Sermon Transcript
Hi, friends. Good morning. What is the most important question for a Christian to be able to answer in our world today? Think about that for a moment.
What is the most important question for somebody who professes to follow Christ to be able to answer in our culture today? You might be thinking some sort of question about who God is or who Jesus is or what the purpose of life is. Those are all good questions, but whatever answer you were going to give to those questions are gonna come from— hopefully, yes, hopefully from the Bible. Watched a video recently that asked this question, and the answer of the speaker was a compelling one, and it’s this: is that the most important question in our day and age for a Christ follower to be able to ask or answer is, why do you choose to follow the Bible? So I’ll ask that question.
Why do you choose to follow the Bible? Somebody asks you that question, why do you choose to follow the Bible? And our fallback answers fall into 2 main categories. The first one is this, that’s how I was raised. I have a question.
How many of the things that you and I were raised to believe are just wrong?
Whether it’s, you know, some sort of parental wisdom or wisdom from your friends or something that you believed that now you come to realize, I don’t even know why I believed that. Now, I’m telling you, like, you young people, I’m not saying, like, your parents are trying to intentionally deceive you. We’re just not as smart as you think that we are. And sometimes over time we begin to realize, oh, like, that there are certain things that we know now that we will know better later on. So the answer to the question of, well, I was just raised to believe that way, kind of has some holes in it.
The other fallback answer is the standard, well, I’ve tried the Bible and it works for me. It works for me. Yep, I believe it because it’s true to me. It’s changed my life. And I was raised in a church environment personally, and I had always heard that nobody can ever argue with your testimony.
And that’s true. Your own personal experiences, it’s hard for a person to be able to dispute that. And yet, how many other people were raised to believe other things that were legitimate, that worked for them, that contradict what it is that you and I believe? We find that all the time. So how do we answer that question?
Why can I, why should I Choose to believe the Bible. I want to say up here at the front, if you are new to the church, one of the things that is foundational for us as a leadership team is whenever we preach, we want to preach out of the Bible rather than putting our words into the Scriptures and then making Scripture say what we want it to say. We want to get our meaning and our application out of the text itself. We try to do that. We try whenever we teach, to teach from God’s Word.
It’s not that we don’t consult other supplemental things, commentaries and things like that, on occasion, but ultimately, the Bible, we believe as a church, is foundational to who we are. We don’t want to just simply look at it and say, gosh, we ought to study that, because we believe that the Bible, according to Hebrews 4, we believe it to be true that the Bible is living and active. It’s sharp. It’s like a sword. It’s sharper than any sword.
Even a double-edged sword, because it’s able to pierce your heart in such a way that you can be reading a passage that you’ve read 100 times, and then all of a sudden, something happens, and it gets your attention, and God speaks to you in that moment. It’s because the Word of God is living and active. No other book can do that. And so, we say we believe what Jesus said, that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. More than we need food, we need God’s Word.
We need His words to us provided in the Bible. We say that we believe that the Bible is able to help us to become all that God wants us to be. So— but we’re not merely, again, interested in accumulating information. We want to be transformed by it. So if you hear that, you say, hey, pro-Bible.
Good job. You guys are very, very pro-Bible. Being pro-Bible is not always the same thing as being pro-reading the Bible. George Barna and his research group every year comes out with something called The State of the Bible, and they do research on trends among Christ followers as well as non-Christ followers about how do people interact with God’s Word. And the most recent one said that 19% of Americans, 19% of Americans are engaged with God’s Word.
And by that, they mean that they read God’s Word at least 4 times a week. You’d say, that’s pretty engaged, at least 4 times a week, 19% of people. Yet there’s another statistic that says that 88% of households in America own a Bible. 88%. And the average number of Bibles per household is— any guesses?
4.7. So what that tells us is Bible ownership is booming. Everybody thinks it’s important to own a Bible, so let’s own 4 or 5 of them. Bible engagement? Eh, we’re not doing as well.
These are things that we have to come to face as we consider God’s Word and what God wants for us, for our from His Word? How do we respond not only to whenever we read or we hear God’s Word, how do we allow it to so transform our lives that we can then put our complete trust in it? And somebody asks us, why do you choose to believe the Bible? We actually have something to be able to stand on beyond, it worked for me, or beyond, that’s how I was raised. The passage we’re going to look at today is in 2 Timothy 3.
And 2 of the verses are some of the most familiar verses in the entire Bible, and I feel very inadequate to present them to you because I’m going to bet that you’ve heard many sermons or lessons taught on 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17 that are better than what you’re going to hear today. I don’t know that I’m necessarily going to convince you that the Bible is God’s Word, and as always, coming against this passage, I just came face-to-face with the reality of, God, I need Your help. Because whenever I come to a passage that I’m familiar with, you know what I do? I just check out because it’s like, oh, I know that. And then I move on to the next thing.
And that would be tempting for some of us in this room who know this passage that we’re going to read today and say, I know that. Tell me something I don’t know. You’re preaching to the choir here, Steve. And that would be dangerous for us because I believe anytime we open up God’s Word, God wants to to say something to you and to me, and He wants to transform us. So, can we just take a moment to just pray, even right now, before we even get into God’s Word, to just ask God to teach us what He wants to teach us, and to have His way here today?
Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I thank You for Your Word. It is living, and it’s active, and we need it, yet we don’t engage with it as much as we should. I pray that we would come to this passage with a fresh, set of eyes, with a fresh mindset and a soft heart, rather than looking at it and saying, I already agree with that, or, I already know that passage. I pray, God, that we would not give in to that urge.
I pray that we would repent of pride when we come to the Scriptures. I pray that we would be humble and hear what you want us to hear. I pray all these things in the name of Your Son, Jesus, and for His glory. Amen. Let’s look at 2 Timothy 3, starting in verse 14.
We looked at verses 14 and 15 and the verses before that last week, but I want to just go back over verse 14 and 15 to set some context and draw something out of it here in a little bit. But mainly, we’re going to focus on verse 16 and 17. Timothy chapter 3. And Paul says this to his protégé Timothy, the young pastor at the church in Ephesus. He says, but as for you, Timothy, 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 servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. I want to answer 3 questions today. Like, I love when a text just outlines itself for us, and this text does such a beautiful job of it. I don’t want to try to do anything super, you know, innovative, like, oh, my goodness, here, and risk going outside the text to make something happen.
Here. I think that this text answers very, very plainly for us why the Word of God works, how it works, and to what end it works. What is the goal? What is the end result of the Word of God working? We believe that the Word of God works.
And why it works— the first reason we see here, we see it in verse 16. All Scripture is what? God-breathed. All Scripture is God-breathed. What the heck does that mean?
This is a Word that Paul essentially created. You won’t find it in the Bible anywhere else. You won’t find it in anywhere else in all Scripture. But he’s trying to convey something here, that in the same way that God put breath into the mouth of Adam, and in the same way that God, according to Psalm 33, breathed out creation, that God breathed out what we have here in Scripture, the very words that we have here, that God opens His mouth and something happens. Something miraculous happens anytime God opens up His mouth.
He gives breath of life. He opens His mouth, and He creates redwoods, and He creates the Pacific Ocean and the things that swim in it. He opens His mouth, and it creates the deserts, and it raises mountains, and it lowers valleys. He creates planets and solar systems and galaxies and the entire universe. By His Word, and in the same way, God created His Word here for us.
He breathed into it with a breath of life. And when we’re saying— some of our translations say, all God’s Word is inspired. Maybe that’s, in fact, how you learned it when you were growing up. All God’s Word is inspired. And it is inspired.
And by that, we don’t mean that it inspires us like a singer inspires us, or a good speaker inspires us, or a song or a book inspires us. We’re saying that what we have here is the very breath, the very Word of God. And it’s the Word of God when you read it, and it’s the Word of God when you hear it, and it’s the Word of God when it sits on the bookshelf. And it’s the Word of God when it sits on the dashboard of your car and it begins to fade because it’s been out in the sun. It’s the Word of God when you believe it, and it’s the Word of God when you don’t believe it.
It’s the Word of God when you love it. It’s the Word of God when you like it, and it’s the Word of God when you don’t like it. The very breath, the very Word of God here. And what we’re really talking about here when we’re talking about God-breathed, we’re really asking the question of origins. Where did it originate?
Where did the Word of God originate? Did it originate with God, or did it originate with mankind? You can see where I’m landing in that I’m calling it the Word of God. Believe that it originated with God, and it’s a mystery as to how God did this. Scripture doesn’t go into tons of detail as to the process, the mysterious way in which God inspired the writers to write what they wrote.
But we do have 2 Peter. You don’t have to turn there because we’ll have it up here. I want to read just a couple verses that to me are illuminating. I’m going to mainly focus on Verses 20 and 21 of chapter 1 here of 2 Peter, but I’ll read a couple verses before it, too. For we did not follow, Peter says, cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power.
We’re not just creating stories here. But we were eyewitnesses. We saw this of His majesty. 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 am well pleased. When Jesus was baptized, people were eyewitnesses of that.
They saw that when they heard the voice of God. We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with Him on the sacred mountain, meaning the Mount of Transfiguration there. Peter was part of that. They were eyewitnesses. We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it as to a light shining shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.
Check this out. Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. Did you catch that? For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. So what we have here is we have the writers writing what God wanted them to write.
It’s not their will, but the will of God working through them. They produced what God wanted them to produce. And in the same way that a wind— Peter would call here— blows a boat in the direction that the wind determines it will go, God somehow mysteriously breathed and directed the writers to write what they wrote in such a way that these are Holy Scriptures. They are the Word of God that were produced through other people. And it’s a mystery as to how that can happen.
And by that, I don’t mean that Jesus or that God always used direct dictation. There were times when God specifically told a person what to write. The Book of Revelation, Jesus tells John on the island of Patmos, write this, write this, write this, write this.
But we know that there were other ways that Scripture was produced. Luke, as a historian and as a doctor, produced what we now know as the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts by doing thorough research and interviewing people and talking to eyewitnesses and just tons of research that went into creating something that would have a lot of evidence behind it. He wasn’t just putting forth his own opinion. In other cases, writers of Scripture were spoken to by God in dreams and in visions. The point is not the precise method that God used to speak to them, because Hebrews 1 tells us God has spoken to people in the past in a variety of ways.
The point is, is that what we have here is what God wanted to communicate. And you may struggle with that. You may be a person that would say, like a lot in our culture do struggle with today, to say, I don’t believe that it’s possible for God to inspire people to create something here. And I would— one of the things I would suggest is, if you can believe Genesis 1:1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, then writing a book is a piece of cake for God. Is it really, really that big of a deal?
If you can believe Genesis 1:1. If you don’t believe that, I understand why this would be a struggle. But if you can believe that God spoke and things were created— and we’re not talking about all the different arguments that go along with creation, I’m just talking about God being the origin of the universe and of creation— if we can have agreement on that, then writing a book isn’t that difficult. I have my name, like some of you do, on some works that have been published that people can actually purchase and say, hey, I’ve read something that Steve helped create. Big deal.
I’ve done that. Some of you have done that. To God, it’s no big deal. If He can create the universe, He can create the Bible. There are other people that would say, well, I struggle to believe that all Scripture is inspired.
Maybe some of it, but then how do we even agree on what is inspired? We’re going to have arguments as to this is inspired, that’s not, this is, that’s not. That also falls short of what Scripture here is claiming. All Scripture means all Scripture. It all hangs together.
It’s all of a piece. You take apart one piece, it all begins to unravel. So we have to come back to what Scripture is saying about itself. And you would say, well, that’s circular reasoning. How do you know that the Bible is inspired and God-breathed?
Because it says it.
I understand that’s not the most convincing thing, but what we have here, the implications of this being a God-breathed document, is that we would expect it, if it indeed was authored by God, we would expect it to be reliable. We would expect it to be trustworthy. We would expect it to be something that we could bank everything upon, and we would expect it to be consistent. And indeed, that is what we have. We have a reliable collection of historical documents in the Bible that have been proven through archaeology and through historians that the names and the dates and the places were actually names and dates and places that match up with what actually happened in history.
These were things that were written, in many cases, by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses whose testimony is internally consistent and externally corroborated, which is amazing when you think about— because we sometimes take other historical documents and we elevate them above the Bible, and yet they don’t even scratch the surface of, of the reliability of the Bible in connection to the manuscripts and all the other pieces that are part of this puzzle. We forget that the Bible is a unit, but it’s also 66 books. And with these 66 books, you’re talking about something pretty supernatural. You’re talking about something that was created on 3 continents in 3 different languages by over 40 different authors, many of whom never talked to each other, because we’re talking about a 1,600-year span. That’s amazing.
And when you add to that the sheer number of manuscripts that have been found, portions of manuscripts that are connected to the original manuscripts, and you connect that to the fact that we have a document that is filled with prophecies that were fulfilled and were witnessed by people, specifically Jesus Himself— I mean, just the prophecies that He fulfilled in and of himself. What you have is you have an incredibly reliable document. And you say, how is this even possible? Only God could pull this off. Shannon and I on Friday had the chance to go see the new Toy Story movie, Toy Story 4.
I did not cry. I thought I would. I love the Toy Story movies. I thought it was great. Yeah, Shannon cried.
Yeah. No, it was good. Go see. Go see Toys— in fact, let’s just stop what we’re doing here. Let’s go.
No, Toy Story 4 is great. And we’re amazed at, wow, over 25 years. I remember sitting in the theater the very, very first time. Some of you young people are like, you remember sitting— yes, 25 years ago or so, whenever the first Toy Story movie came out. And there’s been a second one and a third one and a fourth one.
And it all tells the same story. And we’re amazed by this. Over a 25-year period, that people could come up with sort of a single storyline that weaves its way through 4 movies. Big deal. What about The Avengers or Star Wars?
Yeah, like, you’re excited about The Avengers, Isaac. Yeah, good for you, bud. Have you seen all 37 movies or however many there are? 22. Thank you.
I’m sorry. Thank you. Whatever it is, the fact is, is we’re amazed that you can sit and you can watch from beginning to end. And I have not seen all The Avengers movies. I haven’t seen the last several of them.
I don’t— I don’t— I don’t enjoy sitting in theaters for 3 and a half hours at a time, typically, to watch these movies. But if that’s your thing, that’s your thing. I’m just saying, we’re amazed when somebody can keep a storyline going through all of these movies together, and we’re like, hello? Like, we have a 1,600-year period and one storyline coming through continents and language and people who never even talked to each other? How’s that possible?
God? The Word of God?
And yet, Satan has tried to undermine the authority of God’s Word and the reliability of God’s Word, and you and I being able to say, I can depend upon God’s Word. Satan’s tried to undermine that from the very, very beginning. How do I know? The Book of Genesis says that the serpent said to Eve in the garden, did God really say?
And just began to sort of question Did God really say this? Did God really say what’s here? So, we have to recognize that this is under attack and that this is not the most popular view of God’s Word. Nevertheless, God has produced for us a document that is reliable and is trustworthy and is accurate. It’s comprehensive, and it’s miraculous and supernatural in so many different ways.
And what are the implications of this is that To disbelieve or to disregard or to disobey part of God’s Word is to disbelieve or to disregard or to disobey God. That’s a significant deal. If this is God’s Word, then to say, I’m going to agree with this, and I’m not going to obey over here, and we just kind of go on down the line, that’s a dangerous thing to do, and yet we do that all the time. To disobey God’s Word at any point is to disobey God at all points. You’re guilty of one sin, we’re guilty of all of them.
Another implication here in the midst of this is that God’s Word is not given to us because God is trying to say, here, study this and memorize it and then do it without any form of a relationship. This is an expression of the goodness of God. If everything that God does is good and is right, then what we have here is the goodness of God for us, and we need to take it as such. We should never lose sight of the fact, the most important thing is the God of the universe wants to speak to us. And I don’t know about you, students.
I don’t know about you, adults, if you’ve ever wondered, like, what is it like to hear the voice of God? I’ve never heard the audible voice of God. I’ve talked to people who claim that they’ve heard the audible voice of God. I don’t know if they’re eyewitnesses or not. I’m just saying, I’ve never heard that.
But if you want to hear the voice of God, start with what He’s already said to us. It’s available. We can hear God speak to us right here, right now. We don’t have to go outside of this to hear from God. He’s spoken to us very, very clearly.
So, all Scripture is God-breathed, which is why the Word of God works. But the Word of God also works— and I won’t spend as much time on this piece, but it bears saying— is that all Scripture is reliable. All Scripture is reliable. You saw it there in verse 16. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful Or excuse me, I said reliable.
It is profitable. Profitable. All Scripture is profitable because it’s useful. It’s helpful. It’s advantageous.
It is something that we can make use of. And by all Scripture being useful, that means including the maps and the genealogies and the things we would rather just sort of, okay, I don’t like what the Bible has to say about that. All Scripture is beneficial. Even things like, yes, 2 Chronicles and Nahum and even Leviticus. Yes, Leviticus.
Can anything good come out of Leviticus? Something good can come out of Leviticus. We can actually have a devotional out of any place from Genesis to Revelation. It’s all God’s Word, and it’s all useful, and it’s all helpful, and it’s all profitable. It’s all something that you and I can benefit from.
And we need all of it and not just one piece of it. And it’s funny to me that we sometimes come to God’s Word and almost ask the Bible to prove itself to us so that it can fit into our lives, as if we’re able to say whether or not something’s useful to us or not. It’s not our call. The Bible is reliable and useful because God says that it is. He knows better than we do.
And it’s not about seeing how God fits into our story and whether or not I want to benefit from it. The Bible’s about God writing a story and how you and I fit into His story. And everything, again, from the genealogies and the lists, everything is beneficial because He’s been writing a story and He wants you and I to be a part of it. He wants relationship. It’s amazing.
How does the Word of God work? It gives us 5 things here. I’ll just— again, I’m not going to spend a ton of time on these. We talked about one last week, and that is in verse 15, how the Word of God works, because it’s God-breathed and it’s profitable. One of the ways that the Word of God works is that it makes you wise for salvation.
Makes you wise for salvation. We talked about how you can be incredibly smart but not be wise. What does it mean to be wise for salvation? It is to know that within these pages, every question that you or I would want to know about how to respond to the eternal destiny that God has for us, It’s all found right here. The 3 most important questions, even more important than why do you choose to believe the Bible, is— are questions related to salvation, and Scripture answers all of them.
We talked about this last week briefly. Why do I need salvation? Why do I need God’s divine deliverance? How do I receive this salvation, this divine deliverance? And how do I know if I’ve received it?
Bible answers all 3 of those things. Wouldn’t it be great to know that you have a Deliverer available to you, that you have received salvation, and you can have confidence in that? Some of us struggle with that confidence piece. How do I know? A book like 1 John is so wonderful.
It points us to how we can have the assurance of that salvation. But that salvation is available through an intentional decision that somebody makes to not lean on their own good works, but on what Jesus has done for them, to say, He died the death that I deserved to die. He took my sins upon Himself, and He came to deliver me from the wrath of God. And so, because of that, I can have a relationship with Him. That’s how a person is saved, and you can have confidence in that.
So, the Word of God makes you wise for salvation. Talked about that last week, but it also gives us 4 other things here that I want to just touch on briefly. It’s useful for teaching. It teaches you. In other words, it tells you what is right.
And I know that this— you know, to me, this shouldn’t be controversial, but it is. Truth doesn’t originate with you, and it doesn’t originate with me. It’s not within us. Truth comes from an outside source that we need to look to, and that is God Himself, who is the author of truth, the embodiment of all truth. Truth is not what you or I or the majority of people vote that it is.
It’s not a person’s perspective as, Well, this is true to you, and this is true to me. There’s an absolute universal truth that is true for all times and for all places, and that is God Himself, and He communicates that through God’s Word for all people of all ages. And so, He teaches us in what is right. And sometimes, God teaches you something new. Maybe I’m teaching you something new today, or God is teaching you through His Word, or maybe you heard something else— students at camp this last week— that was brand-new, and you’re like, oh, this is amazing.
And God is trying to teach you. Sometimes, He also reminds you of things that you’ve already heard, and He’s reminding you of that truth. But He’s doing this to show you the commands, and the principles, and the examples for you and I to be able to look at and say, that’s what’s true. In a world that is false, and it’s just papier-mâché thin, and it’s phony in so many different ways, we have something here that is reliable and true. And so, it teaches us in terms of what is true.
And the goal is not just accumulating more information again. Because you know who had a lot of information and a lot of teaching? The scribes and the Pharisees. It didn’t penetrate their heart. They weren’t transformed by it.
So having the information but not being transformed by it doesn’t do us any good. You might be able to win at Bible trivia, but that’s about it. God wants to transform us by His Word. So it teaches by telling us what is right. It rebukes.
It’s the word there. It rebukes, which means it tells us what is not right. It tells us what is not right. It not only tells us what is right, it tells us what is not right. And sometimes, God’s Word just is like a slap in the face, just pointing out to you and to me where we fall short of God’s glory, His perfect standard, that we are outside of the truth that He wants us to walk in.
And so, the word there specifically for rebuke speaks of the idea of confronting somebody with the hope of them turning away from the danger that they’re heading in so that they will then go in the other direction. They’re heading for disaster, and you’re calling them back from that. That’s what the Bible does. It rebukes us. It’s like a mirror that you hold up to yourself, and you can argue with the mirror all you want.
I don’t look like that. But that’s what the mirror says, and God’s Word is a perfect mirror that shows you exactly what you and I look like, even the things within us that nobody else would ever see or even know about, and even the hidden things to you and to me. God’s Word is able to reveal that. It rebukes us. So it tells us what is right, tells us what is not right.
It also corrects. It corrects, meaning it tells you how to get right. It tells you how to get right. God doesn’t just say, you’re doing it wrong, people. Get your act together.
He corrects us. And that’s the positive, the building up that comes after the rebuking piece. He doesn’t just knock us down, but He straightens us back up. And, in fact, that word for correct is the same word that was used in the ancient world when there was, like, a pedestal or something would get knocked over and you would set it back up. That correcting is to set it back up.
It means to straighten out. In fact, the Greek word is the word from which we get our English words orthopedics. In orthodontics, that word ortho, that means to straighten, to align something to a true standard. And so correction comes in where God is able to not just rebuke us and to teach us, but to correct us and to help us to head in the right direction, to show us how to get right with Him. He doesn’t just leave us to wonder because He’s a good God.
And then it says, it trains you in righteousness. It trains you and me in righteousness. So it not only teaches us what is right, what is not right, how to get right, it trains you in righteousness. It teaches you how to stay right. It teaches you how to stay right with God.
This idea of training is the idea of growth and of maturity and something that I’d love to be able to have faith without it costing me something, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t that be great? Faith doesn’t cost you at all. There’s no sacrifice involved. There’s no dying to myself at all.
That’s not how it works. God has to take us to the training room, and His Bible is— His Word does that for us. It trains us in what is right so that we can look more like Him.
So all Scripture is God-breathed, and it’s useful for teaching. Rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. Towards what end? What’s the goal? Verse 17, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
To what end does the Word of God work? To thoroughly equip you for every good work. And the idea there is, again, one of maturity. It’s one of God wanting to help you to take the next step and to help me to take the next step. And it’s something that we need to be thoroughly equipped.
I’ve tried to do this with my kids as they’ve gotten older, to present to them as many different scenarios as I can of things that they might encounter so that they— when they come to those situations, they know what to do in those situations. And that’s what the Word of God can do. It can equip us. You’re weak in evangelism. You’re weak in loving somebody over here.
You’re doing pretty well over here in this area, but I need to train you more in this particular area. Whatever the area is for you, God has a training regimen for you and for me that we need to submit ourselves to so that we can look more like Him. And the idea of being equipped for every good work is speaking to be fit for service, is really what it’s referring to, to be fit for service. And it just dawned on me— I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed— it dawned on me this last week. I’ve read this verse a zillion times, and it never dawned on me what the contrast of this would be, but I’ll present it to you in case that it’s going to be an aha moment for you.
When the Word of God is not working in my life and I’m not depending upon it, I am ill-equipped.
I’m immature. I am ineffective.
If the opposite is being thoroughly equipped for every good work, when I— when I’m not allowing God to do what he wants to do in me, He’s going to take me back to class because I’m incomplete. I’m just not what He wants me to be. And the same is true for you as well. God’s Word is able to train us in righteousness, to correct us, rebuke us, teach us, make us wise for salvation. Why?
So that we might look more like Jesus. He wants to equip us for everything that we’re going to encounter along the way.
I can’t convince you that this is God’s Word. It’s interesting that the word that Paul uses for God-breathed is a Greek word that has a root word that is the word for the Holy Spirit. I think that there’s an element of this, a large element of it, in which we just need God to illuminate our minds. We need the help of the Holy Spirit to help us to see that as we read it, we’re reading what God’s Word is for us. But students, I was talking to Tate yesterday, and he was sharing with me a little bit about what you guys were learning at Hume.
I understand you guys were learning a little bit about sanctification. That’s, like, just this gigantic word that’s like, I can’t believe you guys know that word. Like, that’s a word that people pay lots of money to go to seminary to learn. You high schoolers have learned this word sanctification. This idea of following Christ after you’ve made a decision to follow Him and to keep on following Him so that He can make you more like Him.
And that’s what the Word of God does. It sanctifies us. If you have any hope, to become more sanctified, to mature, to move forward in your faith. And I know that that’s the desire of many of you who went to camp, and you’re like, I just want to grow in my faith. And coming back home is so hard.
Man, it is hard. But you need to know that God has given you His Word. He’s given you access to the greatest information and resource available that anybody could ever imagine because it answers all the key questions in life that anybody would ever want to know. What is true? What is right?
Why are we here? God, what do you want for me?
What is the meaning of life? The Bible answers all of that. It’s able to— it’s sufficient. It’s able to thoroughly equip you for every good work, and it’s enough. You can’t add to it.
You shouldn’t add to it. You can’t try to— it has no limitations or weaknesses. It’s complete so that you can become complete. And maybe the takeaway for some of you here today is to go, I really should be reading God’s Word more. And I just want to challenge you with this.
I heard this a while ago, and it’s really, really helpful to me to think about, is if you take 12 minutes a day— I know this would take some discipline. Do you have 12 minutes a day? If you have 12 minutes a day, you can read through the Bible in a year.
Reading at what is known as preaching pace. So I’m speaking to you at preaching pace. If you read at the pace at which I’m speaking to you, you can get through it in 12 minutes. It might take you a little bit longer, and that’s okay too. Or maybe you just are like, I need to focus on just anything that’s going to be beneficial to me, like, right now, because I’m just starting out on this, or it’s been a while.
Go to 1 John, or go to one of the Gospels— Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Find something that is going to get you into God’s Word, because The more that you’re in God’s Word, the more that your life will begin to be shaped by that, if you’re able to go into it with the right mindset, that God wants to shape you. The greatest privilege of all is that we have a chance to know the God of the Bible, the God of the universe who created it all. Let’s never take that for granted, because the Word of God works. Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, I thank You for our time together today, And again, I just— I’m so insufficient. I don’t have any ability to cause somebody to be convinced that this is the Word of God. But You’ve revealed that in my heart, and it’s been a conviction that I’m grateful for. And I pray that that would be something that we could leave here feeling confident of, that just as sure as You created the universe, You created this Word, and You created it not so that we could be really good at trivia, but that’s so that we could be transformed. Do that.
Have your way. Make us wise for salvation, God. Teach us, correct us, rebuke us, train us in righteousness. Thoroughly equip us for every good work that you have for us. We love you.
We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
