Is there anything we can trust?

Jason Worf

Back to Basics • Sermon • Submitted 24 days ago • Presented a month ago

2 Timothy 2:24–26

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Church Life

Welcome to Riverview Adventist church where we follow Jesus and serve one more. If you’re new to Riverview, I hope you’ve received a welcome bag with some goodies and some information about our church. If you don’t have one yet, please drop by the welcome desk and we’ll get you one. We’d love to stay connected with you. If you would be so kind, please text “hello” to (509) 519-1894, or scan the QR code on the sticker in front of your seat.

I’d also like to welcome everyone who is watching us online. If you’d like to connect with us, please go to riverviewadventist.org and click on the “new here” button.

Connect Groups

At this time in our service we like to share what’s going on at Riverview and connect with our people, our mission, and our community.

Joelle, would you come up? I’d like you to tell us what’s going on with Connect Groups starting in March….

Is there an interest in small groups at Riverview?

Tell us a little about the options. I see we have a Connect Groups Catalog in the bulletin today, and that list is also online at riverviewadventist.org/connectgroups.

When are these groups taking place?

Do we have other plans for small groups after this spring session?

So, I’m interested in one of these small groups, how do I sign up?

The groups page on the Church Center app…, scan the QR code beside the connect group, or the QR code at the end of the catalog for the Area-wide connect groups form,

Thank you Joelle. I’m looking forward to your new small group, and I’m grateful that we have a broader church community to invest in the discipleship process. If you’re interested in leading a small group, please let Joelle know. Her number is in the Connect Groups Catalog in your bulletin, or on the Church Center director.

Here are a few other announcements:

Invite Theresa. And Rae - Tomorrow at 3 pm we have a ladies tea party. Please come and bring a friend or neighbor with you.

Children’s Expo: Whether you’re a children’s Sabbath School teacher, interested in helping out in this summer’s VBS program, or a parent who wants to be better equipped for spiritually leading your children, the UCC Children’s Expo is a great investment of your time. There is an enrollment fee. If you are a ministry leader at Pasco, we will pay that fee for you, if you want to attend. Mayra will be taking a bus from TCAS so there’s plenty of room. The expo starts at 10:00 am on Sunday, March 2 and it will be finished by 4 pm. If you are planning on going, please tell Troy Morrison and talk to Mayra if you’d like to carpool.

Speaking of Troy Morrison, the Ministry Placement Committee has asked Troy to take on the Volunteer Screening Coordinator role. This is a role that we’re going to ask you to vote on. Since this comes from the Ministry Placement Committee as a motion, is there a second? All in favor please say, “I.” Any opposed please say, “no.”

Thank you.

Feature

Now, I have something fun to share with you. Could all the Primary kids come up with the primary teachers?

…. Teachers say a few words…

What kinds of things do you do in Sabbath School? Are there stories or crafts?

What vision do you have for the kids that participate in your primary class? What do you hope will change or grow in their life as a result of Sabbath School?

Do you have a full roster of volunteers, or could you use some help?

Could the elders join me up front as we pray for these kids and teachers?

Offering

Our offering emphasis today is for Camp Mivoden Development. Loose offering will go to help Camp Mivoden provide excellent facilities for summer kids camps, winter retreats and ministry training programs, and even church campouts and a host of other spiritual events.

I’d also like to point your attention to our Campus Upgrade project. We are still waiting on permitting to be completed by the city of Pasco, but soon we’ll begin repaving our parking lot and fixing the water and sewer issues at our Community Services buildings. These are worthy projects and they need your faithful and consistent support. Would you think about committing a monthly amount toward this project until it is completed? Whether that’s five dollars, or five hundred dollars a month, a consistent investment will dramatically reduce the amount of money we’ll need to borrow to complete these necessary upgrades.

Prelude

Now, it’s time to take a deep breath… and relax. Let go of your burdens. Shut off all the pressures from work and all the stressors at home. Forget about the pile of dishes you weren’t able to finish this morning. Don’t stress about the car repairs, or the budget concerns or the report you just got from the doctor. Lay all of that at Jesus feet. If you’d like to share any of those burdens with our prayer team, take one of the prayer cards from the pew and use this time to write out what you’d like us to pray for.

And as you lay all those burdens down, take a moment to invite Jesus to fill you with His Spirit, and with His peace and joy.

Children’s Story

I have two questions for you. First, do you have a Bible?

And second, do you like to take walks with your family?

I have a story for you about a long walk, and a Bible.

Mary Jones’ family was poor. She was the daughter of a weaver who lived in Abergynolwyn in Wales. She was born in 1784 and her parents were devout Methodists. Very few people had Bibles at that time. At eight years old Mary professed the Christian faith and joined her parent’s church. She had learned to read in the circulating schools organized by Thomas Charles. She would go to a farm two miles away from her house to read a neighbor’s Bible. It became a burning desire for her to have her very own Bible in the Welsh language. When she was 9 years old she began to work and save money so that she could buy her own Bible.

For six years she worked and saved every spare pence that she could. In 1800 she had saved enough for a Bible. Her family didn’t have a horse, and Mary didn’t even have any shoes. One spring morning in 1800 she set off for the town of Bala, 26 miles away, where Thomas Charles lived. He had a copy of the Bible for sale.

When she arrived in Bala it was long past sundown and Thomas had already gone to bed. A neighbor told her that Thomas regularly got up to study around 4:30 or 5 in the morning and that she would know he was awake when she saw a candle in the upstairs window. She waited and watched all through the night until she saw the candle and then she knocked on Thomas’ door. When she told him how far she had walked and asked him for a Bible Thomas looked sad. He told her that all the Bible he had were already sold or promised to someone else. But Mary was so persistent and distraught at the idea of not having a Bible that Thomas took one that was promised to someone else and sold it to Mary.

Now, old stories like this sometimes become a little altered with age. Some people say that Mary actually had to wait for two days for another Bible to arrive. That version of the story says she purchased a copy for herself and two more copies for members of her family.

Now, Mary’s love for the Bible and her desire to have a copy in her own language is worth telling all by itself, but the story doesn’t end with Mary. You see, Thomas Charles was so impressed by Mary Jones and her fervent, determined, uncompromising desire to have her own Bible that he proposed to the Religious Tract Society that they form a Society to supply Wales with Bibles.

In 1804, just four years after Mary made that 26 mile walk, The Religious Tract Society formed the British and Foreign Bible Society. This Bible society began translating the Bible and distributing all around the world. The first translation project was the Gospel of John into the Mohawk language for Canada. They printed Bibles in Welsh, Gaelic, Romani, and hundreds more. In just 20 years they had distributed 1.7 million Bibles, and 2.5 million New Testaments. Within 75 years they had distributed 82 million Bibles, and by 1909 that number was over 215 million Bibles.

In one four year period between 1914 and 1918 — the time of the first World War, they translated the Bible into 34 new languages and dialects! Today the British Bible Society is still translating, and distributing Bibles. They distribute over 175 million bibles every year.

And to think, one teenager who really wanted a Bible for herself inspired a movement that is still impacting the world today.

What do you think God can do when you choose to follow after Jesus with all your heart?

Back to Basics, An outreach series

Title Slide

Today we’re beginning an outreach series called Back to Basics. This is a series of messages on several important truths about God that impact our daily lives and strengthen our faith.

These are messages that you can feel free to invite your neighbors and coworkers and friends to come and listen to or watch online. I’m going to try to make these subjects simple and accessible for anyone.

While this is an outreach series that I hope you’ll invite people to join, I want you to remember that our goal is not to bring people to church. As a follower of Jesus our purpose is to live out his love through friendship and service, and when the time is right to invite people to follow Jesus with us. That will mean coming to church at some point, because that’s part of following Jesus, but more importantly, it’s about inviting someone into your life with with Jesus.

Evangelism isn’t about inviting someone to church. It’s about inviting them into your family and into your life.

So, I have a suggestion for the next several weeks. It’s a challenge that I’d love for each of us to adopt. I’d like you to bless three people each week. One person from the church, one person from the community—your neighborhood or work or the store—and the third person could be from either the church or from the community.

bless

The word bless comes from the biblical idea of speaking well of someone, praising someone, or pronouncing or making someone happy. The english word, “bless” comes from a concept that is even more practical—it means “to add strength to someone’s arm.” Can you think of a way you could add strength to someone’s life?

This week, I’d like to you to look around and ask God, who needs me to hold up their arms this week? How can I bless someone? It may be an encouraging card, or a phone call where you say, “you are valued.” It may be that you pay for a random person’s lunch, or you help a neighbor with a project.

So, that’s three people with at least one of them being from the church and at least one from the community.

Can you do that for the next several weeks?

Alright, let’s get into today’s question—Is there anything we can trust?

Introduction

In just the last few days I’ve had someone ask me about “the muslim BIBLE,” suggesting that the Quran and the Bible are kind of equals, and I’ve had people tell me the Bible is hard to pay attention to—it’s kind of boring and doesn’t feel relevant.

These are totally legitimate thought processes. Hey, if the Bible isn’t relevant, then why pay attention to it? And if it’s basically just our version of the Quran, then why not explore the Islamic Quran or the Jewish Tanakh or the Book of Mormon or the Hindu Vedas, or the Buddhist Dhammapada? What’s so special about the Bible?

And let me go just a little further. Is there any of these documents that we can truly trust?

In June of 2024 Reuters Institute did a public opinion study (https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2024/public-perspectives-trust-news) and discovered that most people in the world don’t trust most news outlets most of the time. It’s interesting that public trust and trustworthiness are not the same. People often trust institutions and individuals who are not trustworthy, and sometimes they distrust organizations that are actually very trustworthy.

When it comes to the news, only 32% of people trust most news most of the time. That number is a tiny bit higher for people over 35, but not by much.

So, what is trustworthy in our world today?

It’s difficult to trust science. They keep finding out new things that completely change stuff they said 10 or 20 years ago. Is what they say today going to change again in 10 years?

It’s hard to trust technology firms. They’re making AI models that are supposed to be getting really advanced, but they still can’t figure out how many fingers a person has on their hand. But also, if they can figure all that stuff out, could an AI end up taking over the world? Doesn’t seem trustworthy either way.

It’s hard to trust car companies that keep promising hands-free, attention-free, self-driving cars. One company is promising to release a car this summer that doesn’t even have a steering wheel or a brake pedal. But they’ve promised self-driving cars for years and they have yet to meet a deadline.

And then there’s the weather. No one really trusts the weather forecast, never have, and probably never will. Even with huge data centers and amazingly detailed maps and models weather predictions are still about as accurate as a fortune teller’s prophecies.

So who or what is trustworthy in our world?

In a world where there is so much skepticism of truth, I’d like to make my case today that the Bible is trustworthy and full of goodness and truth. It reveals the truth about our creator God, about our world and about how to live a good life.

A bit about the Bible

If you’ve been around the Bible for a while you probably already know most of what I’m about to say, but let’s do a quick review just to make sure we’re all on the same page.

There are several things about this unique book that set it apart from any other book in the world.

The Bible isn’t one book, it’s a collection of 66 different documents. There are anthologies of poems, national histories, books of doctrine, letters to individuals and churches, stories of Jesus’ life, and books of prophecy. These documents were written by at least 40 different authors over a period of over 1,500 years. The authors were scribes, prophets, kings, fishermen, scholars, priests, shepherds, farmers and political leaders. They wrote from locations as far west as Italy and as far east as Iran. These documents were written in three different languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

And yet, in spite of the great diversity of the Bible, the messages it gives and the truths it tells are incredibly unified. They describe God’s plan to solve the problem of evil in the universe through the sacrifice of the promised one, Jesus Christ.

The Bible makes incredible claims about itself.

It says that all of it was inspired by God himself.

2 Timothy 3:16–17 ESV

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

It says that it wasn’t written because humans thought it was a good idea, but because the Holy Spirit compelled them to write God’s messages.

2 Peter 1:20–21 ESV

knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

The authors of the Bible saw visions of God and heaven and the future of earth and they wrote down in their own words what they saw and heard. Sometimes they talked with angels. Some of the writers walked and talked and ate dinner with God himself. One author saw God in his glory, in person! And then there were all the disciples of Jesus who wrote books and letters that are in the Bible. They trained with God-in-human-flesh (that’s Jesus) for three and a half years and then were filled with the Holy Spirit who led them to write down the teachings and stories of Jesus.

How the Bible Became One Book

The story of the book we call the Bible is a long tale with lots of twists and turns, most of which we’ll skip this morning. The story begins with a guy named Moses around 1,400 BC who wrote the first five books of the Bible. Actually, they were kind of all one book, but it was so long that they divided it into five scrolls, and we just keep those division of scrolls today in the first five books of the Bible. Moses’ original scrolls were preserved by the priests and copied down to distribute among the various tribes. Eventually, there was a specialized group of priests who were trained as scribes and tasked with copying the holy books of Israel.

They had exacting expectations to make sure they copied the manuscripts exactly as they had been originally written. Along with the five books of Moses they preserved and copied the books of the prophets, and the wisdom writings and stories like Proverbs and the book of Esther and the Psalms and The Song of Solomon. These first set of documents are known as the Old Testament books and they end with the writings of Malachi in about 400 BC. They were collected and revered as inspired writings for hundreds of years before Jesus. And when Jesus had the opportunity, he affirmed the inspired nature of this collection of writings.

Matthew 5:17 ESV

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

Luke 24:26–27 ESV

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.

John 5:39–40 ESV

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

Then there is the New Testament—the books and letters that were written and circulated among the Christian church by the disciples of Jesus. When one of these main disciples would write a letter to a church, the people that carried the letter and then the church that received the letter would make copies and send it on to other churches. This group of 27 different books and letters was written between 50 and 100 AD by the people that spent time with Jesus and had a first hand knowledge of his death and resurrection. They were eye-witnesses of Jesus.

These documents were so widely revered that there was little doubt in the church’s mind that these writings of Jesus’ eye-witnesses were as authoritative as the Old Testament writings. By the early 100’s Christians were all using a common collection of New Testament writings.

By the 300’s AD the Old and New Testaments were being copied together and bound into a single volume called a Codex. In 405 AD Jerome translated the bible into Latin which became the standard Bible for centuries.

The authenticity of the modern Bible

Some people wonder if the documents we have today of the Bible are authentic to the original writing from 3,500 years ago. Historians and experts in ancient documents agree that the Bible is the most reliable of any ancient document. The copies that we have today date back closer to the original writing of that document than any other ancient document we have on record. And there are more copies and quotes from the Bible than there are for any other ancient document. And it’s not even close.

I’ll give you an example.

Caesar lived from 100 to 44 BC. The earliest copy of his writings that we have dates back to 900 AD, 1,000 years later. We are quite confident that the copies we have are very close to the original writing. We have 10 copies of his work.

Plato livd in the 400’s BC and the earliest copy of his work that we have dates to 900 AD, some 1,200 years after his death. We have 7 authentic copies of his work.

Homer’s Iliad was written around 900 BC and the earliest copies we have date back to 415 BC, 500 years after it was written. And it was really popular—we have 1,900 complete and partial copies of the Iliad.

The New Testament was written before 100 AD and the earliest fragments we have date to about 114 A.D. That’s somewhere between 14 and 64 years after the original writing! And we have 5,600 copies of the New Testament in greek. There are far more copies of the New Testament Greek manuscripts than any other ancient writing. When we compare these documents we find they have 99.5% similarity. In addition to the greek manuscripts, we have 19,000 copies that were translated into Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Aramaic languages. The total supporting documents for the New Testament is over 24,000! SOURCE: Christian Apologetics and Resource Ministry - https://carm.org/manuscript-evidence

Now, if we add in the Old Testament documents, the number grows incredibly high. In the late 1800’s 250,000 Jewish manuscript fragments of the Old Testament were found in a genizah (storeroom or cabinet for old manuscripts) in Old Cairo. Those documents dated back to the 870 AD time period. That was good stuff, but then something amazing happened.

In 1947 a shepherd made the greatest discovery of manuscripts of all time. he tossed a stone into a hole in a cliff and heard a noise that sounded like shattering pottery. When he investigated he discovered that the floor of the cave was covered in large jars containing leather scrolls wrapped in linen cloth. We call the site Qumran. It has 11 caves with 1,050 scrolls. Every book of the Old Testament was represented except the book of Esther and they date back to 250 BC, 1,258 years older than the oldest manuscripts we had up until that time. When we examined the differences between the ancient scrolls and the more newer books we discovered that the total number of differences between the documents was only about 5%. Of that deviation most of the differences were in spelling, a few are stylistic changes with no deviation in the meaning. In other words, the greatest manuscript discovery of all time proved that what we have today has been preserved with only minor variations, none of which altered the meaning or brought the manuscripts integrity into question.

Just a reminder, the next-best well documented ancient text had 1,900 copies, but the Old Testament has 17,000 Hebrew scrolls and codices and the New Testament has over 24,000.

If there is an ancient document you can trust to be accurate to its original writing and meaning, it’s the Bible.

I believe that God has preserved the Bible throughout the centuries so that He has a truthful testimony of His character and plan to save us from sin and evil.

The evidence of prophecy

There’s another evidence that I’d like to give you to prove that the Bible is not an ordinary book—prophecy.

The best fortune tellers and self-proclaimed prophets are right by accident every once in a while. Even a broken clock is right twice a day and false prophets will get something right so long as they’re vague enough. Scholars who have studied the prophecies of Nostradamus say that there are no definite, verifiable fulfillments of his 942 predictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus#:~:text=Nostradamus’s%20supporters%20have%20retrospectively%20claimed,and%20the%20September%2011%20attacks.

Predicting the future is something humans are really, really bad at because the best we can do is guess. But the Bible says that God knows what’s going to happen all the way to the end. It’s as if he can read the future like we read histories of the past, except better. If that’s true, then His prophets should be able to tell us things before they happen—and they do.

There are over 300 prophecies with specific details that were fulfilled in Jesus. The odds of one person fulfilling just a handful of those specific prophecies is ludicrously high. But Jesus fulfilled over 300 specific prophecies—an impossibility unless those prophecies were given by the God who can see the future.

And then there are the historical prophecies like the prediction that Babylon would be overthrown by Cyrus. That prophecy was written by Isaiah over 100 years before Cyrus overthrew Babylon in the same way described in Isaiah 13:19-22. And there’s the prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem (Luke 21:20-24). And there’s the prediction of the rise and fall of all the great empires around the Israelite nation from the 600’s BC all the way down to our day today.

No other religious book contains this level of precise and verified prophecy fulfillments. Not one.

We could go on about the historical and archeological evidence the prove the Bible to be an accurate and reliable historical document. Or we could explore the many, accurate, scientific statement that the Bible made thousands of years before we proved them to be true with the scientific method.

Transforming Power

But possibly the most important evidence of all is the evidence of changed lives. The Bible has turned addicts into free people, skeptics into believers, lazy people into productive citizens, and cause nations to flourish in morality, human rights, and justice.

For those who read and follow it the Bible promises amazing benefits:

next for each

Romans 10:17 says that it awakens faith when you read it.

2 Timothy 2:24-26 says that the Bible is the tool God uses to arouse a desire for repentance and connection with God—freeing us from the power of Satan.

Philippians 1:9 says that love grows from the study of God’s instructions.

John 15:11 says that the words of God through the Bible fill your life with joy.

In 1 Samuel 3:21 we’re told that it is through the Bible that God reveals himself.

According to Psalm 119:9-11 Reading the Bible is your path to a life of purity and goodness and truth.

The musician who wrote Psalm 119 had a lot to say about the Bible. He said that “I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches.“ (verse 14)

He also said in Psalm 119:105 “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

Reading and hearing the word of God is reported to repair marriages, renew a passion for life, and even bring health and wellness to the body.

Sola Scriptura

If you look back in history you’ll find that for centuries the church had put its traditions and religious forms in place of scripture. Church leaders said that only they could properly interpret scripture and so they banned the members from reading the Bible. Rituals and superstitions were a poor substitute for the Word of God. Finally, in the 16th century a whole group of people rose up in protest and demanded that the Bible become the sole authority for truth and Christian practice. They rejected the idea that church tradition was the main source of God’s guidance, instead claiming that God spoke through His Word.

They rejected the idea that the priest or pastor in the pulpit was the sole authority for interpreting scripture. One man translated the Bible into the language of the people, instead of the antiquated Latin text that few could read. He said that he wanted a plowboy in the field to know more about the Bible than the priest did.

Today we benefit from the protest of the past. Almost everyone here has a Bible in their home, if not two or three. If you don’t have a Bible, please feel free to take one of our pew bibles home with you.

It is because of their protest some 500 years ago that the course of religious history has taken a dramatic turn in favor of having access to God’s Word.

And yet, for all its benefits, many still find the Bible to be boring, or irrelevant, or difficult to understand. let’s spend just a couple minutes thinking about how we should use this ancient document.

Interpreting Scripture

Just like any piece of literature, the Bible requires thoughtful consideration and study. You can’t just read it through and understand all of it like you would an easy-reading novel. A compilation of 66 different documents with different styles of writing and different cultural and language and location is going to require some work to understand. We have to do some interpreting to make it come alive.

The fancy word for interpreting the Bible is hermeneutics.

After Jesus rose from the dead, one of His first recorded acts was to interpret Scripture: "And beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures" (Luke 24:27). The Greek word translated "explained" in this verse is a form of the verb diermeno from which our English word "hermeneutics" is derived.

Let me give you a simple illustration of why we have to interpret the Bible as we read it.

When the Bible describes King Saul going to a medium to talk to a dead prophet, is the Bible describing the action of a desperate and wicked king, or is it giving us a prescription for how to communicate with the dead? Figuring out which is the Bible’s intention is the work of interpreting, or explaining, the Bible.

Notice how Paul encouraged Timothy to be careful about how he interpreted the Bible:

2 Timothy 2:15 (NLT)

Be a good worker, one who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly explains the word of truth.

Every single time you open the Bible you are interpreting it as you read it. Don’t feel intimidated by that; you interpret everything you read or listen to or watch—it’s a fundamental part of assimilating information and deciding what to do with it. So the fact that the Bible requires this type of mental work shouldn’t surprise or intimidate you. But it is extremely helpful to have some tools to work with as you read the Bible and figure out how to apply its stories and wisdom to your life.

Reading and explaining the Bible is not simple. But you don’t need to be a theologian or have a degree in religion to be able to understand it. The Bible is accessible to everyone.

I like to think that studying the Bible is a little like the gold miners back in the gold rush. You couldn’t just dig in the ground for a few minutes and then walk away rich. You had to dig and dig and dig and then you would get a little bit of gold. That would have motivated you to go back and dig some more. You’ll be richly rewarded by studying the Bible, but you have to put your effort and strength and resources into it to get the nuggets of truth out.

Lets look at a few simple principles for understanding the Bible.

The first principle you’ve got toRead it

That might seem obvious, but have you done it?

If you read a short passage in the Bible and say, “huh? What does that mean?” And then plunk the Bible down on your coffee table to sit there for the next few weeks, then you’re not going to understand it. But if you keep picking it up and you read the whole chapter and then the whole book and eventually the whole Bible, then a lot of those confusing passages are going to start making sense.

If I were to read a short quote from one of Shakespeare’s plays and ask you to tell me what it means, you‘d probably get it wrong.

For example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream someone said, “The more my prayer, the lesser is my grace.” This almost sounds Christian — prayer and grace. But if you read the context you realize that what its talking about is that more the character, Helena, pleads for the other character, Demetrius, to love her the less likely he is to love her.

Read it and you’ll understand. That’s the most basic and essential part of understanding the Bible. .

The promise of the Bible is that when we read it our faith will be awakened.

Do you feel like the Bible is a boring old book? Then read it and keep on reading it. It will become more interesting the more time you spend in it.

The second principle is just as simple: Ask God for help

In psalm 119:18 the musician wrote, “open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.” God longs for you to understand and it is His good will to give you the Spirit to help you understand if you ask.

God promises help in James 1:5 “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.”

My last principle for today is equally simple: get the meaning from the text

The Bible is not a mystical book of secrets and hidden meanings. It is plain and simple. A farmer is qualified enough to interpret the most complex prophesies.

Let the text tell you what it means and you’ll be safe in your interpretation.

As you read something, ask yourself what the author was saying to the people he was writing to. If you don’t know that answer then stick with the passage until you understand its basic message.

You might have to read some other parts of the Bible that talk about the same people or places or ideas in order to fully understand it.

Once you understand the basic meaning, ask another question: “what does it mean for me today?” or “What does God want me to do with this information?”

The first question about the author’s meaning has to do with reading the Bible, but the second question is all about what we do with what God has taught us. The Bible only comes alive when you make the personal application of faith.

Conclusion

The American Bible society tells the story of a woman named Alima who lives in Mozambique. Alima has problems that most of us don’t have. She lives in a place where basic necessities are sold for exorbitant prices in black market shops. Her income opportunities are extremely limited. Often her family struggles to find food.

One day she decided to go to a nearby church with her mother, and there she heard the gospel, and was given a Bible that was provided by generous donations from other countries.

She says, “Receiving the Bible is like receiving the Savior in my life. The Bible changed my life. Whenever I open my Bible, I feel God in the Scriptures and can interact with Him. The Bible is God in my hands and heart. Without the Bible, my life would be terrible. Without a Bible and Jesus, I was just existing with no hope, but Jesus brought me from existence to life. When I got my first Bible, I felt that I had something to live for.”

Loving the Bible requires poverty. Jesus said it like this in Matthew 5:3 ““Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Do you recognize your need for the Bible? Is it an absolute necessity for your soul, or are your content to live with a dribble of truth once every week or month when you come to church?

As we turn to our Isiah 55, I’d like to invite the worship team to join me up front for our closing song.

Isaiah 55:1–2 NLT

“Is anyone thirsty? Come and drink— even if you have no money! Come, take your choice of wine or milk— it’s all free! Why spend your money on food that does not give you strength? Why pay for food that does you no good? Listen to me, and you will eat what is good. You will enjoy the finest food.

The Bible is the living word of God. It will not enter your life without accomplishing what God intended it to do. And it will turn your life from mere existence to hope and joy and possibility. God’s Word will satisfy your soul, and quench your thirst for truth and wisdom. And it will satisfy the deep longings of your soul for relationship, meaning, justice, joy, and security.

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, I commend to you the Bible, God’s Word of Life. Read it. Find Jesus in it. And Follow Him.

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Earn an accredited degree from Redemption Seminary with Logos.