Back to Basics [STAR] (3)

Introduction

Thank you for having me here tonight. Such an honour to be speaking at a church that has profound impact in our city.

Want to take the time to honour your YA director Clay - thank you so much for having me.

As well as honouring your SPs pastor Joel and Sharon. Who are just legends in our faith community - we are so, so blessed by their ministry.

ILLUSTRATION: The Word is the beginning of everything

I want to start by telling you a story of something that happened quite recently, within the last year. I met with one of my friends, someone who used to be one of my kids in my youth group. The meeting started off normal but I soon realised that he was meeting me to tell me that he was actually not a Christian anymore. He launched into a 30 minute long rant about all the things that are wrong with the church, it’s people, about how God doesn’t care or isn’t real, how the bible isn’t real, how all religion ultimately leads people astray; just a huge rant. I sat there and took all of it quietly, as a pastor you do tend to hear at least a couple of these a year. When I sensed he had finished, I looked up at him and told him I understood, that I didn’t necessarily agree with what he was saying but that I respected his opinions. I just said, but before we leave here I just want to ask you one question that I’d like you to honestly answer, I asked him, “When was the last time you read your bible properly?” the question caught him off guard, he froze. He tried to stammer out “I mean, I’ve read it pretty extensively when I was a Christian” but i interrupted, “yeah but when was the last time you like actually read it - and be honest with me please.” After umming and ahh-ing for a couple of seconds he responded to me - “maybe a year ago. Maybe more.” I kind of let the silence just sit there between us. Because it proves a point that I want to talk about to you all tonight.

I want to start by being real - I think many Christians today try to navigate life without God’s Word. And I also think that is why we are experiencing an EPIDEMIC of weak faith.

I genuinely believe that if we were to look at the state of weakness in the church today - MUCH of it could be attributed to one single issue: There is no love for the Word anymore in our faith.

Biblical illiteracy is weakening the faith, crippling the church and dimming our light.

It’s come to the point that I would be scared to do a hands up survey here of who reads their bible daily. Not even talking a full on 30 minutes, I’m talking about who even glimpses at the Word of God daily here. Why scared? Because quite frankly if the answer is less than 100% then I think the church is in trouble. But you know what the reality is according to Bible Society? 4%. Yeah only 4% of young Christians are reading their bible daily. Only 20% of Christians read their bible frequently but in your demographic? 4%.

I would be scared to do a survey for how many people memorise scripture here.

Jesus’ Words stick with me in John 14:15 “15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” God’s love language is obedience.

Let me ask you something: How can you keep a commandment you haven’t read? How can you obey an instruction you do not know?

I think, as a church, we need to have a serious talk about this. Let’s pray.

Segment 1: When the Word becomes optional

Hosea 4:1–6 “1 Hear the word of the Lord, O children of Israel, for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or steadfast love, and no knowledge of God in the land; 2 there is swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and committing adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed. 3 Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens, and even the fish of the sea are taken away. 4 Yet let no one contend, and let none accuse, for with you is my contention, O priest. 5 You shall stumble by day; the prophet also shall stumble with you by night; and I will destroy your mother. 6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.”

Granted, as you may have noticed, this passage is directed at priests, who have neglected to teach the Word of God.

But the overarching, far more important point that we have to take note of is the reason there is no more steadfast love, or faithfulness to God. Why things like swearing, lying, murder, stealing, adultery, bloodshed, why did all of things enter?

v6 is the plain answer - a resounding warning to all Christians of any age: My people are destroyed for LACK of knowledge, you have REJECTED knowledge.

I find this pretty interesting, like it’s KNOWLEDGE of all things. It’s not passion in this instance, it’s not prayer, it’s not relationships - my people are destroyed for a lack of KNOWLEDGE.

Let’s keep it clean and simple today yeah? When the Word becomes optional - waywardness becomes inevitable.

The MOMENT we as Christians reject the value of the Word, reject the KNOWLEDGE of God (of which the Word is our primary source) we are asking to walk into a wayward faith.

The MOMENT we as Christians choose to neglect the guiding light of the Word is when we start to tread along paths of darkness.

You know in this day and age this is worse than ever because we LIVE in a time of distraction. Literally everything is a distraction, social media, tv, netflix, instagram, we are constantly being fed information. How do you know what is right and what is wrong?

Where is the truth, what gives us the perspective to filter this information? What gives us the ability to DISCERN what you should be living by and what you should be rejecting?

Why do Christians go wayward? Psalm 119:105 “105 Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Because in the midst of the darkness, they throw away the light. They reject the Word.

My friends - please listen to me, it is impossible to navigate the darkness without a light. It is IMPOSSIBLE to live as a Christian in this world without the knowledge of God. I would go so far as to say it’s impossible to live as a Christian in this world without WANTING to have the knowledge of God.

ILLUSTRATION: The Roman Road

The first time I encountered the lack of the word in the church first hand was with a previous leadership team. Who here knows that the ability to evangelise is critical to our faith? I sat with the team and asked someone to evangelise to me. Speak to me as if I were a friend, and you had just shared your personal testimony and now it was time to explain to them the spiritual reasons for your belief. None of this “because it makes me feel good” “because I have heaps of friends in church” no - why do YOU believe in God, why does ANYONE need to believe in God? I want you to use the bible to explain it to me, even if it’s just one or two verses. I told them that they could use the bible if they wanted to.

Now, I’m not saying the next part to make fun of anyone - I’m not using names anyway. But all I’m going to say is that only 3 people came forward, one of them used no bible verses, one used john 3:16 and quoted it incorrectly, and the other used 2 Corinthians 5:17 and quoted it incorrectly.

Oh my heart. I was discouraged for weeks after that. How can we claim to love God and yet not even READ His word? Not even KNOW His Word? How can we obey His commands to evangelise, if we don’t even know the biblical reason for our faith? How can we walk confidently as Christians if we don’t have His Word written on our hearts? If we CLAIM that this is one of the most important decisions we’ve ever made how can we not know WHY we made it? We REJECT the Word.

I had to teach them. Romans 3:23 “23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Romans 5:8 “8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 6:23 “23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 10:9–10 “9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” (this is called the Roman Road btw. And everyone should know it).

Segment 2: Spiritual Nourishment or Entertainment

Do you know what happens when we begin to remove the Word from our churches? We turn church from a place of spiritual nourishment into a place of spiritual entertainment.

People come to church to scratch a spiritual itch that they have, to entertain their spiritual side - but there is no nourishment to be found.

And this is why people can become Christian - making the most significant decision of their lives, to believe in their saviour Jesus Christ - and yet in 3 months time they can fall away, and turn their back on the faith they so boldly professed.

Why? Because without the Word our churches just become places of entertainment. Church becomes a SHOW with no SUBSTANCE. COMMUNITY with no CORE.

Faith becomes a product for our enjoyment - not the foundation of our lives.

And that’s why people leave the faith when they get bored. Because it never moved past entertainment for them.

The ONLY way to combat this form of Christianity is by bringing it back to the Word.

Romans 10:17 “17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”

Where is your faith coming from if you have no contact with the Word?

Are you coming here to be spiritually nourished? Or spiritually entertained?

Segment 3: When Discernment becomes optional, Deception becomes inevitable

Can I share with you a very real danger that we are facing in the church that comes about pretty much exclusively because of our lack of the Word?

Take a look at 2 Timothy 4:3–4 “3 For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”

The Word is the Christian’s ultimate tool for discerning what is good from what is not. It is the ultimate authority on what is of God and what is not.

It is more than just a guidebook on how to live life, it is the magnet that will always draw us back to the cross.

When we lose the word - we lose our ability to discern what God’s truth is.

And When Discernment becomes optional, deception becomes inevitable.

And this is what Paul is talking about in this passage - without the Word, without the truth in our lives, we are naturally drawn to what we WANT to hear. We surround ourselves with the things that we like to hear, the people that we like to hear from.

Our main source of “truth” comes from what our friends say, what the news says, what instagram or tiktok says, what our favourite influencer or celebrity says, what our favourite song says, what our favourite movie quote is.

It may start slowly, but the MOMENT you turn away from listening to the truth - we begin to wander off into myths.

And we wonder how worldly culture penetrates so deeply into the church? I’m telling you it’s because we have LOST our love for the Word. The moment the Word loses its value as the ultimate authority, is the moment we begin to wander into myths.

And can I just bring a grave warning to all Christians here - the worst manifestation of what Paul is saying in this passage, is when Christians read the Word and twist it to suit their own meaning.

We make the bible about what WE want to hear. We don’t want to hear God nowadays.

We use the bible to justify our sin, we read parts of it and purposely reject other parts, we take certain attributes of God and highlight them like his kindness and His love, and we take other attributes and we hide them, like His holiness and His hatred of sin.

Hear me out Christian - this is a fatal mistake.

Mark 7:13 NIV

13 Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.”

In my opinion this is one of Jesus’ most scathing remarks aganist the Pharisees - they nullified the Word of God, by adding their own tradition and meaning to it.

They NULLIFIED IT - they removed it’s power, its transformational, life changing effect.

ILLUSTRATION: Chinese Bible

As part of a push to "sinicize" religion (to make it Chinese in character), the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on a 10-year project to rewrite the Bible and other religious texts. In the Gospel of John, Jesus famously confronts the accusers of a woman caught committing adultery, saying "let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone at her." The chastened accusers slink away and Jesus says to the woman, "‘Has no one condemned you?' 'No one, sir,' she replied. 'Neither do I condemn you,' said Jesus. 'Go away, and from this moment sin no more.'"

A beautiful story of forgiveness and mercy. Unless you’re a CCP official. Then it's a story of a dissident challenging the authority of the state. In a Chinese university textbook in 2020 - the rewritten Gospel of John excerpt ends, not with mercy, but with Jesus himself stoning the adulterous woman to death.

Now this is a blatant and drastic example. But you know - because of the church’s biblical illiteracy, we already do this sort of thing on a smaller scale without even realising it sometimes.

“God just wants me to be happy” - well no. Happiness is not God’s priority for you. Holiness is. 1 Peter 1:15–16 “15 but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.””

“God won’t give me more than I can handle” - well not really. God will frequently give you more than you can handle ON YOUR OWN. He does this so you will learn to rely on Him. 2 Corinthians 1:8–9 “8 For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. 9 Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.”

“I don’t need church to be a Christian” - well..yes you do. Hebrews 10:25 “25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”

“God accepts me as I am. I don’t need to change.” Well yes…and really no. Titus 2:11–12 “11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, 12 training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age,”

Listen to me carefully - my goal is not for me to turn us all into bible bashing legalists. I genuinely believe that a truly bible-believing, Word based Christian will be a bastion of the sweetness of God. 1 Corinthians 13:1–2 “1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

My goal is to point out to you - how do you expect to stay on the straight and narrow without your map? How can you possibly feel comfortable navigating the pitch black web of life without your light? Build life changing churches without our source of power?etc.

Segment 4: Transformation, not Information

Can I share with you one of the biggest reasons why I feel Christians don’t read the bible nowadays? One of the biggest mistakes we make when we think of the Word of God?

One of the biggest mistakes we can make as Christians is to think that we only read the bible for information.

Listen to me - the bible is not just about information, it is about TRANSFORMATION.

The bible was not given to you to increase your knowledge, but to change your life

Hebrews 4:12 “12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

How many times have we heard this passage and not grasped this meaning. The book that you read, words that you read - they are not static words on a page, it is not a TEXTBOOK.

Every Word in these pages is ALIVE, and ACTIVE. EVERY TIME you open the bible - it speaks to you, it runs after you, it lays hold of you, it ministers to you

Everytime you open the Word of God, you will receive something you NEED. Every time you open the Word of God, it speaks life into you for YOUR SEASON. Whether you open it on the mountaintop, or whether you open it in your valley - God speaks. The more you open it, the more He speaks. The more you open it, the more you flood your soul with much needed nourishment.

People always complain “Oh I read the bible, I didn’t get anything.”

To those people I say - The bible isn’t a vending machine - it’s a seed. You don’t always see the results instantly, but the growth is happening whether you perceive it or not.

The bible is not just about filling your mind - it is about reshaping your heart.

Of course you will stop reading the bible if it were just about information. Of course you would stop reading it if it were just a textbook. But it isn’t.

ILLUSTRATION: The Little Pink Bible

You know I grew up around physical bibles because I’m not a baby. And I was very blessed to grow up around my parents who both had a very healthy reverence for the bible, and mentors like pastor Benny who also had a profound respect for the Word. They would carry these huge old bibles around to preach, pray. My dad would always scold me for putting my bible on the floor at church. “Don’t treat the Word of God with such contempt” (ooOOOooO whatever). But I never caught it, I just never really understood. UNTIL -

One day I was caught in the most violent deliverance case I had ever witnessed as a leader before and still, up to this day. One of our kids had started manifesting violently at camp and even when he got home he was manifesting powerfully. Our entire leadership team was over at his house praying over him, casting out the demon - the works (mind you we didn’t have much experience with this stuff at the time). But no matter what we did, he was still violent, we couldn’t hold him down, we couldn’t hold him back. We were desperately freaking out.

So the family called in a deliverance minister - a big african pastor who swaggered into the house and walked up to the boy. The first thing he asked for was a bible. Unfortunately none of us had one. So we searched everywhere in the house, and finally we found one. It was a small, bright pink bible with a gloss cover. I was like oh man we all gna die today.

To this day I’ll never forget this. The pastor walked into the room with the bible - and this boy who had been violent and unperterbed up until this time froze in his tracks. He stopped thrashing, stopped yelling and screaming and for the first time in his voice, there was - fear. He started to violently threaten the pastor, “I’ll kill you if you come near me.” you know what this pastor did? He opened this little pink bible - and put it on his face. The boy collapsed onto the floor immediately, this pastor knelt down next to him and left the bible on his face. and he screamed and thrashed. I mean it was quite a sight - this huge boy couldn’t escape from underneath this little pink bible.

The pastor finally picked up the bible - and read Psalm 34:7 “7 The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.” get OUT in the name of Jesus. Boom - delivered. I was fearful of many things that day, but the greatest fear I developed that day was of the Word. The most haunting image I had that day was of a tiny pink bible tormenting a grown man. Since that day I have never placed my bible on the floor.

Altar Call

It is fundamentally a heart issue - it is an obedience issue. We need to submit ourselves to God again and choose to rekindle our love for the Word.

Salvation Altar Call.