There’s a meme going around on Facebook saying that certain modern translations of the Bible have “verses missing.” They do this by way of comparison to the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible.
First, a general word about the KJV. Although a magnificently rendered translation for its time, the translators from the original Hebrew and Greek (and Latin...more on that later) who created this English translation had access to a small percentage of the ancient Biblical manuscript fragments that translators have today.
This, in turn, means that we need to consider how Biblical translation is done in the first place. It begins with ancient manuscripts that are the result of generations of hand-copying of texts. This copying was done by devoted scribes and monks throughout Jewish and Christian history, conducted over vast swaths of geography.
Because of human error and not any imperfections in God or His Word, some of the manuscripts contain errors or attempts at “helpful” theological explanation. In certain geographic regions, where families of manuscripts developed, such errors or supposedly “helpful” additions were copied repeatedly.
Over time, scholars have, as part of their desire to present God‘s word as accurately as possible, observed that some families of manuscripts have tended to repeat the same mistaken renderings of the original texts.
Part of the work of a prayerful translator is to determine which differences among families of manuscripts are significant enough to warrant exclusion from translation.
This is not a matter of adding or subtracting anything from the Word of God. This is a matter of attempting to render the Word of God accurately.
Those who produced the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible had a minute number of ancient manuscripts with which to work. For large sections of the scripture, they had no manuscripts at all. What they did them to produce their translation where they had no manuscripts was to consult the Latin Vulgate Bible, the official Roman Catholic rendering of the Bible at the time.
So consider that much of the KJV was an English translation of a Latin translation of manuscripts from the original Hebrew and Greek in which the Biblical writers composed their inspired writings. Beautiful as it is then, the KJV is a flawed and incomplete rendering of the Old and New Testaments.
Today’s translators have access to every extant ancient manuscript of the Bible there is, something like 10,000 manuscript fragments, from the third century-AD onward, for the New Testament alone.
So, if there are passages “missing” from these modern translations, it’s usually because the translators want to give you the actual Word of God and not what sometimes exhausted or helpful monks mistakenly included or excluded in translations like the Vulgate or the KJV.
My favorite current translation is the English Standard Version (ESV).
You might want to check out two of the following helpful books.
I learned--or maybe, just noticed for the first time--a new word while studying the gospel text for this coming Sunday. The word, otiose, appears in I. Howard Marshall's commentary of the gospel of Luke. According to the Oxford Living Dictionaries, the word means, "Serving no practical purpose or result." It also meant, archaically, "indolent or idle."
Marshall's use of the word comes in a refutation of Rudolf Bultmann's assertion that the appearance of both Simeon and Anna at the temple on the day of Jesus' dedication was implausible. Bultmann said that for the two them to show up at virtually the same time was contrived, a literary doublet meant to hammer a theological point home. Marshall disagrees and, noting that Anna's particular words aren't quoted, says, "her rather otiose role is more likely to be an indication of historicity." In other words, Simeon's words were cited and Anna's weren't. A contrived doublet would have them both spouting verbose proclamations. The fact that Luke doesn't quote Anna's specific words, only that she affirmed Jesus' identity and began telling others about Him, affirms that events that day in the temple happened exactly as Luke reported them.
The point Marshall makes is a good one. Twentieth-century scholars like Bultmann took as their project "demythologizing" the New Testament, believing, like Thomas Jefferson before them, that anything that they couldn't rationally explain or didn't come under the category of "normal" human experience, couldn't possibly be true and must be "made up." This kind of thinking is what causes people to dismiss such essential New Testament teachings as the Trinity, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, Jesus' miracles, and His resurrection. In other words, it leads to a tamed, irrelevant, impotent, and meaningless version of Christian faith.
Influenced by such thinking, one of my seminary professors, for example, made light of the New Testament's teaching about the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Godhead. "There must be a Holy Spirit," he would say dismissively. "Otherwise, how does the next tissue pop up in the Kleenex box?" To speak of the Holy Spirit, he said, was to speak of nothing more than team spirit, the good feelings that infect a group of people when they're joined together in something like the Church.
That, of course, is no Christianity at all and I am thankful for faithful Christian teachers, people filled with the power of God's Holy Spirit, who trusted in Jesus in the way that Luke 2:22-40, this coming Sunday's gospel lesson, tells us that Simeon and Anna believed. They trusted God even when He did something out of the ordinary that they couldn't explain.
To fail to take the Bible's witness to the saving power of Jesus Christ seriously is to render Christian faith otiose. And my experience with Christ these past forty-two years tells me that the Christian witness is anything but that. I believe in Christ and I also believe that Simeon and Anna declared Him the Messiah that day in the Jerusalem temple two-thousand years ago.
I learned today of a major hotel contacting a local Gideons group, asking them to pick up all the Bibles placed in their rooms. They said it was no longer their policy to keep religious materials in their facility.
That's their prerogative, of course. Hoteliers are under no obligation to stock freely-accessible Bibles in their rooms. (Or $5.00 waters in their mini-fridges, for that matter.)
Nonetheless, it strikes me as a strange decision. The hotel is a privately-held company; there are no Church-State issues involved. And the Bibles are tucked away in drawers; nobody is forced to read them. (Though I have read of one-time atheists who came to faith in Christ as the result of reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room one night.)
I suppose some might be offended by the presence of a Bible in the top drawer of their bedside stand and that this is what the hotelier is reacting to.
It just underscores the fact that we are living in an increasingly intolerant culture--much of that intolerance incited by so-called Christians bullying rather than loving their neighbors--and that, if Christians want to see Jesus' great commission (Matthew 28:19-20) fulfilled, we cannot rely on others to fulfill it. (We never should have relied on anyone else to do it anyway!) We must prayerfully prepare for opportunities to share the hope that we have in Jesus Christ by building loving relationships with those who don't yet know or believe in Him. As a former atheist myself, I can tell you that it was people who were prepared to tell me about the hope they had in Christ who opened me up to knowing Jesus and appreciating the Word of witness about Him we read in the Bible.
(By the way, the Gideons are preparing to distribute the Bibles they've collected from the hotel in other ways. So, Gideon checked out, but he's going no doubt, to find a place for his Bible.)
A colleague of mine shared the quote cited below from Lee Strobel over on Facebook.
As a former atheist whose struggle against Christian faith led me to believe in Christ, I can identify with Strobel's thought processes as he engaged in a similar struggle.
In the end, as was true for Strobel, after considering the evidence, from the Scriptures, from reason, and from the sciences, I simply didn't have enough faith to be an atheist.
Strobel's quote:
To continue in atheism, I would need to believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, and non-reason produces reason. I simply didn't have that much faith.
"Not all of the founders acknowledged the Bible as the revealed Word of God. Nonetheless, it was widely regarded as a receptacle of great wisdom and, especially Jesus' teachings, a handbook for ethical and virtuous conduct."
2 Timothy 3:16-17 Psalm 1:1-3
In this past Sunday’s gospel lesson, we heard Jesus tell Nicodemus: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)
What Jesus was saying is that when God’s Holy Spirit is on the loose in people, we can neither control the Spirit nor, usually, see what the Spirit has been up to until after He’s completed His work. Like the wind, we can’t see the Holy Spirit, we can only see the evidence of His activity in people’s lives.
This, I think, is a good place to start when examining our question for tonight, how can we know that the Bible is the Word of God?
Now, this question is a bit different from the ones asked and answered in books like Mere Christianity, The Case for Faith, The Case for Christ, or How We Got the Bible. They answer questions like
Who was Jesus?
How did He understand Himself?
Is the Bible reliable, is faith logical?
Did Christ rise from the dead?
and others. They all demonstrate that the historical evidence and logical cohesion for believing in the truthfulness and reliability of the Bible are overwhelming.
But it’s possible for us to accept the historical truthfulness of Scripture and what it tells us about God and still not believe in Jesus, the Messiah-God to Whom the Bible points as “the way, and the truth, and the life.”
A man I knew once told his sister, “I believe that Jesus died and rose from the dead. So what?”
That man’s belief was no different from that of the devil’s. The devil absolutely believes that God exists. He knows what God has done. And, as his encounter with Jesus in the wilderness shows, he knows the Bible inside out.
But the devil lacks faith. And so did that man.
Faith is what happens when we pull down our shields--shields like self-sufficiency, egotism, fear of losing control over one’s life--to open ourselves to what God wants to give us and do in us, now and in eternity. Faith is about surrender to the God we meet in Jesus.
Second Timothy 3:16 says: “All Scripture is God-breathed…” Now, both the Old and New Testament words for breath--ruach in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and pneuma in the Greek of the New Testament--can also carry the meanings of wind or spirit.
What Paul was telling young Timothy is that while the Scriptures may look like nothing more than words on a page, they’re actually as infused with the life of God as Adam was when God breathed into dust and made the first human being; they’re as filled with the life or Spirit of God as the first Christian disciples were when, on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to them on the rush of a mighty wind.
When we are open to it, the Bible is a tornado that we can’t control, that can blow through our lives, tearing down old ways of thinking and living, and empowering us to have, in a phrase that Paul uses in his letter to the Philippian Christians, “the mind of Christ.”
Fine, you may say, the Bible is Spirit-inspired. How do I know that's all true?
We live in a condo. This past week, workers came to the development to clear away the branches that had blown down from the trees and, in at least one case, clear away an entire tree that had fallen, all because of the high winds we’d had a few days before that. Many of you will remember that particularly windy day. But you remember it not because you saw the wind in the same way that you could have seen rain or snow or a bright sun; what you saw was the evidence of the wind from what it was doing.
And this, I think, can point us to how we can know that the Bible is the Word of God: We can see the changed and changing lives of those who are being exposed to the Bible!
The changes wrought in believers by God’s Word in Scripture may happen slowly in some, or come with hurricane force through many aspects of life in others, or in fits and spurts in still others. But when we let the Bible immerse us in the truth God--as we read it on our own, as we receive it in, with, and under the bread and wine, as we hear it proclaimed or taught, as we place ourselves under it as God’s authoritative and life-giving Word for our lives--we see the evidence for the Bible being the Word of God. The Bible is the Word of God first and foremost, because it changes us.
This Word:
assures us of God’s forgiving grace,
imparts God’s guidance for the living of each day,
helps us to forgive as we’ve been forgiven,
empowers us to live with hope and peace, and
sets us free to live as people confident of their Father’s love and certain of their Lord’s presence with them in the good and in the bad, all the way to eternity.
How does it do this?
By creating faith in Christ within us. Romans 10:17 tells us: “...faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ…”
The Bible can do this because it’s the instrument of the Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians 12:3 says: “Therefore I want you to know that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, ‘Jesus be cursed,’ and no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”
The Holy Spirit’s imprint is on every letter of Scripture to present the Word about Jesus so that people immersed in its truth have and are strengthened in their faith relationship with Jesus.
This underscores why we can say confidently that the Bible is the Word of God. We can do this when we consider what the Bible means when it talks about “the Word of God.” For the Bible, the Word of God, ultimately is a Person and that Person is Jesus. John 1:1 tells us: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…”
The Word of God then, is Jesus. This is the Word let loose by God over chaos in Genesis 1 to say, “Let there be light” and there was light, “Let there be land” and there was land. “Let there be stars and sun, moons and planets, and human beings made in My image” and all those things and more came into being.
We can speak of the Bible as the Word of God because, from Genesis to Revelation, it points us to Jesus the Word of God.
And we will know when we’ve heard the Word of God when it conforms to all that God reveals about Himself in the Bible’s sixty-six books and when it challenges us or comforts us or stretches us to be remade by God to look more like Jesus Himself.
We know the Word of God is in the Bible when we see the impact it has on us or others, how it challenges us to turn from sin, how it incites us to trust in Jesus Christ, how it empowers us to pray, to witness, to serve, all because this Word from and about Jesus sets us free to live for the Savior Who lived and died for us.
The Word of God we find in the Bible is a mighty wind blowing away the old and dead and breathing life into the new and eternal.
The Bible is the Word of God. When we let it have its way with us, we won’t need evidence to prove that. The evidence will be found in what that Word does in us, to us, and for us.
When encountering God's law as embodied in the Ten Commandments, ask God how we have failed to be obedient. When encountering God's grace as ultimately revealed in Christ, ask God to help us believe that Christ's death and resurrection were for us too.
The first question is a hedge against self-righteousness that would destroy our relationship with God and others, driving us instead to repent and be reconciled with God.
The second is a hedge against against despair, helping us to remember that we are also part of that world for whom God the Father sent His Son and for Whom the Son Jesus died and rose. His grace incites us to fall into the eternal arms of the God Who loves us with an unquenchable passion.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son." (Jesus in John 3:16-18)
The upcoming Christmas season, which begins in two days, is a great time to get to know God through the reading of His Word. But one other hint: Reading the Bible is best done in association with a group of friends who read the same passages each day, then gather once a week to reflect on the Scriptures, learn from each other's insights, pray together, share their highs and lows, especially in light of what God is teaching them through His Word, and, of course, be a part of a local church family. We were made for fellowship with God and others.
Poet and pastor Malcolm Guite applauds Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature and explains the connections between Dylan's body of work and his reading of the Bible.
Years ago, I read an article in Rolling Stone about Roger McGuinn, lead singer and lead guitarist of The Byrds, a band that successfully covered several Dylan songs. This was during Dylan's "Christian phase." But McGuinn explained that in the mid-60s, ten years before Dylan's "conversion," Dylan told McGuinn that he always turned to the Bible for song-writing inspiration. You can hear it on every Dylan LP. He's steeped in the Scriptures and they're apparent in his cadences, sensibilities, and imagery.
Dylan deserves his Nobel Prize and my life has been enriched by his work.
Ambrose was a favorite historian of mine. His biography of Dwight Eisenhower, one of the best studies of Ike I've read and Citizen Soldiers, a moving account of the heroism of G.I.s who were central to the Allied victory in World War 2, are among my favorites.
The Wild Blue focuses particularly on a man whose heroism and patriotism were later impugned when he ran for president in 1972, George McGovern. The South Dakotan who would later become an historian and a US Senator, piloted what were, by common consent, the most difficult-to-fly aircraft of the war. This is a great book!
Lutzer, a very conservative Christian evangelical, provides tremendous insights and guidance for anyone wanting to defeat bad habits in their lives.
Without the Bible, God's book, and other reading material, life would be barren. (In saying this, I'm not putting other books on a par with the Bible, by the way. It would be ridiculous to compare any book to the Word of God! But I am glad that God has gifted some people to author all kinds of books.) I'm so thankful for the gift of reading, for authors, and for the fact that my mom took me to the library to get borrowing privileges when I was little. (My first book was an oversized book containing photographs by Matthew Brady and others chronicling Abraham Lincoln and his times. Already a nerd, I was about four at the time.)
"[In Martin] Luther's...treatise [on prayer] he tells us to build on our study of Scripture through meditation [of the Scripture], answering the Word of God in prayer to the Lord. As we do that, we should be aware that the Holy Spirit may begin 'preaching' to us. When that happens, we must drop our [prayer] routines and pay close attention." [Timothy Keller. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God.
"God acts through his words, the Word is 'alive and active' (Hebrews 4:12), and therefore the way to have God dynamically active in our lives is through the Bible. To understand the Scripture is not simply to get information about God. If attended to with trust and faith, the Bible is the way to actually hear God speaking and also to meet God Himself." (Timothy Keller. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God.)
The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace. #OneWayLove
— Tullian Tchividjian (@PastorTullian) August 10, 2014
The Bible Series premieres this coming Sunday on the History Channel at 8:00 ET. This is a music video with clips of scenes from the series. It looks like it's going to be very good!
This didn't make it into tomorrow's sermon. But I thought that I'd share it here:
When we turn a deaf ear to God’s Word, ignoring either God’s Law or God’s promise as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, it’s like driving another nail into Jesus’ scarred flesh all over again.
It’s like joining the Good Friday conspirators who thought that by killing Jesus, they could throw off the lordship of God and, like Adam and Eve at the dawn of human history, make their play to “be like God.”
This comes through clearly in a passage in the New Testament, Acts 9:4. A man named Saul had been deputized to seek out Jews who were following Jesus and bring them back to Jerusalem, bound as prisoners. On his way to Damascus, Saul (who would later become Paul, a great preacher of faith in Jesus) encounters the risen and ascended Jesus, Who asks, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
Whenever we turn our backs on the Word of God as revealed in the Bible, we persecute Jesus and distance ourselves from Him.
God forbid that we should do that! God forbid that we should turn our backs on the One Who says, "The Father and I are one" (John 10:30) and "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you know Me, you will know My Father also" (John 14:6-7).
From today's devotional in Our Daily Bread: "Caring for God’s people includes feeding them spiritually, leading them gently, and warning them firmly. Leaders in the church are to be motivated by the incalculable price Christ paid on the cross."
These are important words.
But here are a few additional thoughts triggered by the Bible passage on which the devotion is based, Acts 2:22-32. (You might want to go read it now. Go ahead! I'll wait here for you to do it.)
The word translated in the New Revised Standard Version rendering of the passage, as "overseers," is, in the original Greek, "episcopos." Episcopos is a compound word composed of the prefix, "epi," meaning "over," and "skopos" (from which we get words like telescope and microscope) and means "see."
So, an episcopos, is an overseer, someone who, in the church, sees over the spiritual needs of a congregation or a group of individual Christians.
The word "episcopos" came to be rendered in English as "bishop" and has come to be applied to clergy persons who oversee the work of groups of congregations and pastors, whether those groups are referred to as synods, conferences, districts, or dioceses.
However, the New Testament has no reference to persons bearing the title "bishop" or "episcopos" functioning in this way.*
When the New Testament refers to "overseers" or "bishops," it has in mind what we would today call "pastors." Pastors, in the New Testament context, could be the shepherds of congregations or serve the shepherding role among groups of believers within a larger body.
The New Testament doesn't lay out any particular system for individual congregations or groups of congregations to organize themselves. Biblically, we are free in Christ to be organized in any way that seems practical, helping us to pursue our common mission as believers in Christ.
The Lutheran Confessions are similarly indifferent to how congregations or groups of congregations are organized. Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession, an expression of how Lutheran Christians understand God, the Bible, and Christian faith, says, "It is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word."
Lutherans have always believed that authority over the actions of the Church aren't governed by human beings, but by God, as mediated to us through God's Word, the Bible. Part 1 of the Formula of Concord, another basic Lutheran confessional statement, says, "We believe, teach, and confess that the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged...Other writings of ancient and modern teachers, whatever their names, should not be put on a par with Holy Scripture. Every single one of them should be subordinated to the Scriptures..." [italics are mine]
It's fine for denominational groups, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) of which I am a part, to have bishops, so long as that's agreeable to those within the ELCA. But the Bible only knows "bishops" (overseers) as pastors. Bishops over a synod or a diocese are in a category Martin Luther called "adiaphora," an element of church life that has nothing to do with and is unnecessary for, our salvation.
*You will notice that the word episcopos is very much like the term Episcopalian. That's because the Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, traces its organizational structure back to that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, and other Christian traditions, operate with an episcopal system. This means that they are governed largely by bishops. Most notably, bishops in all of these traditions assign pastors to congregations, rather than congregations prayerfully deciding who to call to be their pastors.
Under episcopal structures, to varying degrees, bishops also are deemed to be the ultimate authorities within the regions, dioceses, synods, or districts in which they serve, over the faith and practice of the Church. So, for example, when some bishops in the the Episcopal Church-USA, authorized the ordination of practicing homosexuals, some Episcopal parishes chose to place themselves under the authority of bishops of other dioceses, ones in which the bishops adhered to differing understandings of the underlying Biblical issues.
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Today’s sermon is a rerun and I think I would have preached it whether I’d spent Thursday and part of Friday at the hospital to get my defibrillator. That’s because the topic for today is something about which I am passionate. It’s about the object of an ongoing love affair in my life and it isn’t with Ann. (How’s that for grabbing your attention?)
To start, I'd like to show you a few books from my personal library.
This first one is a paperback version of the New Testament in the Good News translation. It was given to me by my parents’ church in Columbus when I graduated from Ohio State in 1975. This Bible is especially important to me because this was the very one I read when I first fell in love with Jesus Christ!
It was on these pages that I came to learn more about Who Jesus is and the depths of His passion for you and me and everybody in the world.
Acts was the first book of the New Testament I read in this edition. I remember being especially stirred when I read this verse, which comes after an account of how the apostles, the leaders of Jesus' post-resurrection Church had been beaten for their faith in Christ. It says: “The apostles left the Council [that had beaten them and told them to never speak in Jesus' Name again], full of joy that God had considered them worthy to suffer disgrace for the Name of Jesus.”
To this day, I can hardly read that passage without choking up. Imagine it: These followers of Jesus derived joy from having the privilege of suffering for their allegiance to Jesus! By contrast, I sometimes complain about being inconvenienced by people for whom Jesus died and who Jesus has called me to love.
When I went to seminary four years after becoming a Christian, I was required, along with all of my classmates, to have a copy of the Oxford edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. It’s no longer in print, but I used this Bible throughout my seminary career and into my early years as a pastor. After it got worn out and had nearly fallen apart, no matter how much Scotch, masking, or duct tape I put on the binding, I bought another one just like it to replace it. As you can see, after awhile, this second came to look like the first one, too.
It was from this edition of the Bible that I read on the night before my family and I headed to the first congregation I served as a pastor twenty-seven years ago. Just before I went to bed, I read Paul’s letter to a young pastor named Timothy. In the book called First Timothy, Paul gave Timothy advice that I felt that I needed as a then-young pastor myself: “Command and teach these things. Let no one despise your youth, but set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity…attend to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you…Practice these duties, devote yourself to them, so that all may see your progress. Take heed to yourself and to your teaching; hold to that, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.”
Later, I bought this Study Bible, which I still use sometimes. And later still, I bought this Life Application Bible. Like the others, it’s now showing its age. I’ve had it for about thirteen years and still use it every day.
A few years ago, I added The Message translation to my arsenal of Bibles. And, within the past year, I’ve gotten two wonderful editions: The Orthodox Study Bible, with notes by Greek Orthodox scholars, and The Lutheran Study Bible, from the publishing house of Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Though I have differences on many issues with both of those Christian traditions, these are wonderful study Bibles.
Now, I’m not showing you my Bibles to impress you. My point is this: Since 1976, reading the Bible has been an almost daily part of my life. And if you were to open most of my Bibles, you’d find underlines and notes all over them. You'd find questions in the margins, too, because there are still many things I don’t understand about God.
Some people might find all my markings on the pages of my Bibles offensive. But if the Bible is God’s Word, as I believe it is, then what you would see in those notes and underlines and questions is the record of my ongoing dialog with God, the conversation to which God invites all of us on the pages of the Bible.
This morning, I confess that I sin every day of my life. I do things that are wrong and say things I shouldn’t say. And I think things which, if any of you were mind-readers, would cause you to want to avoid me at all costs. The Bible hasn’t made me perfect. But it has introduced me to the God Who loves imperfect people like me and is committed to helping those who daily surrender to Him.
It's shown me the God Who's committed to changing us into all that God made us to be in the first place.
You see, unlike Lady Gaga, God doesn’t think that we should pursue sinful lifestyles just because we were “born that way.” In the Bible, God teaches us that we’re not to live as the slaves to sin, which is what we all are when we are born; instead, in Christ we are born again and set free to live God’s way!
When we spend time reading God’s Word, it brings changes to our lives, usually in ways we can’t readily articulate.
I love a story about an exchange of letters to the editor that once appeared in a newspaper in England. It started with a disgruntled church member who wrote something like this: “I’ve been in worship virtually every Sunday for the past thirty years and I have recently realized that I can’t remember a single sermon I’ve heard in all that time. Therefore, I’m going to quit going to worship. It’s obviously a waste of time.” Several days later, another letter to the editor appeared. It began: “My wife has always cooked the meals in our family these past thirty years. Recently, I have realized that in scanning my memory, I can’t really remember more than a handful of specific meals she has prepared. Therefore, I’m going to quit eating.”
Daily taking the time to read God’s Word, like weekly worship, is another way God feeds us and nourishes us. I certainly don’t remember every specific conversation I’ve had with God as I’ve read and written on the pages of my Bible these past thirty-five years. But I do know that when I take the time for this daily discipline, I remember that God is with me and that He is waiting to help me that day.
I receive God’s counsel.
I find what displeases God and the things for which I need to repent and receive the power of His Holy Spirit to change.
I see how God provides for me and how God wants to be with me forever.
I’m encouraged in my down times, guided through life’s mysteries, and brought down to earth when my ego is riding high.
I remember that Jesus died and rose for me.
But it takes time spent reading and paying attention to God's Word for all of these things to become apparent in our lives.
I'm a slow-learner when it comes to almost anything in life. That includes learning what it means to follow Jesus and trust in God. The moment God begins forming faith in Christ within us—something we Lutherans believe starts at Baptism—we are part of God’s kingdom.
But growing up in the faith, living in the confidence that God willingly gives His children, being able to face whatever life throws at us, and becoming the high-impact people of faith we’re made to be, that is a process.
It happens bit by bit as we surrender our lives to Christ. It happens through things like regular worship, regular prayer, regular service, regular giving, regularly encouraging others with the love of Christ, regularly inviting others to worship with us, and regularly reading God’s Word.
This is what Paul is talking about in our second lesson for this morning, composed of the opening passages of his first letter to a church in the Greek city of Thessalonica. He begins by saying how thankful he is that the Christians in this Aegean Sea-coastal city are so faithful to Jesus Christ.
He writes: “For the Word of the Lord has sounded forth from you not only in Macedonia and Acaia, but in every place your faith in God has become known... [And then Paul goes on to write:] For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, so that we have no need to speak about it.”
Do you see what happened? The Thessalonians had daily feasted on the Word of God. It had become integrated into the very marrow of their souls. The results were predictable. People who lived miles away heard about how Jesus Christ was at the center of their lives and how His Word made a huge positive difference in how they lived and faced each day.
When we daily take in God’s Word, each verse becomes like one of those time-released medicine capsules that, at just the right moments, work. God's Word works within us and then bring into being things like joy, compassion, hopefulness, a commitment to justice, and deep faith.
This, in turn, is seen by others and, as was true of the Thessalonians who influenced other people, we will bring God’s Word to those around us. God’s Word enters us and our lives become God’s Word for others, speaking God’s truth and God’s call to repentance and belief in Jesus.
I urge you to make reading the Bible a daily part of your life.
Wear out your Bibles!
Make notes in the margins!
Memorize verses that are meaningful to you!
Ask God to explain passages that you don’t understand.
Ask God to help you apply the things that you do understand.
Consider joining in with the remaining readings and weekly discussions as we read the Bible together in a year.
And ask God too, to set off the power for living with joy, peace, and hope that comes to all who let God’s Word act as their guide through life. Amen
"Holy Scripture remains the only judge, rule, and norm according to which as the only touchstone all doctrines should and must be understood and judged as good or evil, right or wrong." (The Formula of Concord, one of the Lutheran confessions)
[This week, as we together read the Bible in a year here at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, we're moving into the Psalms. Below is the text of what will be both a handout for the discussion groups on Wednesday and an insert in this coming Sunday's bulletin.]
The Psalms are sometimes referred to as “liturgical poetry.” Leitourgia, the word that is transliterated into English as liturgy, literally means “work of the people.” To worship God for all His goodness, grace, and power is the work of God’s people and it’s something we’re to do 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But there are special times when God’s people come together to worship God. The Psalms, compiled over many centuries, are words that the Jews of ancient times and of today, have used for their public worship for centuries. As people who have, through Jesus Christ and our faith in Him, been made part of God’s family, the Psalms are for us, too.
Traditionally, the largest share of the Psalms has been attributed to David, Israel’s second king. Others are said to be written by people like Moses and Asaph. Some are ascribed to nobody in particular.
Who wrote the 150 psalms in this book isn’t as important as what each of them does. Basically, they function to help us have an honest conversation with God, no matter what our circumstances, feelings, or needs.
According to one prominent scholar, Claus Westermann, there are ten types of psalms:
• The Community Psalm of Lament
• The Community Psalm of Narrative Praise
• The Individual Psalm of Lament
• The Individual Psalm of Narrative Praise
• The Psalm of Descriptive Praise or Hymn
• Creation Psalms
• Liturgical Psalms
• Royal Psalms
• Enthronement Psalms
• Wisdom Psalms
In general terms, lament psalms give voice to feelings we have in times of trouble. They could arise from personal suffering and grief or national calamities. Examples of community lament include Psalms 44, 74, and 79. Examples of individual lament are Psalms 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and many others.
Psalms of narrative praise speak of God’s greatness through the narration of specific events. Examples of community praise include Psalms 106, 124, and 129. Examples of individual praise are Psalms 9, 18, 30, and many others.
Psalms of descriptive praise give honor to God while describing His blessings. They had a special place in ancient Jewish worship. Some in this category include Psalms 29, 33, 65, and 145-150, among many others.
Creation psalms speak of God as the Sovereign Who created and rules over His creation. They praise God as Creator. Psalms 8, 104, and 139 fall into this category.
As to liturgical psalms, Westermann says that those psalms referred to as “liturgies…are clearly shaped by…a combination of liturgical speech with liturgical actions.” Most commonly, this involves what we call antiphonies, when a worship leader or one group issues a call and all in the congregation or portions of the congregation respond. Good examples are Psalms 66 and 107. There are subcategories in this grouping like Pilgrimage Songs, sung by people as they processed or traveled to the temple in Jerusalem; Songs of Zion, which were probably Pilgrimage Songs specifically asking God to protect Jerusalem from attack; Psalms of Blessing, special benedictions for those who had worshiped in Jerusalem during a festival and were returning to their homes; and Entrance Instructions, dealing with entering the sanctuary during a festival.
Royal psalms have to do with the rulers of the nation, while enthronement psalms hail God as the one and only true King!
Wisdom psalms are liturgical poetry that present wisdom from God, akin to the book of Proverbs. Examples include Psalms 37, 49, and 112.
The word psalm refers to a sacred song or hymn. There are psalms in other books of the Old Testament and the categories into which scholars sometimes divide the book of Psalms can overlap.
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
1 Kings 19:9-18
In his fantastic book, The Power of a Whisper, Pastor Bill Hybels, tells what happened to him one day after he prayed this prayer: “God, if there is something you would like me to do…then please say so. It doesn’t matter what it is; I’ll do it.”
He had no idea how God might answer that prayer. But in a few days, Hybels and his wife Lynne were leaving the funeral of his aunt and getting into their car when he “spotted a frail, elderly woman pulling into [a] nearby apartment complex.” He saw the woman park her car, then “slowly and laboriously pull grocery bags out of her trunk.” Hybels sensed God’s Holy Spirit telling him, “How about helping that woman with her groceries?”
Initially, Hybels says, he tried to brush past this holy whisper. It seemed so mundane. But he remembered his prayer.
He approached the elderly woman, asking if he could help her. Relieved, she said, “Oh, yes! Thank you!”
As Hybels tells it: “The driveway leading back to her apartment recently had been seal-coated and was roped off, meaning residents had to walk a few hundred yards just to get from their cars to their homes.” Hybels knew he was helping to fill a real need, especially when the woman handed him a thirty-pound bag of peaches even he found a little hard to handle.
As Hybels tells it, the woman led him “through backyards that had become swamps due to recent rains…” She was “extremely arthritic and slow-moving.” It took thirty minutes for them just to make their way to the woman’s apartment!
After he had helped her to empty the sacks, she reached her hand out to Hybels and said, “I will believe to my dying day that God sent you to help me just now.” As inglorious as it all seemed, Hybels was sure she was right.
Our first Bible lesson for today recounts a conversation between God and the prophet Elijah. It raises an important question: Does God still speak to believers in 2011, the way He spoke to his prophet in the ninth-century BC or was Hybels’ direct message from God a figment of an overly spiritual imagination? What does the Bible say?
Pull out the pew Bibles for a moment, please, and turn to 1 Samuel 3:1, on page 158. The verse tells about when God called a young boy named Samuel to be a priest, judge, and prophet. It says: “Now the boy Samuel ministered to the LORD before Eli. [And this is the part to which I want to call particular attention:] And the word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no widespread revelation.” That last sentence has always interested me because of is its unspoken assumption that, throughout much of ancient Israel’s history, God commonly spoke to His especially called people, like prophets. The era before Samuel’s call apparently, was a rare time when the connection between God and His people grew spotty.
Centuries after Samuel, after God came into the world in the person of Jesus and after Jesus died and rose and sent the Holy Spirit to believers in the Church, it wasn’t just to prophets and priests that God spoke. It was to all believers. In the pew Bibles, take a look at Acts, chapter 2, starting at verse 17, on page 627. On Pentecost, Peter is explaining how ordinary people who believed in Jesus were telling others about God’s mighty works. He explained how such a thing was possible by remembering the ancient words of the prophet Joel: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, That I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh…”
In fact, throughout the book of Acts, which tells the story of the early Church, we’re told how God’s people prayed and God directed them. The Bible assumes that it’s normal for God to speak to believers who are dialed into God.
But how does God speak to us?
Please pull out the Celebrate inserts and look at the first lesson, 2 Kings 19:9-18.
Let’s set the stage: It’s the ninth century BC. About fifty years earlier, the nation of Israel had split in two. The southern kingdom, known as Judah, retained its worship life in Jerusalem and struggled to retain its faith in the God of the Bible, Who they knew as Yahweh, the LORD. The northern kingdom, with its capital of Samaria, called itself Israel.
According to the Bible, the northern kingdom never had a king who was faithful to Yahweh or just in his actions. The worst of its rulers was Ahab, who worshiped Baal, a false deity of rain, fertility, and agriculture.
Despite the LORD’s first commandment that no other god should be worshiped, Ahab and his wife Jezebel encouraged the people to turn their back on God.
God made Elijah a prophet in order to call the king and the nation to repent for their sins and to trust in God alone.
At Mount Carmel, God was shown to be faithful and powerful, while Baal was shown to be a man-made fiction.
Right after this contest, it seemed that the northern kingdom would return to God. King Ahab got rid of the prophets of Baal as God, through Elijah, directed him.
Later though, Ahab told his wife Jezebel about all that happened and she sent a message to Elijah, telling him that within a day’s time, she would see that Elijah was a dead man. First Kings, chapter 19, verse 3, says that when Elijah received that message, “he was afraid” and he ran. Like Peter, in our Gospel lesson, Elijah allowed his fears to veto his faith in God. He panicked.
Our lesson finds Elijah at Mount Horeb, also known as Mount Sinai, the place where, six centuries before Elijah’s time, God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. Twice in our lesson, God asks Elijah why he has run. Twice, Elijah says, as he does in verse 10, you see: “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken Your covenant [the covenant God had made with Israel on that very mountain], thrown down Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
Have you ever known fear like that, a fear that leaves you feeling alone and without hope? The doctor tells you about a poor prognosis or a loved one dies and you wonder how you can possibly function. The stock market moves further into negative territory and you fear that you’ll have no retirement income.
It’s at times like these that God wants to tell us, in the words of Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.”
God wants to tell all who believe in Jesus Christ, as 1 John 4:4 puts it: “Little children…the one who is in you [the Bible teaches that Christ lives in His people] is greater than the one who is in the world.”
God is bigger than anything we may fear and, as Romans 8 reminds us, those who turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ, live in the certainty that nothing can separate us from the love of God given to us through Christ!
Sometimes though, we may need special guidance or assurance. Elijah did.
Look at verse 11 of our first lesson. God told Elijah to stand on the mountain, “for the LORD is about to pass by.” Then, we’re told, “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind, an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire, and after the fire the sound of sheer silence.”
It was there in the silence, that somewhere in his own spirit, Elijah heard God speak to him. (The older translations says that God spoke to Elijah in “a still, small voice,” but even that may suggest something too noisy.)
God then ordered Elijah to move past his fears, giving him three specific tasks.
Listen! When you’re afraid or lonely or need guidance or you simply want to offer yourself to the God Who offered Himself for you on the cross, you can hear from God.
The most reliable place to hear God is on the pages of the Bible. That’s where God’s Word can always be found.
I got to know a Pentecostal pastor named Howard back in Cincinnati. Loved that man! We were having a heart to heart one night when he said, “You know, so many Pentecostals want to hear ‘a special word from God.’ But all they really need to do is look at the Bible to find God’s Word for their lives.” I smiled and said, "Howard, you sound like a Lutheran!"
Howard was right! We’ve all read about people who have done horrible things because, they claimed, some voice had told them to do so. If you feel prompted to do something, look in the Book. Find out what God’s Word says. Talk to a trusted Christian friend who knows God’s Book. God will never tell us to do anything that runs contrary to His revealed will in the Bible. Never.
But when, in the silence of your soul, you sense God prompting you, go for it!
Jim and Sheila, from our congregation, went to Bob Evans for lunch on Friday. Across the way from them sat an older man eating by himself. Sheila observed his conversation with the waitress, indicating he might be a “regular” there. She thought she heard him use the word, “radiation.”
That’s when I think God spoke to Sheila. “I felt,” she wrote to me in an email on Friday, “like I wanted to make this man’s day.”
In order to not be heard by the man, she wrote a note asking the waitress to bring the man’s check to Jim and her. She handed one of our “The Meal’s on Us!” cards to the waitress to give to the man. Later, the waitress brought a box to the man as he’d requested and told him that his meal had been taken care of. “Who?” he asked. The waitress shrugged. The man teared up, read the card twice, then tucked it into his pocket. Sheila says, “My heart felt warm all over.”
[The front of one of our "This meal's on us!" card.]
[The back side of our "This meal's on us!" card.]
Does God still speak to His people today? Yes, most reliably in His Word, the Bible.
Right now, members of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, and I are reading the Bible together in a year's time. We're reading it straight through, about three chapters a day, from Genesis to Revelation.
Here are a few thoughts underscoring the importance of constant study of Scripture that I've run across in the past few days.
We cant watch TV for 3 hrs then read the Bible for 3 min & expect to grow spiritually.
And I just read this from the final chapter of David Platt's fantastic Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream (it comes as part of his plea to readers take on an experiment in radical Christian living that, interestingly, includes taking a year to read the Bible in its entirety):
I want to put a particularly strong emphasis on this step of the Radical Experiment [reading the Bible through in a year's time]. The Christian marketplace is filled with books today--some of them healthy, and some of them not so healthy. To be honest, I have been very hesitant to write this book, because I look at our bookstores and think, Do we really need another one? I suppose only time will tell if it was worth it, but time has already spoken on one Book.
God has chosen by his matchless grace to give us revelation of himself in his Word. It is the only Book that he has promised to bless by his Spirit to transform you and me in the image of Jesus Christ. It is the only Book that he has promised to use to bring our hearts, our minds, and our lives in alignment with him. I'm not saying that God has not used or blessed other Christian books throughout Christian history, but there is only one Book that he has perfectly inspired by his Spirit for the accomplishment of his purpose. When you or I open the Bible, we are beholding the very words of God--words that have supernatural power to redeem, renew, refresh, and restore our lives to what he created them to be.
Of course, there are passages of Scripture that trouble us or that we can't explain. But as you read the Bible daily, great themes of faith emerge, themes that will bring your faith and your relationship to God alive.
Don't be satisfied with a second-hand knowledge of God, a verse here, and a devotional thought there. Such things can be helpful to us. Hearing or reading the perspectives of others on passages of Scripture--like you get a daily devotional--can be a great antidote to our penchant for riding our personal hobby horses as we skim the Bible just for things we like. (And as readers of this blog know, I do read a daily devotional. But I also read and study chapters of the Bible each day, not just in preparation for preaching, but for other reasons.)
The daily reading of Scripture will move your relationship with the God ultimately revealed to the whole world in Jesus Christ to a ever-deepening level of intimacy, dependence, true awe of God, and true confidence in your living.
And, as with any relationship of love, the key is not some chimerical entity people call "quality time," it's quantity time. If we don't spend lots of time with God--in things like daily Bible reading and study, daily prayer, regular service in His Name--along with weekly group Bible studies and weekly worship, our relationship with God can only be superficial.
If you want more than a superficial faith or a superficial understanding of God, you can begin to address that desire by reading the Bible every single day.
