing to do with the text and everything to do with my brain, my lived experience, their brain, their lived experience. It's all different.
[00:17:43] And so when we come together and we are united by what we believe about the Bible, we are always on a path to division.
[00:17:56] Because I'm going to read one text one way and you're going to read it another.
[00:18:00] That's just the way it goes.
[00:18:03] And it gets even dicier when we start doing text equations. Have you seen text equations?
[00:18:10] Oh, the Lord is coming back in 2030. And I can tell you why. See here, Mark 6 says this. If you take that into account and then roll over here to Ephesians 7.
[00:18:20] There's no Ephesians 7, by the way.
[00:18:23] You'll understand it there. And then if you take Psalm, the Psalm. Psalm makes a hint and promises that over there in ephesians, the Mark 6 passages, then go, have you felt that connection? Like that? That's bound to be wrong.
[00:18:41] I once preached from a rather long passage in Philippians, and I had a member come to me and say, it bothers me that you didn't use very much Scripture.
[00:18:57] And I said, I'm very sorry because I don't want to bother people.
[00:19:04] And she said, it bothers me you don't use much Scripture. And I said, I read from 25 different verses in the Bible today, they were just in a row.
[00:19:21] But what she wanted was like that old, like, I've got this passage and then this passage and then this passage and then this passage. And we're going to skip around. I'm going to make my point.
[00:19:31] Well, don't you think we can make our point any way we please when we do that?
[00:19:37] When we all gather around our Bible, whenever we all gather around and look at it, we are going to disagree. As we study Ephesians on Sunday mornings in our Bible classes, we are going to disagree at places.
[00:19:53] That's why John had to sit down and remind us, or at least maybe break the news to us, that in the beginning was the Word, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
[00:20:17] All things came into being through him. And without him.
[00:20:22] Not one thing came into being.
[00:20:28] What has come into being in him was life. And that life was the light of all people. The light shines into the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. From the very beginning, the Word of God existed.
[00:20:50] Creation happens. And he says, it doesn't say. And God waved his hand.
[00:20:59] Creation. The world is created. And it says, and God said, let there be light. The Word of God shapes and creates and manipulates and allows things to grow and, and thrive. And the Word of God has been doing that, as John says, long before it was written down and bound.
[00:21:28] The Word of God is doing great things.
[00:21:32] Let's skip to the next passage.
[00:21:35] Matt, if you don't mind. He was in the world. This Word came into being. This world came in. Sorry. He was in the world and the world came into being through Him. Yet the world did not know Him. He came to what was his own and his own people did not accept Him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become the children of God who were born not of blood or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
[00:22:16] Church when we talk about the Word of God, we have got to get away from thinking first of a bound book in our pews. The Word of God is Jesus. God incarnate in earth, dwelling among us.
[00:22:33] The Word. The last word on the Word is that the Word became flesh.
[00:22:41] It didn't say. And the Word became translated.
[00:22:46] The Word became bound. The Scriptures point us to Jesus, but the Word of God is absolutely. This Bible is absolutely powerless without Jesus.
[00:23:04] That. That's when, when God says let there be light, when God says let there be rain, when God said let, let my people go.
[00:23:17] All the things God said throughout Scripture, we find in Jesus that God voicing what God wants is bound up and comes to earth as God and God's desire.
[00:23:37] What God wants, God says.
[00:23:42] And then Jesus is what God says God wants.
[00:23:50] Jesus is that word that became flesh and dwelt among us.
[00:23:58] That's why pulling back on that first Timothy passage in chapter three is pretty important.
[00:24:07] He says, but as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in this Christ Messiah anointed King Jesus.
[00:24:33] All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching and for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness. So that so we don't reproof for reproof's sake.
[00:24:47] We don't correct for correctness sake. If you correcting someone else does not lead them to a life worthy of the calling. So that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. We're leading each other to every good work. And we aren't just leading each other from scripture. We are being led by the one about whom Scripture speaks.
[00:25:17] We get to be led by the living Christ, the living Jesus. The Spirit that is in us is that like that driving leads us to Jesus.
[00:25:30] That's a real and powerful thing in our existence. And we can come around the Bible, we can gather around Scripture and we can disagree.
[00:25:39] We can disagree.
[00:25:44] We are in East Texas.
[00:25:47] Just walk around. You will find churches that disagree.
[00:25:52] Well, you have to drive around.
[00:25:56] You'll find us will disagree in churches of Christ that disagree. Like we have the same names on the front. And we disagree on a pretty wide scale, mind you.
[00:26:21] So the text does not unite, but the Word does.
[00:26:32] The text does not save, but the Word does.
[00:26:42] In Scripture we do not find forgiveness, but in Scripture we find the one in whom we find forgiveness.
[00:26:55] That's why it's so dangerous to go to the text to find your correctness.
[00:27:03] It's more important to go to the text to find your king.
[00:27:13] Tell me this story, the one about Jesus, the one about what God would have me to be.
[00:27:29] The one about the Word becoming flesh and walking around among us. That Greek word is so fun. I don't talk about this much from the pulpit, but it's just so fun. That Greek word means essentially like tabernacled.
[00:27:43] Remember the tabernacle from the Old Testament. Tabernacle was where God dwelled.
[00:27:51] He says the word didn't become a tent, but it became flesh and tabernacled among us.
[00:28:00] He dwelled among us.
[00:28:03] God walked around and we got to hear him speak.
[00:28:11] So listen to what he has to say.
[00:28:16] When God speaks, listen to what he has to say.
[00:28:21] And it can be tough.
[00:28:24] It can be tough to open your Bible and see what's in there.
[00:28:31] Where do you start?
[00:28:33] We're at the first of the year. How many times have people said, you know what? This year I'm reading through the Bible, Genesis, doing great.
[00:28:42] Exodus. Oh, I know these stories. Exodus 20. Ah, the Ten Commandments. I remember them from college.
[00:28:51] Yeah.
[00:28:54] Exodus 21 more commandments. Exodus 22 more commandments. 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 more commandments.
[00:29:04] And then it's Valentine's Day, and you gotta be looking for your spouse. Something for Valentine's Day. You gotta figure that out. And you get lost.
[00:29:11] That New Year's resolution slips away at about Exodus 30 every year.
[00:29:17] Even if you power through, you get done with Exodus and you look around the room at church and you say, my goodness, none of these people have made it through Exodus. I bet.
[00:29:29] What's next?
[00:29:31] Leviticus?
[00:29:37] Numbers.
[00:29:40] Numbers.
[00:29:42] And then Deuteronomy means the law again.
[00:29:47] It just means Deuteronomy means the law a second time.
[00:29:52] It's a sequel to the part you didn't like that much.
[00:30:01] When you open your Bible and you decide you want to read your Bible, find Jesus and listen to what the Lord has to say, find Jesus.
[00:30:16] And that's through community, through scripture, through worship, whatever it is. Listen to what the Lord has to say in the text, because therein we find salvation. We'll have people at the back ready to pray for you. We have. I'm up front if you want to come talk to me. If you want to give your life to Jesus, if you want to follow this word that became flesh and dwelt among us, it's the best life I can imagine. But please do any of that. Anything you need while we stand and while we sing.
