The Word of God – Part 4

2 Timothy 2:16-17 “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

In every society we have what I call the ‘opinion makers.’ These are people who use words to make a living like the journalists, anchormen/women, lawyers, politicians, educators, etc. Often we find that they create the opinions that we all accept and live by.

Some years ago I was in Denmark and stopped at a little kiosk to buy a English magazine. When the owners saw that I spoke English they started to speak to me. They told me that they had lived in Canada for many years and had just recently moved back to Denmark having been gone for almost 25 years. They went on to tell me how they were scared with what they saw taking place on how people were being brainwashed. They were being told what to buy, where to buy it, what to wear, etc. In other words, what they were telling me was that their opinions were being formed for them.

I believe that we, as God’s people and especially those in leadership positions, should be the opinion makers. We should know the Word of God and make God’s opinion known in our society. Francis Schaeffer said: “The culture is to be constantly judged by the Bible, rather than the Bible being bent to conform to the surrounding culture. The early church did this in regard to the Roman-Greek culture of its day. The Reformation did this in its day in relation to the culture coming at the end of the Middle Ages. And we must never forget that all the great revivalists did this concerning the surrounding culture of their day. And the Christian church did this at every one of its great points of history.”

Isn’t this a problem that we have in the Western world today in that the Bible is looked down upon and is discredited and irrelevant to what we are faced with today? However, it doesn’t matter what the ungodly say about the Bible, but for those who profess a faith in Jesus Christ and believe that the Bible is the Word of God, we need to allow the Word of God to be the one guiding us in this world. This is what happened with the early church as well as the reformation during Luther’s day. Luther’s great statement should be the statement of each one of us who claims to be a Christian: “I stand on the Word of God.” 

What is happening in our society is that all things are relative. The final value is what makes me, the individual, happy, feel good, etc. Nothing is fixed; there are no standards except what makes the individual happy.

I would like to bring home two things in this regard. First, in most of our states we have the no-fault divorce laws. They are based on the view that there is no right or wrong and consequently what gives them happiness at the moment is the only way to go. Today, divorce among God’s people is just as high as among the unsaved. 

Secondly, we need to see the promiscuity that is taking place today in the light of the Word of God. In our generation people are asking why promiscuous sex is wrong. I can think of three reasons why.

First: Because God says it is wrong. For those of us who profess to follow Christ that should be enough right there. Second: We need to understand how the Lord made us in regards to our relationships with one another and to fulfill the way in which He made us for. Promiscuity tries to force something into a form which God never made us for and which cannot be fulfilled. Third: Promiscuous sex is wrong because it destroys the picture of what God means of marriage, the relationship between a man and woman.

We need reformation to see things set right in our society.

 Word of God – Part 3

Psalms 119:98-100 “Your commands make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever with me. I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes. I have more understanding than the elders, for I obey your precepts.”

When we look back into Western history and we see the importance of the Word of God – we are astounded. However, in many of our schools and homes people are ignorant of the important role that the Word of God has played in our lives and societies.

The Bible Literacy Project states: “Scripture begins with God creating the world, but there is something these verses don’t tell you: The Bible has itself created worlds. Wherever you stand on the spectrum from devout to atheist, you must acknowledge that the Bible has been a creative force without parallel in history.”

If one was to go to the apotheosis of the French Middle Ages – Sainte Chapelle – one will see that the walls are made almost entirely of stained glass. Writer Shalom Spiegel said: “It has been rightly called the most wonderful of pictured Bibles.”

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said: “The King James Bible has influenced our literature more deeply than any other book – more deeply even than all the writings of Shakespeare  – far more deeply.”  The poet and painter William Blake calls the Old and New Testaments “The Great Codes of Art.”

Abraham Lincoln, one of our great Presidents said in his inaugural address: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” The historian William Wolf said this about Lincoln’s address “with its fourteen references to God, four direct quotations from Genesis, Psalms, and Matthew, and other allusions to Scriptural teachings it reads like a supplement to the Bible.” Lincoln’s comment about the Bible: “The best gift God has given to man. But for it we could not know right from wrong.” Isn’t this one of the problems that we have today? We do not know right from wrong. We are now calling good evil and evil good.

Ronald Reagan called America “a great shining city on a hill,” three-and-a-half centuries after John Winthrop (sailing for Boston in 1630) anticipated a new community that would be “as a City upon a Hill” invoking the famous verse in Matthew, “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid,” (Matthew 5:14) which harks back in turn to the prophets (Isaiah 2:2-3, Micah 4:2) and the book of Proverbs 4:18. John Livingstone Lowe called the King James Bible “the noblest monument of English prose” (1936); George Saintsbury called it “probably the greatest prose work in any language” (1887). Nearly two millennia earlier, the great Pharisee rabbi Hillel described the ideal life: “loving peace and pursuing peace; loving humanity and bringing it close to the Torah.”

A survey was done by two professors to see who had made the greatest impact upon our nation. They went through thousands of speeches, essays, etc. to find who was quoted the most. To their surprise they discovered that the Bible was the one that was quoted the most. What an impact the Bible made upon our nation in its early developing years.

Some of our founding fathers like Winthrop, Adams, Lincoln, and thousands of other ordinary citizens found a good destiny in the Bible and made it their own, but today the Bible is fast becoming a book that just sits on the book shelf and gathers dust.

Historian G.M. Trevelyan said: “We aren’t discussing a merely ‘popular’ or ‘influential’ book. We are talking revolution. In 16th and 17th-century Britain, the English Bible was capable of affecting the first thoughts people had on waking, their last thoughts before sleeping, their dreams, and their nightmares. British homes were decorated biblically – with Bible quotations or pictures painted or papered on the walls or printed on cloth wall-hangings. British life grew and flourished on a biblical trellis. Centuries later, Quiller-Couch wrote of the Bible in Britain that the Bible is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.”

Reformation brings us back to the Word of God. My prayer is that God will give His people a hunger for the Word of God. Like Job said: “I have esteemed your word more than my necessary food.”

Word of God – Part 2

Psalms119:11 “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.”

When John the Baptist, forerunner of the Lord, appeared on the scene he had some choice words to say to the religious leaders of his day.

Matthew 3:7-10 “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.”

 
One of the things that the religious leaders were doing was relying upon tradition. Tradition was taking over the Word of God. Later Jesus told them: Matthew 15:3  “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?”

 
Some years ago I was speaking in a church on the subject: WHAT IS REAL SPIRITUALITY?  After the message a number of people came forward and I sensed that they had come into a real freedom. However, I learned later that the pastor was very upset with me, for what I did not know. I felt that I should go and see what the problem was, so I went the next day.

 
When I spoke to the pastor I first mentioned that if I was saying something that was not biblical that I needed to know so that I might correct it. What he did was he pushed the Bible aside and said: “Let us not get into that right now.” He said the real problem was that in my preaching I had gone against seventy years of tradition. Ah! That was the real problem: I had gone against tradition! This made me wonder how much of our work today is based on tradition and not the Word of God, and how this could be the major problem today in some of our churches.

 
When I think of our denominations today most of them were started by men and women of vision and some of the things that they did were right on for their time, culture, etc. However, today is a different situation and yet we carry on with many of these things not because we are obligated by the Word of God, but because of tradition. As a matter of fact our tradition has begun to take the place of Scripture.

 
Why do we do some of the things that we do? Are they biblical? Do they fit in the culture that we live in today? I was preaching in a church in Europe where the pastor had a real desire to go back to the Word and make sure that what they were doing as a church was really based on Scripture, and not tradition.

Later when he wrote to me he told me that there were many blessings and they were praising the Lord for all that He was doing. The only thing that was negative, he said, was that they were kicked out of the denomination they were in. Interesting! But perhaps that is not so negative after all.

Perhaps the biggest issue facing us in the Western world is the rejection of ultimate truth. People say today that we make our own truth. What is true for me might not be true for you. Or, those who have the places of power are telling us what truth is. (Like the U.S. Supreme Court telling us that the Ten Commandments are not ‘constitutional’ and cannot be hung up in our court rooms throughout the land.)

Reformation brings us back to the ultimate truth: the WORD OF GOD.