I want to start today’s workshop
by challenging us to rethink about what does Bible reading mean for us. I hope
that after today you will gain some new perspectives about Bible reading that
maybe you have not thought about before.
Usually when we think about Bible
reading, we associate it with this thing that we call quiet time. It is this
time that we set aside either in the morning before we start our day or in the
evening before we go to bed.
Now quiet time is good. What
happens though when we fail to do quiet time? A lot of times we feel guilty
about not coming before the word of God.
Today, I want you to get that
picture out of your head. If indeed you are saved by grace alone, your
acceptance is not dependent on how religiously you read the Bible. Your
acceptance is derived solely on what Christ has done for the Cross of you. He
has died for your sins, including your failure at coming forth to His word.
These are all atoned for on the Cross and grace has abound where sin increased.
On the other hand, some of you
may be of another category. You have been reading your Bibles well and
dutifully and you are frustrated when your peers don’t share the same passion
for the Word of God. Well I need you to humble yourself for you are falling
into the same trap that ensnared the Pharisees. Perhaps you have derived some
pride from your biblical knowledge. I would like to remind you of 1 Corinthians
8:1 – “Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that ‘We all possess
knowledge’. But knowledge puffs up
while love builds up.”
READING THE BIBLE IS ESSENTIAL
I want to start this section by
telling a story. Sometime ago a man discovered a really old car. He brought it
to an engineer and asked him to inspect the car. And the engineer told him,
this car is designed to run on diesel oil. But this man does not have diesel
with him. So he tried to use normal car petrol. The engineer said, “I don’t
think that would work.”
The man said, “Of course it
would. Fuel is fuel no matter what type!”. Into the car, the petrol went and
sure enough it didn’t work.
So he thought, “I need to try another
fuel and why not go green?”
And he tried to run the car with
ethanol made from sugar cane. Again the engineer said, “You need diesel, I
don’t think that will work.”
The car still didn’t run. He
tried all sorts of fluid kerosene, cooking oil, liquefied gas. But it just
wouldn’t work.
It wouldn’t work because the car
is meant to run on diesel. It was CREATED that way.
And so it is with us. We are
CREATED to live on God’s Word. Many of us here are familiar with the story of
Christ temptation by the devil in the wilderness.
What was Christ first rebuttal
when the devil taunted him to turn the stones into the bread if Christ indeed
was the son of God?
Turn with me to Deutoronomy 8:1-4
“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be
careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land
that the Lord swore to give to your fathers. 2 And
you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led
you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble
you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you
would keep his commandments or not. 3 And he
humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did
not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man
does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word[a] that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deutoronomy 8: 1-3)
So I want to urge you to think of
reading the Bible as something you do to “make yourself right with God”. We
somehow imagine God to be this horrible tyrant who will be displeased with us
if we didn’t read the Bible. The other trap is to think of reading the Bible as
knowledge acquirement. Yes it is knowledge and gaining Biblical knowledge is
great.
But far more important than that
is the fact that it is what we are CREATED to live by. Like the car in the
story it is essential part of how we function. Sure we may run for a while when
we don’t come to it but it is not how it was designed and substituting it with
other fuels make us look extremely foolish.
Without diesel, the car just
wouldn’t work. Without God’s Word, we just wouldn’t work. Our Creator created
us to live that way.
READING THE BIBLE IS DIFFICULT
How many of you find the Bible
extremely easy to read?
I am sure that many of you who
have tried reading it have found portions of it extremely difficult to
understand. What exactly is Paul trying to say? What is Obadiah about? How is
something written so long ago applicable to me today?
But get this; you are not alone
in finding the Bible difficult to read! The apostle Peter also had problems
understanding Paul’s letters. The second portion of Scripture we are going to
look at today is here.
Turn with me to 2 Peter 3:15-16
15 And
count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved
brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as
he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There
are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and
unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.
(2 Peter 3:15-16)
Do you find this remarkable? The
apostle Peter who was alongside Christ Jesus and was an apostle very much
earlier than Paul was acknowledges his letters as difficult to understand. He
finds the Bible difficult to read. If you have lived your lives as a Christian
long enough, we know that reading the Bible is difficult and we should
acknowledge that it is and address the challenges.
But this presents us with a
particular conundrum – if reading the Bible is essential and if reading the
Bible is difficult, how then am I supposed to proceed?
READING THE BIBLE IN FELLOWSHIP
Turn with me to Acts 8:26-31
26 Now an
angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Rise and go toward the south[d] to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is a
desert place. 27 And he rose and went. And there
was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the
Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to
Jerusalem to worship 28 and was returning, seated
in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah. 29 And
the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” 30 So
Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you
understand what you are reading?” 31 And he
said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited
Philip to come up and sit with him.
“How can I, unless someone guides
me?”
I believe this is more than just
a pastor versus church congregation kind of relationship. I want to challenge
us to think of our relationships in church as us bringing the Word to each
another. For those who know the Word, explaining it to those who don’t. Form
these relationships whereby we are reading the Word together. And this forces
us to think more about our church relationships.
Are we friends with people who
are roughly the same age? Are we friends because we like similar things? Are we
friends because we grow up together? Are we friends because we have common
experiences?
Friends how are these
relationships different from the things outside? We need to be forming
relationships whereby we are reading the Word to each another and to be honest
about our struggles and addressing them instead of suffering alone. To be
encouraging each other with what God is speaking to us to each another.
WHAT SHOULD WE BE READING THE BIBLE FOR?
What should I be getting out of
the Bible? This may seem like a strange question to us but we need to ask
ourselves this question seriously.
Some of us think of the Bible as
God’s moral guide for us. We look out for moral rules to follow. Some of us
think of the Bible as a manual. Some of us think of it as an answer to our
FAQs. Some of us look for role models like David or Samuel or Elijah or Moses.
Some of us even try to use it to
make decisions. We flip it at random and stop somewhere to try and find a
pointer for God to lead us whenever we are at a crossroad.
Please allow me to tear down all
of these impressions of the Bible. Yes Scripture is good for reproof, for
correction and for training in righteousness but there is a grander idea. Hold
your Bibles at Acts 8 and turn with me to Luke 24:26-27
“Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and
enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he
interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
This was Christ Jesus speaking
after the resurrection and all the things about Him were explained! There was
no New Testament and Paul wasn’t even a prophet then. All the things, from
Genesis to Samuel to Kings and Chronicles, the Psalms, the Proverbs, the
Prophets are all about Him.
Return again to Acts 8, we note
that the Ethiophian eunuch was reading the Prophet Isaiah when Philip asked him
whether he understood what he was reading.
“Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he
told him the good news about Jesus.”
Philip didn’t use Matthew, Mark,
Luke or John to bring the good news. He used Isaiah.
Everything in the Bible is about
Christ, the one who came to rescue us from our sins. Sure there are good
Biblical role models. But everything in there is about Christ and what he has
done and what he is going to do. Are we able to read with that sort of goggles
to discover the great Christ Jesus in every portion of Scripture we read?
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
I mentioned earlier that I hope
you come out of this workshop looking at Bible reading a bit differently. I
hope you have but my concluding thought here is one with regards to prayer.
Have we ever prayed for God to
open our minds to His word in our daily lives? Have we prayed for a greater
understanding of His word? To pray to God to help us understand the difficult
portions of Scripture?
It does seem a bit strange but He
is the author of the Word and if we struggle to understand it, shouldn’t we be
praying for the author Himself to open our minds? Who can actually explain Lord
of the Rings better than Tolkien himself? Or who can explain the Chronicles of Narnia
better than C.S. Lewis?
I have immense faith that if we
ask of this from Him, it will be greatly answered. And my prayer is that all of
us keep this prayer a huge part of our daily life. For this is a great way for
us to say “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done” in our own personal life. It is
also God’s great desire for us to not live our Christian lives as a community
and not individuals so pray for relationships whereby we are consistently
coming forth before His Word together. Be bold in forming them, and take a leap
of faith in forming these relationships even with people you don’t know so
well.
Let us pray.
Comments