We'll begin reading in verse
10. You, however, know all about
my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience,
love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings, what kinds of things
happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra, the persecutions
I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from
all of them. In fact, Everyone who wants to live a godly life
in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and impostors
will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. I lost my place here. There we
go, 14. But as for you, continue in what
you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know
those from whom you learned it. and how from infancy you have
known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 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. Now, I've entitled this message,
The Miracle in Our Hands. The world loves miracles, and
we would too. If we would actually see any,
that is, the kind of visible miracles that the world claims. The power of miracles to move
people to follow. That is, if you're able to do
a miracle, people will follow you. And it's seen in our Lord's
ministry, and in the ministries of merely human preachers, good
and bad. Now, our Lord worked miracles
and multitudes followed Him. Of course, we learned something
about the value of miracles. To put it in its proper perspective,
miracles can get people's attention, but miracles never did convert
anybody's heart. Because our Lord did miracles both in the
kind of miracles He did and the number of miracles that He did.
No one's even come close to that. And people flocked after Him
until they heard what He had to say. And the clearer he got
about his message, the less people followed him. They didn't care
about his miracles at all. Once they found out that he said,
and you find this out in John 6, this is after our Lord had
fed 5,000 men plus the wives and children that were there
with them. Fed them with five loaves and two fishes. And the
next day they hear him preaching and he's saying, you followed
me because you were hungry and you got your belly full. He said,
don't go after the food that decays. He says, go after the
food that lasts. It's eternal food for eternal
life. And he began to declare to them who he was and that salvation's
all together in him. And he says, unless you eat my
flesh and drink my blood, you'll have no part in this. And they said, that's tough.
That's hard. He said things like, no man can come to me except
my Father which sent me draw him, and I'll raise him up on
the last day. This is the will of my Father who sent me, that
of all that He's given me, I would lose none, but would raise him
up on the last day. He said things like that, and
they said, okay, that's too much. Not only did the crowds leave,
it says many of His disciples, He had more than the twelve.
Many of His disciples no longer follow Him. So that shows you
what miracles can do and what they can't do. Miracles will
gain attention, will gain a following, but they will not change the
heart to make a person believe the Gospel. Yet as much as we might like miracles
and the idea of something that's miraculous, we often forget the
miracle that we regularly hold in our hands. You say, what is
that? This book. We have in our possession
that which, according to the Scriptures, is the product of
God. Something which never would have
come into being apart from God's intervention. If the sky were to open up and
a huge arm break through the clouds and deliver to you a book,
and a loud voice said, Behold, and read, for therein is all
wisdom and truth and things pertaining to God, and therein is revealed
the way of eternal salvation." If that happened to you, I'm
sure you'd be amazed that such a book was given to you, and
you would open it up and read it like a hungry man going after
food. And yet, while it didn't happen
all at once, that's essentially what's been done. God has spoken
from heaven through the prophets whom He has sent, and He has
had them record what message was given to them, and you and
I have it in our hands. Brother Don Fortner, I like the
way he refers to the Scriptures. He says, let's open the book
of God. And that's what it is. You know,
we say, well, who wrote this book? Who wrote that book? And
we know what we mean. You know, Moses wrote the first five books,
and Paul wrote the letters. But there's nothing wrong with
saying, who wrote it? God did. These are God's thoughts. This is God's heart expressed
to us in human words. The Bible would have been no
more valuable nor trustworthy had God reached his hand down
through the clouds and handed it to us in some remarkable way,
such as I described. Now let's look at the miracle
of divine inspiration. We call a thing miraculous when
it involves works which no mere person can do. Something that
defies human limitations. And we have the plain declaration
of that concerning the Bible. Here in verse 16 of 2 Timothy
chapter 3, all scripture, Now, he's already indicated what he
means is the Holy Scriptures, the Bible. All Scripture is God-breathed
and is useful for teaching and so forth. Now, the King James
used to say, or puts it this way, all Scripture is inspired
by God. And that's a good translation.
It indicates the meaning. But it is a single word in Greek. They've crammed two Greek words
together to make one out of it. The first word is God, and the
last one is the word for breath. And so what it's saying is that
this is actually, as it were, the breath of God that we have
before us. That word also that's translated
breath, it could also be translated spirit. This is God's spirit
speaking to us through the words that are written here. Now, Peter
makes it even more clear if we look over at 2 Peter chapter
1. 2 Peter chapter 1. And we'll begin reading at verse
10. Therefore, my brothers, be all
the more eager to make your calling and election sure. That is, to
prove it. We can't change our calling and
election. We can't secure it. But what he's saying, make sure
of it. Prove it, that you have been chosen and called by God.
For if you do these things, you will never fail. and you will
receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ. So I will always remind you of
these things even though you know them and are firmly established
in the truth that you now have. I think it's right to refresh
your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body. Because
I know that I will soon put it aside as our Lord Jesus Christ
has made clear to me. And I will make every effort
to see that after my departure you will always be able to remember
these things. So Peter is setting forth the
importance of knowing the truth And so much so that he was willing
to remind them of it. That is, he didn't feel that
every week he had to come up with something new. And that
learning truth is a pattern of just going from A to B, and then
on to C and D. Actually, when it comes to the
truth of God, it's pretty much going from A to B, and then go
back to A and go to B again, and just keep going over. Paul
said, in Philippians chapter 3, that it was no burden to him
to remind them of the things he had taught them. And he went
over it again. And in 1 Corinthians chapter
15 he says, And I delivered to you that which I also received. I delivered to you again, I remind
you, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.
So truth is important. But notice what he says then
about this truth, verse 16. 2 Peter 1, verse 16. We did not follow cleverly invented
stories when we told you about the power and the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. Now, when I tell you about the
gospel, I'm telling you what I've read in here and what I've
heard from other men who read in this book. But Peter's saying,
We did not follow cleverly invented philosophies such as were popular
in Greece and the Grecian nations at that time, the Gentile nations.
He said, rather, what we're telling you is what we saw with our own
eyes. We were eyewitnesses of his majesty,
and then he describes the most notable example of it. For he
received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice
came to him from the majestic glory, saying, This is my Son,
whom I love. With him I'm well pleased. So
Peter's saying, when I'm telling you that this Jesus is truly
the Son of God, and He is the Messiah, the Christ, I'm not
telling you some finely devised theology or philosophy that we
disciples got together and made up. He said, we saw this. John later said, that which we
have seen and heard, we declare to you. Verse 18, we ourselves heard
this voice that came from heaven when we were with Him on the
sacred mountain. And we have the word of the prophets made
more certain. Now, at this time, the only Scriptures that had
been written and recognized as such were the Old Testament Scriptures,
the Word of the Prophets. And they said, we have the Word
of the Prophets confirmed. All that the Prophets said was
going to happen, we saw it happen. So it's been confirmed. He says,
"...and you do well to pay attention to it as to a light shining in
a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in
your hearts." The world is a dark place when it comes to the truth
of God. Nobody can come to an understanding
of God in any natural means. It's a dark place, but the truth,
the gospel is a light shining in this dark place. And I was
watching, I can't remember what the show was, but here the other
day I was watching the show and they were talking about light
and darkness and they said, darkness cannot overwhelm light. In other
words, there's no such thing as being so dark that the light
won't light it up. Of course, we understand that darkness is
essentially the absence of light. Nonetheless, darkness, however
so dark it is, however so how difficult it is to navigate the
darkness, light penetrates the darkness, and the darkness cannot
overcome it. And that very principle is mentioned,
I believe it's in the first chapter of John. It says that light came
into the world, and the darkness could not overcome it. And that's
the truth of the light of the Gospel. It comes into this world,
and it shines in the darkness of this world, and the darkness
does everything it can to put out the light. But that can't
be done. That's why 2,000 years from these
events, here we are. I guarantee you if it was possible
for the darkness to extinguish the light, it would have done
so by now. And you've probably experienced
in your own spiritual struggles, if darkness had the power to
put out light, it would have put out the light in you long
ago. So he said that the day dawns
and the morning star rises in your hearts. Now, verse 20, above
all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came
about by the prophet's own interpretation, for prophecy never had its origin
in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried
along by the Holy Spirit. Now, first of all, let's get
an understanding by what's meant by the word prophecy. Now, when
we think of somebody gives a prophecy, we think, well, they're going
to tell us about things to come. Well, sometimes that's the case.
But that's not really what the word means here. It means simply
to speak for God. To tell out a word from God that's
been given to you. In a very general sense of the
word, I'm a prophet. Because I take the word of God
and deliver it to others. Now, in the Old Testament days,
God spoke directly to some select men, and even a few women, and
they told others what God told them. And thus they were called
prophets. And when they did speak, when
they did give their prophecy, which was recorded for us in
Scripture, we must understand that it did not come about as
it says here, the prophet's own interpretation. And that's a
fine translation, but really all that Peter is saying is,
what we find recorded in the Scriptures is not the prophet's
own ideas. It wasn't like Moses said, I
need to come up with a law for these people, or they're going
to run wild. I better limit it to ten. See, what could I do
here? Rule one. That wasn't what Moses
did. The Ten Commandments did not
come from him. They came by Him, but not from Him. Nor any of
the rest of the books of Moses. From Genesis 1 all the way through
the end of... Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy. Verse 5. Isaiah didn't say, I
need to come up with a charming prophecy, one that truly moves
people. Let me see. Who has believed
our report? That sounds good. No. The things
that we find in the Bible were not the ideas of men. A lot of people, particularly
as they read this from the King James, which says no prophecy
of Scripture is of private interpretation. And false prophets love to twist
that, and they say that the average person can't interpret Scripture.
They say, no, no, let me tell you what's in here. We can't
be having people privately, that is individually, go to their
house and read a Bible and think they can understand it. If anyone
ever tells you that you cannot read the Bible, and at least
on an intellectual level understand what it says, you're probably
listening to someone who doesn't have the truth. That's what the Catholic Church
did. That's why they burned people at the stake for putting the
Bible into common language. They knew what would happen if
people really knew what was in the Bible. And it's exactly what did happen,
by the way. It broke that church apart. But they would say, no,
only the priests are qualified. Most of them weren't qualified
at all. But it's saying the Bible, the scriptures, did not come
about by men personally giving their opinion of things. It says,
rather, doesn't come by man's wisdom, doesn't even come by
man's will, for prophecy never had its origin in the will of
man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the
Holy Spirit. Now this is true in any method
of transmitting the message of God. Men must not do it. from their own idea of what the
message should be, and they must not do it simply because they
think it would be a good idea for them to do so. There are
many, many people in the so-called ministry today that should not
be there, because their message is their own, and their calling
is their own. Now these prophets of old, their
message wasn't their message. It didn't come from them. They
were given a message, nor did they declare that message or
write it down simply because they thought it would be a good
idea. God told them to. In fact, some of them even resisted.
Remember Jonah? God gave him a message, gave
him an audience, told him go preach it. He said no. I remember
one of the elders there at 13th Street years ago, Cecil Roach. And he preached on the book of
Jonah, got through the whole book in one sermon. But his point
was that God's prophet, whether willing or not, is going to preach
God's message because God is sovereign. And His word will
be declared with a willing or an unwilling prophet. I'm writing
a series of essays on the ministry. And the first couple of them
in particular are designed specifically to talk people out of it. And
I, you know, I even put in there, I said, it may sound strange
that I'm trying to talk people out of it, but I'm operating
on this principle. Anybody that can be talked out
of it should be talked out of it. Because it says these men
did not speak because they thought it was a good idea, so they were
carried along. The church is not so much in need of men who
are willing to preach, it's in need of men who are compelled
inwardly to do so. The Word is in them and must
get out. So the Scriptures, the prophecies
of the Scriptures, the message of the Scripture, God's Word
as contained in the Scripture, didn't come about by the prophets
figuring it out. It's not Isaiah's opinion, Jeremiah's
opinion, David's opinion, it's not those guys. God's message,
and it wasn't written down and recorded for us because the prophet
thought it would be a good idea to do that. God moved in them,
they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Now what is the
proof of divine origin for the message that we believe, the
message contained in the scriptures? Well, we can't prove its divine
origin. There's really no way. You know,
sometimes in reading the comments of people on various social issues,
you know, that come up on Facebook or wherever, you know, you get
these people, yeah, but the Bible says. Well, let's face it, folks,
that doesn't mean anything to anybody unless they first believe
the Bible. And when it comes to believing
the Bible, there is no way for anyone to prove to you that it
is indeed what it says it is. Peter says the prophets were
carried along by the Holy Spirit. Okay. How do we know Peter was
telling us the truth when he said that? Paul says to Timothy,
these are God-breathed writings. Okay. How do we know? Well, we
don't in that scientific sense of the word that somehow or another
we could do an experiment and prove it. And we weren't there
when it was happening. You know, that we might watch
it happen and, you know, maybe like Peter say, well, we saw
the glory on the mountain. No, we didn't see it. But while we cannot give proof,
there's some pretty strong evidence that this book is unique and
stands out separate from all other books, all other messages.
And the first one is this. It sets forth men in a way that
no other book No other philosophy, no other religion sets forth
me, you and me. And how's that? As totally depraved,
worthless, and incapable of doing anything to change it. Philosophy, coming from the mind,
a man certainly isn't going to do that. Philosophy, I remember
one of the things, you know, when I was taking philosophy,
one of the things that We were told, you know, that among non-Christian
philosophers is a big issue of the problem of evil. How can
there be evil in the world? Well, I have no problem understanding
that. We're here. That's why there's evil in the
world. So the philosophies of men even
address questions that we think are kind of irrelevant. But certainly
the philosophies of men, they will talk about man making mistakes,
how man has gone astray, but they think that man is essentially
a good person who makes mistakes. That's the same thing with man-made
religion. man-made religion, always sets
forth men, even if it's one of those evangelists that just loves
in self-righteousness to condemn everybody else, he still sets
forward the idea that that man can do something about it. That
he can change, or maybe he's just pumping up the self-righteousness
of his listeners because he knows that will fill the offering plate.
He's showing them that while they are evil, the folks that
have gathered to listen, they're pretty good. But the Bible says
there is no difference. The Bible says that all have
sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The Bible says
the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
In fact, our hearts are so desperately wicked and so deceitful, the
last line in that verse is, who can know it? Who can know the
heart? Our hearts deceive us. Think
how many people are right now convinced that all is well between
them and God, that they love God, and that when they die,
they're going to go to heaven and be with God. But they will
find themselves among that group of people who say, why am I here
at the judgment seat? Why are you condemning me? Lord,
Lord, didn't we do this, that, and the other? Didn't we go to
church every Sunday and didn't we preach and didn't we contribute
to the church and didn't we do this and do that? And they went
on to say, cast out demons in your name and work many wonderful
works. And the Lord never denied that they did those things. He
just said, I never knew you. Depart. This is why it's necessary that
you and I expose ourselves to what the Bible calls the Word
of God, which is essentially the message of Christ. Because
the book of Hebrews says that the Word of God is living and
powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, able to divide
between joints and marrow, which back in those days, that was
a pretty fine line. And it says, and able to discern
the thoughts and intents of the heart. I find it, the origin
of this book is miraculous, but the power of this book is miraculous
too. I preach from it, and people are convicted of things I never
even mentioned. I've been told that people left
this congregation because I was preaching against something.
And they thought they were being picked on, and I never had preached
against that at all. But the word of God had penetrated
their hearts and revealed to them what was in their hearts
and that was unsettling to them. Why do you think they hated the
Lord Jesus Christ? His word was living. It wasn't just some dead doctrinal
system that they could learn and nod their heads and say amen
and stick it up on the shelf and ignore it. If you want to know what's in
your heart, listen to the plain preaching of the Gospel from
the Scriptures. It will lay bare your heart to
you. And then what it reveals about
you? Do something about it. Do something about it. Man is hostile to God and people
don't want to believe that they're hostile to God. They're not hostile
to the God of their imagination. But they are hostile to the God
of Scriptures. Secondly, showing the uniqueness
of this book. It's the only one like it. Only
one that presents man as what we call doctrinally totally depraved. Completely corrupt and unable
to do anything about it. Secondly, it sets forth a God
unlike a God you'll find anywhere else. Now, there is in all men,
at least to begin with, a kind of gut level understanding there's
a God. We just understand that. It takes a lot of work to be
an atheist. Because people don't start that
way. And I imagine not too many people end that way. But atheism is contrary to human
nature. But just because they have a
gut-level feeling that there is a God does not mean they understand
anything about that God. That's why when the apostle went
into Athens, and he preached there in the Areopagus, Mars
Hill, where all the philosophers gathered, and he says, I came
through your town, I saw lots of idols. He meant the little
shrines. They were everywhere. Shrines to gods everywhere. And
he said, and I passed one by, and it says, a shrine to the
unknown God. They were so worried that they were going to skip
a God, and that God would be mad. They did one, the unknown God,
in case, you know, if you're out there and I don't know who you
are, here's a shrine to you, you know. Want to make sure we
got all, everything covered. And he said, well, I'm going
to tell you about the unknown God. And the thing about the unknown God
that Paul told them about, he put to death all the other gods. And this unknown God set him
forward as the one who made the heavens and the earth. He set
him forward as the one who will judge the world in righteousness
through the Lord Jesus Christ. And he gave testimony to that
by raising him from the dead. And many of them laughed at him
when they heard about the resurrection of the dead. That's impossible. People don't rise from the dead. But there were some who listened. Some to whom the preaching of
the gospel became more than the words of men. The spirit who
had inspired the very message also added his power to the message
going out in some hearts and they heard it and they believed
it. He is a God of absolute sovereignty. He is as much in control of what
we call reality as an author is in control of the story he
writes. He has that much control over
it. He has the authority to do that, he has the power to do
that, and he has the will to do that. He's a God of absolute
holiness. He dwells in light, the scriptures
say, to which no man can approach. In other words, I know that God
came to us in the person of His Son. But God in His, Henry used to
say, in His absolute essence, we can't go there. He's outside
of our creation. He dwells in a kind of light,
a kind of existence, a kind of truth that's outside the existence
you and I have. It's not just that He's so holy
and righteous that we dare not approach Him. It's simply impossible
that we could go where He is. Because He doesn't exist in this
creation like you and I do. And that means He's utterly set
apart from us. And that's what the word holy
means. He's set apart. We preach a God of absolute justice. I say we preach it. The Scriptures
set forth a God of absolute justice. Do you realize that most of what
passes under the name of Christianity is setting forth an unjust God? It's saying He put a law, and
He said, alright, obey the law, and you'll go to heaven when
you die. But we couldn't do that, and so, supposedly, God came
up with an easier method, and He had His Son crucified, but
the way they used the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ is simply
to play on your emotions. They say it was simply a demonstration
of love. Well, it was certainly that.
But it was something much more serious than that. It was a display
of the justice of God against sin. He was not saying, well,
because my son died, I'll just let your sins go. The death of
the Lord Jesus Christ was God not letting sins just go. It's
the absolutely just God exacting the payment for the sins that
He bore. Now that was a great display
of love. But if all God wanted to do was
display His love, He could have found a way to do it without
killing the Lord Jesus Christ. But God has set forth the Lord
Jesus Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, a payment for sin. Why? So that He might be just,
even as He justifies those who have faith in Christ. You see,
faith won't put away sin. Faith does not answer the demands
of justice. And God's justice will not be
denied. So Christ answered the demands
of God's justice so that our faith actually means something.
That's what John 3.16 is actually teaching. For God so loved the
world, He gave His only begotten Son in order that those who believe
in Him will not perish. What would have happened if God
had not given His Son? Those that believed would have
perished anyway. Because faith doesn't handle
the sin problem. Blood does. So we set forth an
absolutely just God. We set forth a God of unparalleled
love, mercy, and grace. On the one hand, the ideas of
men are such that God is not completely just, and on the other
hand, He's not completely merciful either. Because He'll forgive
your smaller sins, but not the big ones. I mean, there's a line,
if you cross it, I'm sorry, you know. If you do it too many times, or some, you know, He forgives
all your sins past. You know, when you make that
profession of faith, alright, all your sins past are forgiven. But you're
on your own for the rest. Brethren, we preach a God of
such love and mercy, it says He doesn't even enjoy the death
of the wicked. He says, I take no pleasure in
the death of him that dies. His grace and mercy is such that
those upon whom it rests are utterly and completely delivered
of all their sin and all the effects of their sin. And only the Scriptures set forth
a means of salvation that is entirely by the grace and work
of God. The only way we enter into it,
or as Brother Donny Bell used to say, the only thing we contribute
to our salvation is the sin that required it. It's the only thing
we're contributing. So we've got to believe. That's
true, but when we believe, that's God working in us to make us
believe. That's not us just being smarter than our neighbor and
believing. And only the Bible sets forward a salvation accomplished
by the death of the Savior. Now we send our men into the
military and send them into wars, and some of them die in the process
of being our military deliverers. But their death is not what gained
the delivery, is it? They just died in the process
of it. They died, as it were, by accident. They didn't go over
there intending to die. And even if they took on a suicide
mission, and they knew it to be a suicide mission, but for
love of their country and love of the family back home, they
were willing even to lay down their lives. It was not the laying
down of their lives that actually accomplished the The deliverance. If they took a bomb in like these
suicide bombers do, you know? It wasn't their dying in the
explosion that accomplished it. It was the explosion. But with
the Lord Jesus Christ. It wasn't that He just died in
His work to save us. His dying was the work. I know
of no other message anything like that. Well, the Scriptures are unique.
And for that reason, we must approach them differently than
we would any other work. There is an improper use of scripture.
The Bible talks about twisting the scriptures to our own condemnation.
And one way that men twist the scriptures, even those that claim
to believe them, is to use them for things they were never designed
for. To approach them to learn things
that were never intended to be taught. First of all, and turn
back now to 2 Timothy chapter 3. This book is a book of salvation. Now it talks a lot about different
things other than salvation directly. And when it does, it speaks of
them truthfully. But it only speaks of those things
in order to provide the stage upon which salvation is set forward. The purpose of this book is to
bring the message of God's salvation to His people. It says in verse
15 of 2 Timothy chapter 3, how from infancy you have known the
holy scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation
through faith in Christ Jesus. Now, this shows us the usefulness
of the scriptures. It has the capacity to make a
person understand how salvation is obtained. Now, the Scriptures
alone do not have the capacity of making a person believe it.
That requires the addition of the gracious work of the Holy
Spirit. But a person can read this Bible and if they'll just
be honest with what it says, they can know how it is God saves
sinners, whether or not they believe it. Able to make you
wise into salvation. And how much does that lay upon
us both a responsibility and a great privilege in teaching
our children? Notice here it says, from infancy
you have known the Holy Scriptures. Teach your children what the
Bible says. We don't know what will come
of it, but we know this. It is a mighty tool in the hand
of God to bring about the salvation of our children if and when it
pleases Him to do so. When I was in high school, they
actually had a class offered. It was one thing you could use
for our English requirements. The Bible is literature. That's
kind of useless. The Bible's not just literature.
I understand there's some literary features and literary differences,
say, between the Book of Romans and the Book of Revelation. But
if you just pick up this book, trying to study it as examples
of ancient literature, it'll be dead book to you. Here's another
thing. This might surprise you. It's
not a book of theology. It's a book of truth. And a person
can derive theology from it. But learning the theology that's
in the scriptures does not make you wise unto salvation. It was designed to make us wise
unto salvation And it was designed to that end, to reveal Christ. Look over at John chapter 5,
verse 39. You know, I was raised in a church,
they emphasized memorizing scriptures, and I memorized a lot of them.
We get points for doing it. And I could not excel in the
athletic field, but I was pretty good at memorizing stuff. Now
I can't remember anything, but back then I was pretty good at
it. And that was good for me. I'm
not trying to put that down. I memorized a lot of scripture.
Then I went to Bible school. And I was taught a lot about
the scriptures and the cultures of the day and took a couple
of years learning the original language of the New Testament
and all this kind of stuff. Learned more about the Bible.
Then I got my degree and we went back and we started attending
church there where Brother Mahan was the pastor. I won't say I
didn't know what the Bible was about before, but I did not realize
just how much it was about the Lord Jesus Christ. So I sat and
listened, and it took a couple of years for me to catch on.
This book is about Christ. And if we miss Christ when we're
studying it, we've missed what that Scripture means. But in
John 5, verse 39, the Lord's speaking to the scribes and Pharisees,
the Bible experts of this day. He says, you diligently study
the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal
life. These are the Scriptures that testify about Me, yet you
refuse to come to Me to have life. Henry used to say things like,
we don't come to Christ through doctrine, we come to doctrine
through Christ. It took me a while to understand what he meant. The story is told in the book
of Acts, chapter 8, that an Ethiopian, a court official in the house
of the queen of Ethiopia, was in a chariot And while he was
in his chariot, I guess obviously he wasn't driving it because
he was reading. And he'd been to Jerusalem and evidently had
gotten a copy of the scroll of Isaiah. And he was reading from
what we would call Isaiah 53. That's the one where all we like
sheep have gone astray, we've turned everyone to his own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. And the
Holy Spirit told Philip, the evangelist, he says, go connect,
go get up by that chariot. And so, Philip, I guess we should
call him the running evangelist, ran up alongside that chariot.
He looks over and says, you understand what you're reading? You know,
imagine this, I've never had to preach while I was running,
but Philip did. You understand what you're reading? The guy
says, I have it. I'm reading this, but how can I understand
unless somebody explains it to me? Is the prophet talking about
himself or someone else? And then he was nice enough to
say, get up here in the chair. So Philip gets up in the chair,
but here's the point. And the book of Acts says, and
from that very scripture, he preached unto him the good news
of Christ. Brethren, wherever you go in
this Bible, Christ is there. And if you can't find Christ,
Probably what it means is you aren't looking at a big enough
section. I realize you can go to those genealogies and you
say, all right, Noah begat who and begat who and begat who.
What's this about Christ? Well, it does tell us how Christ
came to be in this world if we follow it out long enough. But
when we approach the Scriptures, we should not stop trying to
understand them until we've seen Christ in them, because that's
what they're about. And if that means take a bigger section so
that you understand how Christ fits into all this, fine. Whatever
we need to do to find Christ. And it also means once we find
Christ, you've found what that Scripture's meaning, don't look
for something else. So much trouble has come from looking for something
other than Christ. Now back in 2 Timothy 3, we'll
wrap this up. All Scripture is God-breathed
and useful for teachings, wherever we get our truth. Useful for
rebuking. We need that. It doesn't mean
that the preacher's got to get up there and point fingers and
yell. The message by itself, it rebukes. In fact, Paul said
to Timothy, preach the word, be diligent in season and out
of season, rebuke, exhort, and so forth, all these things. He
doesn't mean that one Sunday the preacher gets up and does
some rebuking, the next week he does some correcting, the
next week he does some instruction or whatever. Every week you preach
the Word and it will instruct those that need instruction,
correct those that need correction, and rebuke those that need rebuking,
without the preacher even knowing what it's going to do to any
particular individual at any given time. For training in righteousness,
verse 17, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped
for every good work. The preaching of the scriptures,
as it sets forth Christ and salvation in him, equips the people of
God for everything they're supposed to do while they're here." I quite often get these advertisements
for various seminars. whatnot that pastors can go to
or send the people in their church to and they're going to learn
how to do this or get equipped to do this or that in the church.
Preaching this book equips God's people for every good work. Now God was gracious to give
us this book. I saw a video of some believers
in China And you know, for generations, that was absolutely forbidden
and not particularly safe even now, though it's loosened up
some. But hardly anybody had a Bible. If you're caught with
a Bible, it may very well mean death. And so even when the tyrants loosened their grip,
there still was no Bibles. And so it showed some believers
being delivered a box full of Bibles. You could not have got
a more wonderful response out of them if it had been a box
of gold. You'd see that they'd hand someone a Bible, and they
would sit there and hold it like it was the most precious thing
they had ever seen. Oh, that we had that attitude
about our Bibles. Of course, it's like anything
else. You know, they say familiarity breeds contempt. And that means
just what you've always got around, you lose the sense of how valuable
it is. I would hate to have to live
the rest of my life without access to a Bible. And yet how often
do I prove that by accessing the Bible? It's a wonderful thing. God has graciously given it to
us and He's also graciously bound us to it. So that we not get
in our minds that we have gotten beyond the need of it or can
learn anything profitable beyond it for our souls. If you want to know Christ and
His salvation and how to be useful in the Kingdom of God, read the
Scriptures and listen to the Scriptures preached. They will
do everything for you that needs to be done. Heavenly Father,
thank you for these words, and we pray that you'd bless them
to our hearts. Thank you that we have this book of Christ,
and we ask, Lord, that indeed Christ would be revealed in them
to our hearts, that we might see his glory and worship him
as he should be worshipped. Trust him as he is worthy of
trust. In the name of the Lord Jesus,
we pray it. Amen. All right, you're dismissed.