October 27th, 2011 11:26 by Craig I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me: I got nothing out of the Bible today.
They might be talking about their quiet time – they might be talking about the sermon.
Regardless, that is a tragedy.
The Bible is one of the greatest gifts we have.
The Bible is our guide for this life. Psalm 119:105 says:
Your word is a lamp to my feet
And a light to my path.
2 Timothy 3:16–17:
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.
And those who know this – treasure this truth.
God breathed out His Word so we might know about Him and ourselves and salvation. It is precious. It is the only thing that will outlast this dying world.
Prophets gave their lives to write the Word.
Churches gave their lives to preserve it.
Men like Tyndale gave their lives to translate it.
And now we have the Word in readable, accurate, accessible Bibles.
This weekend, you have heard how reliable the Bible you have in your hands is.
But unless you open it and read it and meditate on it and apply it – it might as well be Grimm’s fairytales.
The tragedy is – that God has given us the most precious thing any one of us owns – He inspired it, preserved its transmission, gave us gifted men to translate it and print it – And we don’t’ take full advantage of that.
Yet we should. As David says in Psalm 19:
It revives the soul; it makes wise the simple; it rejoices the heart; it enlightens the eyes.
The Word of God is more to be desired than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Moreover, by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward. … Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
Yet so many Christians barely read the Word.
They barely know how the Bible is arranged. Many could not even say the books of the Bible.
Ask them about the Minor Prophets – why they are there – what we are meant to learn from them – they look blank.
Many find Leviticus and Deuteronomy too hard.
Many find Paul too hard.
They live on a diet of a few Psalms and Proverbs.
And we wonder why we are so weak. How can we stand against false teaching if we don’t know true teaching? How can we keep our way pure without the Word?
Psalm 19:7-10:
The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul;
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever;
The judgments of the Lord are true; they are righteous altogether.
They are more desirable than gold, yes, than much fine gold;
Sweeter also than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them Your servant is warned;
In keeping them there is great reward.
So in my few minutes this morning – I don’t’ want to give you anything deep – just a few thoughts on how to take this infallible, reliable, incredible gift and utilize it.
- 1. Prepare
Whether you come to it in a quiet time, in a sermon or hear it read – prepare your heart.
I want you to think about how you prepare to meet your Lord on His day.
Charles Spurgeon wrote this:
We are told men ought not to preach without preparation. Granted, but we add, men ought not to hear without preparation. Which do you think needs the most preparation, the sower or the ground? I would have the sower come with clean hands, but I would have the ground well-ploughed and harrowed, well-turned over, and the clods broken before the seed comes in. It seems to me that there is more preparation needed by the ground than by the sower, more by the hearer than the preacher.[1]
That is just as true for reading the word as hearing the Word.
Do you prepare your heart to receive the Word – through confession, prayer and expectation of hearing from the Lord?
Acts 17:11:
Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received or welcomed the Word the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.
James 1:21–22:
Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive or welcome with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
We have to come to the Word with prepared hearts – welcoming the Word and asking God to do His work in us.
Spurgeon added another thoughtful comment:
There should be some preparation of the heart in coming to the worship of God. … Consider whom we profess to worship, and we shall not hurry into His presence as men run to a fire. Moses, the man of God, was warned to put off his shoes from his feet when God only revealed Himself in a bush. How should we prepare ourselves when we come to Him who reveals Himself in Christ Jesus, His dear Son? …We cannot expect to profit much if we bring with us a swarm of idle thoughts and a heart crammed with vanity. If we are full of folly, we may shut out the truth of God from our minds.[2]
So, how do you prepare your heart? In Psalm 46:10, the Psalmist writes:
Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.
Be still, and know that I am God.
It is a deep need for every child of God to be still. In an unhurried manner to focus on the Lord. The more I thought about this verse the more I became convinced that for most of us – this is one of the most necessary commands in the Word. To pause, to cease – to orient our minds to the spiritual reality in which we live. To move from the sphere of the world to the sphere of God.
I firmly believe that so many of the problems, the tensions, the difficulties we face come because we fail to take the time each and every day to be still and know God. To let the knowledge of the Holy One be the starting point for all we do each day.
Be still. It is a command. A command to take time out from the world – to cease striving, to acknowledge the awe and glory of God.
But it is one of the most difficult commands for many of us. Time is a precious commodity. We don’t have the time to cease our striving. iPhones, emails, deadlines, work, meetings – all draw us away. But we must take time to be still.
To do otherwise, says that the world is more important than God.
We need to be still.
Why? Because it is in the ceasing, the solitude, the meditation, the reflection that we know God. And it is here that spiritual intimacy and spiritual power have their genesis.
But in this fallen world, we struggle to be still and know God.
What do I mean by this?
Our world is one of noise and movement and busyness. We play the radio while we dress, we play a tape in the car. We have music on in the background. The shopping centre plays music. The TV is always on.
In fact, we have become so accustomed to noise, that silence seems unnatural.
We are constantly moving. Dressing, going to work, working. When we do sit, it is to talk or watch TV.
Quiet solitude seems unnatural.
But, the problem is that the noise and movement tends to blot out God. The radio speaks of the world. The music sings about the world. The TV proclaims the world’s values. Conversation is about the world. Our movement and busyness is in the work of the world.
And yet our desperate need. Our indispensable need – is to be still and know God.
Believe it or not, being still and knowing God takes great effort. To actually stop. To put off the world. To meditate on the Lord. This does not come easily.
For most of us – stillness is unnatural. We pause and feel guilty. We should be doing something else. And even when we force ourselves to pause – it is so hard to know God.
Stillness before the Lord is a discipline. It takes effort and practice. But, unless each day we reorient our lives to the reality of God and spiritual truths, then we will struggle to understand the power and sufficiency of Christ.
We must pause and move our minds from coffee and deadlines and school and washing – to the heavenlies.
A.W. Tozer spoke of the necessity of knowing God as a priority. He advised:
Retire from the world each day to some private spot, even if it is only the bedroom. … Stay in the secret place till the surrounding noises begin to fade out of your heart and a sense of God’s presence envelops you.[3]
Stay in the secret place till the surrounding noises begin to fade out of your heart and a sense of God’s presence envelops you.
Don’t move to your daily reading or praying or anything else until your mind has moved from the world to God. Until you are awed by His majesty. Afraid of His holiness. In tears over His mercy. Until heaven and hell are real to you. Until serving Him is far more important than anything else you have to do that day.
Stay in the secret place till the surrounding noises begin to fade out of your heart and a sense of God’s presence envelops you.
This is so crucial. Too many of us fail to move to the place where a sense of the Lord envelops us. We rush into God’s presence and out of His presence without ever really knowing Him. It takes time to put off the thoughts of the world and to focus on God. We can’t do it if there is pressure – I have two minutes until I have to run to the bus.
Take the time to think about:
- His attributes – Holiness, love, power, mercy. Let the glory of the Lord become real to you.
- Think of His creation. The magnificence of the heavens and the earth.
- Think of Christ, the cross, the resurrection. The reality that God loved us while we were yet sinners.
- Think of heaven. This world is not our home. We are creatures of eternity.
- Read His Word where He is magnified. The Psalms, Isaiah 6, Revelation 4 and 5, the resurrection.
- Pray and ask the Lord to manifest Himself.
Stay with it until God is real to you. Until you know His power, His glory, His love. Without this – the Christian life is an empty sham. It is going through the motions. We must know that He is God.
This is not easy. It certainly isn’t easy for me.
But it is so crucial to develop the discipline to be still and know that He is God.
- 2. Plan
One thing I have found is this. Unless you have a plan – reading the Word – welcoming the Word – feeding on the Word doesn’t happen.
What do I mean by a plan?
Find a time. Morning, evening – some regular time you can prepare your heart and come to the Word.
It is a discipline. Getting up – setting time aside – carving out a chunk of your day when your day is already so full.
We know we should do this. But all too often we tell ourselves – I don’t have time now, better later. Luther warns about this:
It is well to let prayer be the first employment in the early morning and the last in the evening. Avoid diligently those false and deceptive thoughts which say, “I will pray an hour hence; I must first perform this or that.” For with such thoughts a man quits prayer for business, which lays hold of and entangles him so that he comes not to pray the whole day long.
Have a program.
Read through the Bible in a year or two years.
Straight through, Old and New Testaments each day – Old, New and Psalms and Proverbs each day.
Everyone has a mobile phone or a computer or a tablet computer. You can download Bible programs for free and tailor them to how you read.
Or – you can read through the same five chapters every day for a calendar month.
But have a program and stick to it. If you get behind – catch up – don’t give up.
Have some accountability to your plan. Your wife, a friend, a Bible Study colleague.
Let me put this as clearly as I can. We have a gift – the greatest gift possible. How to live godly and find joy and know Christ and gain eternal life. How to make your paths straight.
But it does not get into us by telepathy or just by being in the same room as it – we have to have a plan to get it into our hearts and minds and souls.
- 3. Ponder.
Listen to Psalm 1, verse 2:
[The blessed man’s delight] is in the law of the Lord,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
The man or woman who would be blessed is delights in the Word and meditates in the word.
Do you delight to read the word?
Can you say with David?:
The Law – the Word – is more desirable than gold, yes, than much fine gold;
Sweeter also than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb.
Do you find the word sweeter than the drippings of the honeycomb?
Too many of us treat the word of God like a file on our computer that we download into our brains. We read the word but we don’t absorb it.
Perhaps the key to delighting in the Word is found in the next line. Meditation.
In the period when this Psalm was written, the people did not have written Bibles. There were just a few scrolls and the scribes would read them to the people. And the people would memorise them. These words were precious – incredibly precious. And they meditated on these words as they memorised.
They asked the questions – what is God saying to me? What truth is in this for me? How can I apply this?
They fitted each part they heard or memorised into the big picture of what God was doing.
Notice that the meditation here is not just meditation in one’s quiet time. It is meditation day and night. The Word is embedded in the heart and mulled over constantly. As one walks, works and relaxes.
You need to put the word into your heart so that the Spirit can do His work.
John R. W. Stott once admitted the truth that many of us have felt but failed to confess:
The thing I know will give me the deepest joy — namely, to be alone and unhurried in the presence of God, aware of His presence, my heart open to worship Him — is often the thing I least want to do.
Make the time to meditate on the Word, to savour it, to delight in it. Then you will be blessed.
I believe that part of our difficulty comes in how many of us were taught the Bible. After salvation, many of us were encouraged to take little classes about the Bible.
There we would go and we would take class 1 – God. And we would learn that God is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. We would learn His communicable and incommunicable attributes.
Then we take class 2 – Jesus. We learn He is deity. We learn of His kenosis and virgin birth and sinless life and substitutionary atonement.
And on the classes go. These classes took the whole of Scripture and synthesised it into pat lectures on aspects of Scripture.
However, unless you have not noticed, God did not inspire His word in a systematic theology. You don’t turn to the index of the Bible and look up the chapter on God or election or eschatology.
He gave us a story. One interconnected story with plot, character development and narrative that was given over many, many centuries. We learn of God through the development of the story of His dealings with man not by reading a systematic theology.
The delight comes in embracing to Scripture as a whole. Reading it as a story of God’s love to a rebellious world.
Read the word. Meditate on it. Read the word some more. Mediate on it. Delight yourself in it.
As an old man, George Muller wrote this:
I have been for sixty-eight years and three months, viz., since July, 1829, a lover of the Word of God, and that uninterruptedly. During this time I have read considerably more than one hundred times through the whole Bible, with great delight. I have for many years read through the whole Old and New Testaments, with prayer and meditation, four times every year.
And we wonder at the power of his life.
So, you must you separate yourself from the world, and saturate yourself with the word and then you will be situated near the waters.
Psalm 1, verse 3:
He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water,
Which yields its fruit in its season
And its leaf does not wither;
And in whatever he does, he prospers.
I have a close boyhood friend. He calls himself a Christian, but he only darkens the doorstep of a church for christenings and weddings. He might open the Scriptures once or twice a year. He feels he can manage just fine without the input and accountability of a church and Scripture.
But his life is characterised by instability. He does not have roots grounded in the word to guide him through the shoals of life. He has had some hard knocks in life and they have flattened him.
I compare him with other friends who are rooted in the word. They have had setbacks that would have flattened most men.
Or the Apostle Paul – he could consider his sufferings joy.
Where does one draw strength in this circumstance? Strength comes from the Lord as their heart goes into the word and they become firmly planted by streams of water. Without that, the trials find us wanting.
This verse is a wonderful picture. Trees can grow anywhere. But those who take root in the field away from a stream are totally dependent on the seasonal rainfall to survive. Many die. Many struggle to exist. When the droughts come, they wither and die.
Yet those that take root by streams have a permanent source of water. They can grow through the droughts.
My life has had a few droughts. Not the severe ones that some have experienced, but bad enough. And my sustenance, my stability, my strength came from the Word. The promises of life. The directions of life. The words of life were indeed sweeter than honey.
I don’t know how some men and women who are not plugged into the word can survive this life. Perhaps they don’t.
Note also that the tree planted by the stream yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. It is fruitful season after season. Its leaves do not wither up.
Compare that to the tree planted away from a stream. No rainfall, no fruit. No rainfall, withered leaves.
And in whatever you do you will prosper. This is not a promise of material prosperity. It is a promise of blessing. It may include a measure of material prosperity as a by-product of wise living. But it primarily refers to the spiritual blessings of living in Christ.
You can trust the Bible. You can base your life on it. You can know that it comes from above.
But unless you prepare your heart to receive it, plan to regularly partake of it – and ponder on how the truths apply to your life – you will be wasting one of the great opportunities and privileges of this life.
Let us be those who savour it and say – the Word is sweeter than the drippings of the honeycombe.
[1] Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon at His Best, compiled by Tom Carter, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988) p. 158.
[2] Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon at His Best, compiled by Tom Carter, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988) pp. 223-224.
[3] Warren Wiersbe (Compiler) The Best Of A.W. Tozer – Book One (Camp Hill: Christian Publications, 1978) p. 151.
