Good morning. Happy New Year! I suspect some of you might be working on some goals. Some of you may be thinking about getting serious about saving some money so you can buy that new car, that new house, that new set of golf clubs. Right? Some of you are maybe thinking about taking a class or just beginning to read up on some particular topic so that at the end of the year or in a few months you may be able to get some sort of a new occupation, a new job. Then I suspect that there are some people who are here today that are like me that decide it is time to get serious about a health routine so that a month from now these nice new Christmas clothes will still fit me. Some of you also may be thinking about actually making this the year that you are going to study the Bible. You are going to study the Bible like we see in 2 Timothy in order that you may be equipped by the end of the year to be able to do the good works that God has in store for you.
So let’s start now by opening our Bibles to 2 Timothy 3:16 if you would like. A little bit of a refresher on where we are at and where we have been. We just got through December through all the Christmas festivities, and now we are returning back to our core values. Our four core values of worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. Today, we are revisiting the value of discipleship. A disciple is simply a learner like a student. We are students of the word and we are students of Jesus Christ. In many ways, we are disciples of other people. So we are going to return to this idea of discipleship. You may recall, if you were here back in October when we talked about discipleship, I said that the most important tool for a disciple is the Bible. We talked a little bit about the importance of that. Today, we are going to continue on with that idea of the importance of the Bible and particularly how the Bible can ensure that we are well equipped to deal with anything that we face in our own lives and in the culture.
A little bit of background before we go into this passage. A little background on this letter. You may recall that the apostle Paul was kind of like a mentor to Timothy. Some believe that actually Paul would have converted Timothy to Christianity. Paul saw a lot of potential in Timothy, so he allowed Timothy to go with Paul on various missionary journeys. Basically, Timothy would follow Paul around all through Asia. Consequently, he would be able to see Paul as Paul encountered opposition from the Romans. Paul encountered opposition from the pagans and from the cults out there. He would have been with Paul when Paul went into the marketplace and began to preach about this new thing called the gospel. He would have been with Paul when Paul went into the synagogue to demonstrate to the Jewish people how the gospel links to their Old Testament writings. Timothy would have been with Paul when Paul was starting new churches, those house churches back in that first century. In this particular letter, it is believed that Paul was actually in prison in Rome at this time. Actually, he was awaiting execution under the hands of the Roman emperor Nero. That is the situation here. Timothy at this particular time was believed to be in the area of Ephesus and was involved in basically a start-up church. So now Timothy was beginning to experience a lot of the same things that Paul was dealing with. He was dealing with these negative outside influences from the different competing religions and the competing gods and goddesses out there. He was also dealing with some internal divisions and some internal conflicts and also dealing with some internal false teachings that somehow had found their way into the church. So that is the situation here. Timothy is becoming quite stressed about the situation, so this letter that Paul writes from prison is kind of meant to be an encouragement to Timothy. We can’t look farther back, but basically, Paul is telling Timothy, you know, listen I understand what you have been through. You know that I have been through the same things, so he encourages Timothy to just remain steadfast. Stay focused on the faith. He says don’t forget the things that you were taught as a child. Don’t forget the Holy Scriptures because that will become your primary tool to be able to deal with the conflicts from outside and from within.
That brings us to our verse today where Paul then says, the verse that we hold to as far as the inspiration of God, that “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.” This is the passage I want to talk about today. I want to consider a few of these words. First of all, the idea of God-breathed. We look at that and we say what does that mean? What does God-breathed mean? At a minimum what it means is that when we talk about the scripture, the Old and the New Testament, we are saying that we are dealing with a special book. That is why we call it the Holy Bible. It is a special book. More than that, we believe that the book is an inspired book. Somehow, when the writers were logging down their entries on the scrolls years and years ago, they were inspired by God. What they wrote was truth. In many ways, when we open the Bible even today, it is the very words of God that we are looking at. We use the words like inspiration. We use the words like God-breathed. The question that a lot of people ask is exactly how did that work. How was the Bible inspired by God? That is the big question because really there is a lot of debate exactly what it means when somebody says that the Bible is inspired. There are several theories of what is called inspiration, but really they boil down to three primary theories.
The first is what I would call the low theory of inspiration. It is the idea that the men who wrote the books of the Bible were actually inspired kind of in the way that Shakespeare would have been inspired when he was writing his plays, Macbeth or something like that. The way maybe Handel would have been inspired when he wrote The Messiah. It is kind of like something that prompted them to write in an amazing way. That is the low view of inspiration.
Then you have the real high view of inspiration. It is the idea that God actually told these writers exactly what to put down on the paper, every single word. So the writers were kind of taking dictation from God. That is a very high view of inspiration.
Then you have the middle-road view, which is kind of the view that I kind of adhere to. It is the idea that the Bible was obviously influenced by God, but yet God allowed the men to retain their own personalities, their own unique perspectives, even their own unique writing styles when those words were written down. What you have is basically in the Holy Scripture, what we would call the Old and the New Testament. You have both the signature of God and the signature of man on that document. The apostle Peter goes into this a little bit more to give you a little bit better picture of what this looks like. He says “Above all you must understand that no prophecy of scripture”, which is basically just the words 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.” The whole idea of this as they were carried along is kind of supposed to invoke the imagery of a sailboat where the sail is filled with wind and the sailboat goes along. The idea here is that the men who wrote the scripture or spoke in prophecy were filled with the spirit of God and that spirit kind of pulled them along or pushed them along that they might be able to communicate the truth of God to the readers. What we have here is a situation where again the spirit of God was moving through the writers to communicate to the writers to ensure that what they are writing down was God’s word. That it was true. Why was God so concerned to make sure that the Bible and words that were written down were true? It was because they were documenting history. In other words, they were documenting His Story. His unique story and God wanted to make sure that they got it right. That is what is amazing about the Bible. Some people look at the Bible and they say it is just a list of rules, a list of dos and don’ts. There are other people that look at the Bible as a nice little source of blessings and promises. Some people look at the Bible as a way to get information about how to run a church or how to organize a church. Some people look at it as just a way to get some good advice. Consequently, they say the Bible is a law book, a devotional book, a church manual, or some sort of a self-help manual. In way, it kind of is all of those things, but yet first and foremost, you have to remember that the Bible is a story. It is a true story. It is His story. It is the story of God and his dealings with mankind and his desire to bring all mankind, all humanity back to Him. That is what we are talking about. It is a very unique story. Unique in the sense that we have one story, but we have 66 books contained within that one book. We have 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament that actually create one story with one central theme. That is a very unique book. In fact, so unique, I don’t think there is really anything out there to compare it to.
The only thing that we can really compare it to is something like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. When I grew up we had The Encyclopedia Britannica and Funk and Wagnalls. Today, everybody uses Wikipedia. It advertises itself as the free encyclopedia. It is on the internet and somebody decides they are going to start a topic and then anybody can basically contribute to that topic. They can add articles. They can add information. They can actually edit each other’s information to hopefully keep it kind of true, but that is what it is. It is an online, ongoing encyclopedia with currently about 24 million articles on it and about 100,000 different contributors all contributing to this thing called Wikipedia. For example, if we wanted to start a topic about Bellevue Christian Church, I don’t think there is one out there, but we could do that and then everybody could add their own contributions to that particular topic. I think Bellevue has a Wikipedia entry and people add their information about Bellevue on there. Any topic you can imagine is on this Wikipedia.
So thinking again about the Bible, in some way the Bible is kind of like God’s Wikipedia. That is how I see it. I was reading recently a book about that and somebody came up with that idea and I thought that was kind of true. It was kind of like God was sitting back about 5,000 years ago and he decided it was time to document His story. Instead of him taking the time to sit down and write it, he thought what he would do is allow humans to write the story. In fact, not just one human, but about 40 different people would contribute to His story. It wouldn’t just be someone that was a write. It would be people from all sorts of occupations. It would be kings and slaves and fisherman. Those types of people. They wouldn’t just write it over a year. They would write it over 1500 years. Then when he got done, somebody would pick up that story today and we would see an overarching, unifying story which is God’s story of God’s creation and God’s redemption of man. That is a pretty amazing thing when you think about it because it would be like today if we decided we were going to do something very similar. We are not even going to say the topic, we are just going to go out and recruit 40 or so people from a variety of occupations and just allow them to take their own personalities and their own literary skills whether it is with poetry or narrative or history or those types of things and just begin writing and add to this topic that really doesn’t have a lot of definition at this time. Then don’t allow them to really communicate to each other during the next few years. In fact, don’t allow them to communicate to each other at all within the next 1500 years and then come in and open that book up 2000 years from now and we see this unifying story. At a minimum, it would be unique. At a maximum, it would be inspired. It would be like the Bible. So the Bible is a very, very special book. Again, 66 books with over 40 authors written over 1500 years all with one unifying story of God’s redemption, God’s relationship with man. That is a nice thing to know. It is good information, but really it’s not just designed to be a nice story. It’s designed to be something that is very practical and very useful for us.
In fact, Paul goes on to write “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and training in righteousness.” I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail on what these words mean. When you think about teaching, it is really a form of instruction. What are we taught about in the Bible? We are taught about so many things, especially about God and about man, but really what we are taught is how to live in this world. The Bible gives us a nice framework, a nice set of boundaries for being able to view the world in a very unique way. A lot of people go through life and they have a worldview but they don’t even connect it to anything. Christians connect their worldview to the Bible. The Bible is a great source to come up with a worldview. Within that Bible, it is not only a worldview, it has its own built in mechanism for rebuking you when you step outside of that worldview. That is that second word, rebuking. We don’t use the word rebuking a lot but really it is the idea of just reprimand. It is associated with sin or error. Basically, rebuke should come in again when you step outside that existing set of boundaries or that existing worldview. The Bible is a great tool for that. If you sit in front of the Bible and start reading it, pretty soon you are going to be convicted or rebuked about a certain type of behavior that you know is inconsistent with God’s view or God’s will for you. Then you have this idea of correcting because the Bible isn’t just about beating you up when you do something wrong. It’s not just a set of laws that say you did this and you need to be punished. The Bible has a built-in correction that says this is what you did and this is the way to get back on track. The Bible has this amazing ability to correct you and bring you back in line with that worldview. Then finally, he talks about training in righteousness. It is the whole idea that it is an ongoing guide for daily living, for how to live in this crazy, mixed-up world. That is what is going on here. In order to access that information, in order to access those four good things, you have to be willing to at least read it. You have to be willing to take it out of your car when you get home on Sunday. You need to take it off the shelf. You need to take it and open it up and begin to read it. Once you read it, you see that it is an amazing tool, that you’ve got this amazing resource. In fact, you’ve got some built-in mentors there like Paul with Timothy that you can’t get elsewhere. In today’s day and age, one of the things that people really seek out I think is some sort of a spiritual mentor. Somebody that can help mentor them through life. The Bible has at least 40 and more likely 400 because as you read the Bible what you have is these people that have lived through very similar experiences that you are living through or have lived through and they are sitting there ready and waiting 24/7 to sit there and begin to feed you the wisdom so that you don’t make the exact same mistakes. So you’ve got these built-in mentors in that Bible. If you open it up and you sit with them, God will communicate to you through them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. When you are feeling lustful thoughts you start reading the Psalms and David starts reading the Psalm to you talking about how he messed up with the sin of Bathsheba. Or you are feeling a little bit discouraged or something like that and you come alongside Paul and he encourages you like he did Timothy. Or if you are feeling like you are going through a major trial in life, go in and sit next to Job for a while and he will help you process through this difficulty, this severe life trial you are going through. That is what you have. You have this built-in group of mentors 24/7 that are sitting there waiting to just help you out, help you through life. It is an amazing thing. Even so, the Bible is not just so that you might be taught or corrected or rebuked or even trained in righteousness. Really, the real goal of Bible study is so that you may be equipped.
2 Timothy 3:17 goes on to say “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and training in righteousness so that the man (or woman) of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Good work can be good deeds, but it can basically be any good work that God has for you. As I said before, God has a plan for every person in this room. God has a specific plan for each person in the room. Really, what the Bible does, it invites each one of us into His story to become part of His story to continue writing His story. So He has placed each of us in our own unique cultural context. Some of you are out there in the business world. Some of you are out there in the academic world where you are exposed to teachers and professors and students. Some of you are in healthcare where you are around doctors and patients and nurses. Some of you are in entertainment or hospitality where you are exposed to a certain type of people. Some of you are stay-at-home parents where you are exposed to a different group of people. This is the cultural context that God has placed you in just like he has placed the people in the Bible in. What he is saying is now you have the opportunity to continue to be part of God’s story, continue to make your contribution to God’s story in a very unique and even inspirational way. That is an amazing thing. God’s story is not over. Everyone here that wants to can be a part of God’s story. The way that you do that is simply try to take the word of God, begin to understand the word of God, and begin to find points of connection in the world in your particular context where you can use to begin to reveal both truth and error. There are a lot of truths in the world, and you can use those truths to point people back to God. There are a lot of errors in the world, and you can use the error to point people to God.
But in order to do that, you have to know his word. You have to go beyond simply hearing the word or reading the word. You have to get into studying the word. This is where the crown begins to thin out. Because there are a lot of people that are willing to hear the word, listen to the word on their iPhone, come on Sunday morning and hear the word. There are people that are willing to get into a Bible reading plan and read the word, but to be honest, very few people really desire to study the word. When I talk about study the word, I mean not just a casual reading. I mean open it up looking at the historical background like we do when I preach on Sunday. What is going on during that particular time period that you need to understand. What is being said by the author back then. Is there a principle? Is there an application? Is there a promise? Is there something that I can glean from that inspired word that was given 2000 years ago and take forward into my cultural context, take forward into my life and begin to apply to my life and hopefully begin to apply to the world? When you are able to do that, what you begin to see is transformation not only in your life but you begin to see transformation in the world. In other words, what you are trying to do is just continue on God’s work. The kingdom-building aspect of God’s work. That is what I mean when I talk about studying the word.
You say, Chuck, that is good stuff, but that’s hard. You are right. Anything worthwhile is hard. I hope you have figured that out by now. Anything worthwhile doing is very hard, but yet you don’t have to do it alone. In fact, you shouldn’t do it alone. Yes, we should study the Bible on our own but not exclusively on our own because if we study it exclusively on our own, it can get really bizarre because we can’t be objective about the word because so often what we do, we are reading our own biases into the word. There is somebody who said, I think it was a student, if you sit down and you try to read the Bible totally by yourself, you can become very weird. You can. That is why we have churches out there that are doing weird things because the Bible was never meant to be read totally alone. It was meant to be read in community. The community of the faith. Because it is only in the community of the faith where you can learn to make good observations. You can talk to one another and figure out what is the original author trying to say here. What ideas can I bring forward to today? What kind of things do even my own traditions say that plays into this? Really what Bible study boils down to is a conversation. It is a three-way conversation between the word of God, the Bible, the community of faith, including the people that have gone before us, and it is a conversation with culture. The three things. Any of them you can’t do separately. So when you sit down to study the Bible that is what you are doing. You are going back into the word. You are trying to figure out what the original author intended to say. You are going in and saying what does the community say, my existing community. What do the people who went hundreds of years before me have to say? What is the cultural saying? Once you get that, you’ve got it to where you can begin to make these points of connection. When you get it and you are in a position to go out there fully, thoroughly equipped to not only transform your life but to be able to transform culture. You get that? That is the difference between hearing, reading, and studying.
In closing, we’ve got this amazing book. We’ve seen this so many times that all scripture is God-breathed. There is not another book ever produced that makes that claim. We’ve got this amazing book that is useful. It is profitable for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. We are able to take that and become fully equipped to be able to deal with every situation in our own lives and everything that we would come to encounter in the world. The only thing we have to decide is how bad to we want it. That is the dividing line. How bad do you want this stuff? How bad do you want to be a transforming agent in culture? Some don’t care and I know that. But I still know that there are some people here that do care and they want to care and they want to be part of God’s ongoing redeeming and transformation of the world. In fact, we have a Bible study class coming up next week. That is an opportunity to take that first step this year to study God’s word in a serious way so that by the end of the year or by the end of two years or whatever it is, the man, the woman of God will be fully equipped to begin to do the good deeds and the good works in the world.
