Listening To The Word

Scripture and Sermon for Sunday September 17th

Faith Baptist Church of Lower Sackville, Rev. Borden Scott

Scripture Reading: Luke 4:1-13 – Borden

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.

The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’ ”The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.

And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’ ”

The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. For it is written: “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’ ” Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.

Sermon: “Listening To The Word” – Borden

Introduction

I remember my grade 11 English teacher once asking our class if anybody had read the Bible. I don’t remember anybody else raising their hand. I can’t even recall if I was willing to be the one person who admitted to being “all religious”, but by that age I was pretty comfortable with it so I think I would have. I don’t think this teacher was a Christian, but she told the class that it was worthwhile reading the Bible at some point to see the origin a lot of the ideas and common phrases that are all around us, all through our books and movies, and in whichever one of Shakespeare’s plays we were studying in English class that year. Most people don’t have any idea that expressions we hear and use regularly are Biblical: “The eleventh hour,” “at your wit’s end”, “the blind leading the blind”, “by the skin of your teeth”, “fall by the wayside”, “a fly in the ointment”, and “the writing on the wall” just to name a few.

There is no way to overstate the importance of the Bible in how our world has been shaped. But for the first 1600ish years of Christianity Bibles were a rare commodity – there were very few to go around and not many people were able to read them. Most Christians at this time would have heard scripture read at church once or twice a week and would dwell on short snippets they had memorized through the week. Hearing the words of scripture was a precious opportunity.

It couldn’t be more different today. In our part of the world, at least, we have non-stop access to the Bible. Physical copies are everywhere, it’s on the internet, it’s on your phone along with a wealth of resources to tell you what different books and passages mean. But only a small sub-set of Christians consistently spend time with the Bible.

Here at Faith Baptist we’re entering the fall with some plans to try to encourage three priorities set out in our new Mission Edge Churchvision statement: connecting to God, each other, and our community. We started talking about how to go about the connecting to God part last week with a focus on prayer. Today I’ll try to do something similar with the Bible.

If you were a Sunday school kid at some time in the last century or so you might remember the little diddy that goes “Read your Bible pray every day, pray every day, pray every day. (Everybody!) Read your Bible pray every day and you’ll… what will happen? “You’ll grow, grow, grow…”

I’ll try to flesh that out a bit. If you want to “grow, grow, grow” how should you use the Bible? How often should you read the Bible? How much should you read at time? How should you approach what you’re reading? And, with all of the demands you have on your time, what will spending some of that time with the Bible actually do to help in in your life?

I’ll offer what I can on some of these for anybody who doesn’t have much experience with the Bible and as a reminder to those who have some history with it. And, just as we did with prayer, I’ll start by looking at how Jesus did things.

Jesus and the Scriptures

The passage I chose to focus on today is a vitally important moment in Jesus’ life and mission – His temptation in the wilderness.

Even if you haven’t seen the movie “Rocky” you might be familiar with the famous training montage in the movie where Rocky Balboa is shown jogging all over Philadelphia, training in the boxing ring, punching animal carcasses in a meat locker, and running up and down the steps of a museum. He’s getting himself ready for the fight of his life. There’s now a statue of Rocky at the top of those steps, and it’s a big tourist attraction in Philly.

I feel like this part of Luke’s gospel is a little bit like this – it shows us how Jesus is being prepared for the challenges ahead of Him. In Luke 3 Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, and we read that “the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

Then Jesus went off into the wilderness. And we’re reminded in today’s passage that Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit and led by the Spirit to do this. Luke writes that Jesus ate nothing during the 40 days he spent out there. It is possible for a healthy person to survive this, though it’s certainly risky. The version of this story in Matthew’s Gospel says that Jesus fasted, which can allow for eating certain things at certain times, but in either case by the time Jesus was tested He was physically weakened and extremely hungry.

This is where you can picture Jesus out in a desert, surviving and praying, while the Rocky theme plays! I’m joking a bit, but let’s keep in mind what Jesus knows is coming. He is going to up against the mighty Roman Empire’s political power, a big part of the Jewish religious establishment’s influence, and the spiritual forces of evil determined to keep humanity in a state of sin and death. And the secret weapon to win these battles is a cross, with him on it. How do you prepare yourself for something like that?

The extreme nature of Jesus’ mission is something that the devil tries to exploit in this passage in the hope of getting Jesus to abandon God’s plan.

Luke doesn’t give any preamble to the arrival of the devil, no explanation at all. His original audience didn’t need one. They took it for granted that there was active force for evil in the world, Satan, who works against God’s purposes and seeks to deceive people into rejecting God and doing harm to themselves and others.

In our fairly comfortable society it may not seem as obvious, but many people, at some time or another, encounter evil in a form they recognize is more than just the sum of bad human choices. It stuck with me that General Romeo Dallaire, who was on the front lines of the Rwandan genocide, once said that his horrific experiences didn’t cause him to doubt in God’s existence. He said he knew God must be real because he had shaken hands with the devil.

In Luke 4 the devil tries to tempt Jesus away from His mission to redeem humanity by getting him to stop trusting God the Father.

First the devil tries to prey on Jesus’ physical weakness. “If God can really be trusted, why has he allowed you to go hungry? If you are the Son of God just tell this stone to become bread and eat!”

Then the devil tries to tempt Jesus to skip the sacrificial part of his mission. “If God can really be trusted why should you need to endure torture and death? Worship me and I’ll put you in charge of all the kingdoms of the Earth right now!”

And, finally, the devil tries to tempt Jesus into using His power for fame and recognition instead of the rejection that He would experience on the way to the cross. “If God can really be trusted why won’t He let you gather a whole army of adoring followers? Throw yourself off the highest part of the Temple in front of everyone and have angels bring you safely down. Then no one will doubt you!”

Those are some very serious temptations. If you were looking at the path that lay ahead of Jesus, wouldn’t you be tempted to choose what seemed like an easier way?

So what was Jesus’ main defense against the devil here? Certainly he had the help of the Holy Spirit and He had been preparing Himself through prayer in the wilderness, but the ammunition He fired back at Satan was scripture. Jesus turned to His Bible, our Old Testament. All three of Jesus’ responses come from the book of Deuteronomy.

Should he take it on himself to make bread instead of waiting on God? No. “Man shall not live on bread alone.” Life is about more than material things.

Should Jesus take a shortcut to power and ally with the devil himself? No. “Worship the Lord and serve him only.”

And then Satan switches it up and tries quoting the Bible to Jesus quoting Psalm 91 to support his idea that Jesus try hurling Himself of the Temple heights. But Jesus rejects the whole effort, going to back Deuteronomy 6: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

It's worth noticing here, by the way, that the devil can quote scripture and use it to tempt someone into doing the wrong thing. Just because something is “Biblical” doesn’t mean it’s right, and just because someone quotes the Bible doesn’t mean their words don’t come from the devil himself. But if you don’t know the first thing about the Bible, it hard to tell when this is happening.

Bread Alone

I could prepare 20 sermons about this passage but today I want to really zone in on how Jesus responded to that first temptation: “Man shall not live on bread alone.”

There is more to being human than having food for your belly, a roof over your head, or even all the luxuries that our modern world can offer us. If that’s all you’ve got, what is there to stop you from giving in to every temptation that comes your way? What stops you from becoming a shallow and self-centered person, blind to how you find your way what matters most in your few year on this Earth?

Jesus could readily see how the devil was trying to trick him and respond with what was right because Jesus was brimming with knowledge of scripture. Christians understand Jesus to be both fully divine and fully human, and I don’t think that, as God, Jesus had the contents of the Old Testament downloaded into His human mind. He became familiar with scripture exactly the same way that your or I can. He read it, thought about it, and talked to others about it. I’m not saying he didn’t have an edge in understanding God’s intent behind the words, but He still had to learn them.

A key point here is that when Jesus faced this essential moment He was already prepared because of his desire to obey God and his dedication to knowing God’s Word as found in scripture.

Yes, even Jesus needed to be prepared in order to face the struggles and temptations that all humans face. What makes us think that we can just wing it?

Man shall not live by bread alone. Everybody needs to decide whether or not Jesus is right about that, because we live in a culture that disagrees. It’s all about bread – all about money and the things, experiences, and status that it can buy.

Today we’re becoming less connected to friends and family as the years go by, fewer and fewer people are having children, people are increasingly putting their digital lives ahead of their real lives, and we don’t seem to have much of a sense of purpose as a people. We are not, by and large, a nation of philosophers or poets or visionaries or warriors or saints – we are consumers. Our job – the job our culture assigns us - is to try to get more and more bread.

Is that enough? We do need a certain amount of bread! But bread doesn’t bring lasting purpose. It doesn’t help you grow into the healthiest and most joyful version of you. Bread doesn’t impart the wisdom to help you sustain your most important relationships. Bread doesn’t offer hope during life’s hardest moments, or for anything beyond this life.

And that’s the way the devil likes it – when we try to live on bread alone. That makes for spiritually and intellectually weak people, easy to deceive and to tempt onto a foolish path through life.

When we don’t have deeply rooted principles or a strong foundation of values or a mature concept of God, we’re vulnerable. Engaging with the Bible is an indispensable part of becoming people who aren’t at the mercy of the devil, who doesn’t need – by the way – to turn people into psychotic killers or anything that dramatic. I think he is quite happy when he can keep most people utterly focused on themselves and how they can get more bread.

Consider Ephesians 11-15, and it’s call to grow in maturity as followers of Jesus:

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.

Reading Our Bibles

Let’s talk a bit about engaging with the Bible. What does it accomplish, and how should you do it?

First of all, just like it did for Jesus, it helps resist temptation. In the biggest recent study I could find about the effects of reading or listening to the Bible it was found that people who did engage regularly with the Bible showed a large reduction in things like alcoholism, explosive anger issues, sex outside of marriage, and the use of pornography.

There were also some huge positive effects when it came to having a passion for your faith. These regular Bible readers/listeners were about four-and-a-half times more likely to share their faith with others or to be in a relationship where they helped disciple other Christians.

One of the most interesting findings was that engaging with scripture was a bigger factor in all the things I mentioned than church attendance or prayer. I just want to repeat that so nobody misses it – to avoid temptation and be more energized in your faith there’s strong evidence that regularly engaging with your Bible matters much more than regular church attendance or prayer!

This was especially true for teenagers, so there’s a challenge for us parents to get our kids engaging with the Bible while they are young, because the teenagers who stay in the habit of reading it one their own end up on a very different trajectory through life than those who don’t, even if they all keep coming to church.

But there’s one more thing about this study that was vitally important – there was a magic number: 4. Four times per week. That’s when the benefits of Bible reading kick in. People who engaged with their Bibles once or twice or three times a week showed very little difference from those who didn’t read it at all. It was when they crossed the threshold to four or more that it started to make a big difference.

Now, I know very well that between going to work, keeping a house at least functionally tidy, caring for kids, and keeping up with all the other details of modern life that it is hard to make time for things that don’t help you get through the day.

And, unlike prayer which we talked about integrating into your day, keeping company with God in a sense, engaging with the Bible does require a bit more dedicated time and focus. It’s easy to skip or never get into the habit because most days if you read the Bible it won’t seem to do anything for you in that moment. Just like one day or not exercising or not eating any vegetables doesn’t seem to do you much harm. But what happens after a week, or a month, or a year?

You become unhealthy. Spiritually unhealthy, in the case of never engaging with the Bible. You tell me if you think I’m wrong, but I’ll go ahead and say that you’ve never met a mature Christian who didn’t put effort into engaging with the Bible often. And you will never become one if you don’t. You can use the name “Christian”, but you’ll lack the strength to resist temptation, the security of knowing God more closely, and the wisdom to make the best choices for your life. That’s a hollow faith that won’t offer you much more than having no faith at all, and where you won’t sense God at work in your life.

The renowned preacher John Stott explained what we miss out on this way: “In the Bible God gives us revelations of himself which lead us to worship, promises of salvation which stimulate our faith, and commandments expressing his will which demand our obedience. This is the meaning of Christian discipleship.”

The good news is that engaging with the Bible is not something that requires hours of intense daily study. Remember how I mentioned that for the first 1600 years of Christianity reading your own Bible on a regular basis wasn’t even an option? That didn’t mean they couldn’t have a vibrant faith. What they did was seek opportunities to engage with God’s Word where they could – at church or prayer meetings, and then memorized bits and pieces, meditating on those words as they farmed and cleaned and sewed and cut wood and whatever else was involved in their normal day.

You could do a little of that, even by carrying that Bible bookmark I’ve prepared for this series so you’ll see it from time to time and read over those words and spend some time reflecting on them.

We do, however, have access to Bibles we can read or which will read themselves to us in order to access scripture on our own terms. Adele Calhoun sums up the point of Bible Study well in saying “Through Bible study we gain insights into God, human nature, and creation. Studying the Scripture can equip, guide and reveal how to live in life-giving ways that deepen our friendship with God and others. Both Old and New Testaments encourage regular study, meditation, contemplation and memorization of God’s Word.”

Bible study is, fundamentally, just picking up a Bible and reading some of it, or listening to some being read from a recording or Bible app or wherever. But there are different ways you can approach what you are reading or hearing, and some fit with different people’s personalities or interests more.

Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook describes several approaches to Bible Study, and I wanted to mention how a couple of them work.

Treasure-Seeker Method: Looking for nuggets of treasure in scripture:

· Is there a good example I can follow here?

· Is there a promise I can lean on, or a command I should obey?

· Is there an wise truth I can apply to my life?

· Is there a sin I should confess?

· Is there a question God might be asking me in this?

Jesus’ Apprentice Method: Good for those less familiar with scripture. Choose one of the Gospels (like Mark or Luke) and study to discover all you can about Jesus. Ask yourself:

· What seems important to Jesus?

· What sort of questions does he ask people?

· What sort of questions do people ask him?

· What is Jesus inviting me to be and do?

Understanding how the Bible works and the different types of writing found within it can also help with this. That’s where you could get a lot of benefit from reading a book like “How To Read The Bible For All It’s Worth” or accessing “The Bible Project’s” online videos that cover all the different genres found in the Bible so you can tell the difference between poetry and wisdom literature and the prophetic books and the epistles and how best to read them.

But you don’t need to start there. My conviction is that the Bible is more than just a library of ancient books, but does represent God’s Word to us. God speaks through His Word. As the Bible itself says in the book of Hebrews: “For the word of God is living and active.”

The Bible is what God wanted us to have to better understand Him and to connect to Him. If you pick it up with a desire to please God, I trust God to bless you.

Maybe you’ll experience some feeling or gain some piece of wisdom that helps you in that moment. Maybe you’ll get a reminder of what’s right that helps you resist temptation that week. Maybe you’ll simply store away some truth that helps you in a year, or helps guide you down a path that you’ll be glad you walked in a decade.

But, unlike many of the things we do to distract our overloaded brains through the day, time with the Bible is not wasted time.