Total Authority” Sword Of The Spirit – Part Two Series

“Total Authority” Sword of the Spirit – Part Two

OPEN: Today I want to piggyback if you will on the message from last week. If any of you can remember back that far – let me remind you of what we talked about. Last week we talked about the Sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God.

For quite some time now I’ve been talking about spiritual warfare. I might imagine that some of us are probably getting rather sick and tired of hearing about spiritual battles and spiritual armor and spiritual warfare. Certainly there are other great themes we can explore and learn. Why are we spending so much time on this one topic? - The great battle of our lifetime really centers around this book that we hold in our hands and what we believe it to be. The most serious and intense struggle in which the Christian Church has ever engaged is the war over the Word of God. We need this incomparable and indispensable Book for a right understanding of the origin of the universe and man, the great redemptive work of God culminating in the Advent, Atonement, Ascension, and Second Advent of His only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. We need the Bible to teach us how to live right and to prepare for death and eternity. We need this Book to tell us of future events, how this age will end, the final overthrow of evil and destructive powers, and the coming Kingdom of Jesus Christ.

The great battle of our time is over whether or not we should be sold out and whole-heartedly committed to the Bible – the Word of God. I keep feeling as if the Lord is saying, “No, don’t move on until everyone get’s this – too much depends upon it – It needs to sink in deeper.” So this morning the question that I want us to focus on is

“Why Should the Bible Have Authority Over Our Lives?”

In the book “The Day America Told the Truth” 91 % of Americans admit to lying regularly. 86% ofAmericans routinely lie to their parents. 75% admit to lying to their friends. 73% admit lying to their siblings. And 75% admit lying to their spouse.

None of this is new news to anyone - we live in a society where just about everyone considers it normal to lie. In fact I’ve found that one of the more difficult things to accomplish in discipling new adult believers is to get them to abandon lying as a normal acceptable way of life. Before coming to Christ most people embrace lying as a necessary survival skill in today’s world. And I think that everyone knows this. We all know that just about everyone lies. So as a result our nation has developed a healthy sense of skepticism. No one accepts anything at face value. If it sounds too good to be true – it probably is. And when promises are made to us, we’re told not to get our hopes up because we will likely be disappointed.

On the screen there is a statue you will see if you visit Harvard. After you get over the thrill of saying “You can’t pahk your cah in Hahvahd Yahd,” about 30 bazillion times, tourists love to walk through the Yahd and have pictures of themselves taken with the statue of John Harvard whose foot you are supposed to rub for good luck. The statue stands right in front of University Hall. What many people don’t know, however, is that it’s really “the statue of three lies.” The inscription beneath the statue reads John Harvard, Founder, 1638. Not of word of it is true. Despite what the plaque on the statue says, Harvard didn’t actually found Harvard. The college – it was a college back then – was founded in 1636 – not in 1638 – by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in what was then the village of Newtowne and later became Cambridge. John Harvard was a benefactor for the college and it was named for him in 1639 after he donated his library to the school. Even worse, that’s not actually John Harvard sitting there. There were no pictures or images of him so in 1844, the sculptor, Daniel Chester French randomly chose a student as his model and dressed him in seventeenth-century garb. French did give the statue skinny legs - because that was one symptom of tuberculosis, which Harvard had. So in spite of what the inscription claims, John Harvard was not the founder of Harvard, the university was not founded in 1638 and the statues likeness is not even of its namesake! All this in front of Harvard’s University Hall where the motto is ironically – “Veritas” - truth. Things are not always what they seem.