What Do You Want To Know
Bible Survey 101 Part II
Last week I left off with:
When you build with bricks you have to be careful, some times you brick yourself in and you have no where to go.
(Embellish on notes from last week) We must always be careful in using Old Testament law to determine our actions today. What you determine as a conviction for yourself is personal between you and God and never do we have the right or duty to see to it others abide by your personal beliefs.
So, what is the alternative: We must believe in the Word of God as a living inspired Word. It lives in us, it breaths within us. We take the scripture and study it with the flexibility of Love, the Love of God.
(1)His law was written on tablets of stone, but He did not intend us to
(2)build walls of stone to govern our lives. How do I know this, Well the
Bible says____ Fill in the blank. You read about how Jesus took the common practices of his day and turned them on end.
(3)The walls that were built by the leaders of Jesus’ day began to crumble as Jesus spoke his words of love and forgiveness.
Jesus was radical. Jesus was progressive. Jesus wanted to change things. Jesus wanted love to rule not rules.
When the religious brick layers of his day brought a woman caught in
adultery, do you see Jesus quoting the(4) 7th commandment? Do we see
Jesus pointing a finger at her and saying “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery! Do we see him going around to others in the crowd and saying, have you heard, Rachel did it again. I just don’t understand that girl. We really need to pray for her.
Let me remind you of the story:
(5)John 8:4-11 (page 757 in you pew Bible)
1 But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4 and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" 6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.
(6)10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has
no one condemned you?"
11 "No one, sir," she said.
(7) "Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and
leave your life of sin."
John 8:1-11 (NIV)
Jesus is, of all people, the only one who could rightfully condemn her, but he chose the flexibility of love and forgiveness over the bricks and stones of the Law.
(8)So instead of building walls, what do you say we build a trampoline.
(Talk about how much fun a trampoline can be) Lets take each of our bricks and replace them with a spring that attaches to the trampoline surface. Don’t throw away your beliefs. Most if not all of them have validity. Let us give those beliefs some flexibility when we look at others.
Rob Bell puts it this way:
Being a Christian is about engaging the mind and heart more and more, not shutting them off or letting someone else think for you. The writer Peter urged Christians to be alert. Paul tells his listeners in Thessalonica to test every-thing and hold to the good.” p86
(9)With springs on a trampoline, you can enjoy the give and take. If you
discover that a spring on your trampoline is weak or broken, you can remove it and replace it without any trouble and continue jumping on the trampoline. (Note I said “Your Trampoline) because we build our own trampoline. We build our own walls, with the bricks that we choose. No one hands them to us. We read God’s word and listen to God’s people but in the end we reach out and take each brick and choose what to believe. Even today I am sure that there are some out there that are going to believe that bricks are more important than springs and you will hold to what you have come to believe, not because you genially believe, but because to examine it takes a great deal of work.
This is scary to “old Time” Christians. We don’t want to take bricks out of the wall. What we know to be true, is true. We know that because that is what we have been taught. Our fathers and mothers believed it and they were all right, and their fathers and mothers taught them.
Let me give you an example. If you open a Nazarene Manual from 30
(10)years ago you will find under special rules a paragraph that indicates
that Nazarenes are to avoid movie houses and such entertainment. You don’t find that in today’s manual. Does it mean that you can go and watch whatever you want? Of course not, but Gods people came to realize that with the onset of VCRS, Internet, and Cable Television, we could not be protected from the evil influences any more by simple avoiding the “Picture Shows” . We did not have to go to the movies any longer, they came right into our homes, any time we want. So in the ageless tradition of the Living Word Of God, we changed it. It now reads:
34.1. Entertainments that are subversive of the Christian ethic. Our people, both as Christian individuals and in Christian family units, should govern themselves by three principles. One is the Christian stewardship of leisure time. A second principle is the recognition of the Christian obligation to apply the highest moral standards of Christian living. Because we are living in a day of great moral confusion in which we face the potential encroachment of the evils of the day into the sacred precincts of our homes through various avenues such as current literature, radio, television, personal computers, and the Internet, … The third principle is the obligation to witness against whatever trivializes or blasphemes God, as well as such social evils as violence, sensuality, pornography, profanity, and the occult, as portrayed by and through the commercial entertainment industry in its many forms, and to endeavor to bring about the demise of enterprises known to be the purveyors of this kind of entertainment. This would include the avoidance of all types of entertainment ventures and media productions that produce, promote, or feature the violent, the sensual, the pornographic, the profane, or the occultic, or which feature or glamorize the world’s philosophy of secularism, sensualism, and materialism and undermine God’s standard of holiness of heart and life. —Nazarene Manual 2001-2005
You see, this is how it should have been to begin with. You cannot legislate morality with rules and regulations, you legislate through the presence of the Holy Spirit in a redeemed life. The Holy Spirit will lead guide and direct the person that wants to be lead. By the same token, a person who follows the rules and regulations of the church is not necessarily listening to the Holy Spirit. Do they have joy? Do they have peace, are they happy in the Lord??
If the person you are talking to is truly redeemed they have the Holy Spirit, I want to ask you this question. What audacity, what presumption, what self righteousness posses you to believe that you can do a better job than the Holy Spirit? Or to put it another way,
(11)why don’t you trust the Holy Spirit to do His Job??
Now if the person you are talking to and giving “spiritual advice to” is not redeemed, had not truly given their heart to the Lord than you have no authority to do anything other than to pray for them and intercede asking God to bring them to a point of redemption.
