Last week I said that we’re going to make one statement over and over throughout this series:
We don’t have to APOLOGIZE for our faith. We don’t need to rally to God defense. Our God is bigger than we are – and doesn’t really need our help. But in spite of that… God calls us to contend for the faith.
One of the tools God has given us to contend for the faith is that book you have in your hands – your Bible. Charles Spurgeon once spoke of Scripture this way: "Defend the Bible? I would just as soon defend a lion. Just turn the Bible loose. It will defend itself." It’s a powerful book that is THE main weapon we have in contending for the faith.
Because of the power Scripture has to do that, I’ve discovered over the years is that there are people out here who seemingly do everything they can to undermine the Bible. God’s Word gets in the way of things what they want to believe or do.
(I placed a book that looked like a Bible – but wasn’t - on stage to use for this illustration).
ILLUS: At the first church I served – about the 6th year I was there – I sensed a darkness in the ministry I couldn’t understand. I spent a great deal of time praying about that feeling, and not long after I began praying I became aware of why I sensed this darkness: I found out that one of the Deacons in the church was committing adultery. What was frustrating was that I later found out that many in the church knew about the situation long before I did. I ended up “firing” the Deacon… which didn’t make me real popular with him.
It also didn’t make me real popular with the Deacon’s cousin Stan, who was kind of like the “head” Elder at church. That Elder called a Board Meeting and reinstalled the Deacon to his position. In a later Elders’ meeting Stan told me “I know Paul said we should discipline someone who has done this, but Jesus didn’t… so we don’t have to discipline him.” (Let that soak in for a minute.)
I thought up a real good comeback about two days later, but at the time I was flabbergasted. They didn’t cover this in Bible College. And when I quizzed various preachers in the neighborhood trying to find a solution to my situation I couldn’t find anyone who had an answer to my problem that I could wrap my mind around.
But then I met with Jack Cottrell (he’s one of the “Big Men in our Brotherhood”). Jack was/is a major theologian in our brotherhood and has written numerous books and he just happened to be in our area for a men’s meeting. I got a few moments alone with him and explained my situation – including the comment by my Elder about “Paul said it… but Jesus didn’t.” He said “Oh yeah. That’s one of the 3 great heresies entering church right now.” (I forget what he said the other 2 were). But that was the only comment that seemed to help.
Now, at the time I was preaching through Exodus and I’d just come to the part where Moses and the Israelites had gathered at the base of the Mt. of God to receive the 10 commandments. I’d seen the Charlton Heston version of this and it had always been puzzled that Moses (Heston) went up to the top of the mountain to receive the commandments, and on his way down he discovers the Israelites doing things they ought not to have been doing. God’s mad, Moses is mad and he breaks the tablets of stone. But it puzzled me because it didn’t seem that the Israelites had even seen the laws yet – so why was everybody so mad all of a sudden?
Then I read the text (always a good thing to do if you’re going to preach about it) and I discovered that before Moses went up… God came down. And God thundered down the 10 commandments (the Israelites knew they were doing wrong). And there was thunder and lightning and a trumpet that seemed to blow forever. And the people were so frightened that they said to Moses (the Reader’s Digest version here) “You go talk to Him because we can’t stand to listen to Him anymore.”
I thought to myself – I’ve never had such a powerful text to preach from. And I went out and bought a book at a garage sale that looked just about like a Bible. I brought it home, put it under the pulpit, and Sunday morning I got up and explained the story. And I told about Charlton Heston and the fact that the Israelites had told him to go talk to God because they couldn’t stand to listen to Him anymore.
Then I said “You know things haven’t changed in 4000 years. People still can’t stand to listen to God. Why we just had Jack Cottrell up here for a men’s meeting and he told me that there are three great heresies entering the church.” And I named all 3.
Now only two other Elders and myself knew that Stan had spouted his heresy, and I was publicly spanking Stan without anyone else knowing what I was doing. It was at that point that I pulled out the novel from under the pulpit and opened it to a place that looked like it was in the New Testament.
(At this point in THIS sermon I pulled out the book I was using as a prop and had a man in the front section read off the title of the book, making sure that everyone knew this was NOT a Bible).
The crowd at that first church had no idea the book was not a Bible. And as I opened the book I cited that first heresy “Paul said it but Jesus didn’t” and ripped a page right out of the book (which I did now in this sermon). Then I turned to another section of the novel and cited the 2nd heresy and ripped that page out of the book (again doing that in this sermon) and turned to a 3rd section, citing the next heresy and ripping another page out of the book.
People heard about that sermon 15 miles away.
I then explained to that church that the book I’d torn the pages from was a novel (I read the title off the spine and gave the name of the author – offering to show to anyone a chance to handle it to do so). I explained “I wouldn’t do that to a Bible. But anytime anyone cites a heresy like the ones we’d just discussed – they may as well have been tearing pages out of their Bibles.”
Afterward Stan came up to me and apologized. He said “I shouldn’t have said that.” And I replied “That’s OK. As long as you know.”
They still fired me, but at least Stan apologized.
Now why would Stan have cited that heresy? Because he wanted to cover his cousin’s sin. And why did he repent of what he’d said? Because he was confronted with the evil of what he’d said.
There are people in this world who try to tear pages out of the Bible. Now I can understand an atheist or an agnostic trying to tear up the Scriptures – they don’t like God anyway and they have no love for His book – but I have a real problem with “religious folks” who do this. There are people like that Elder, or some preachers or even “Bible scholars” I’ve encountered who do exactly the same thing.
They’ll tear out a couple pages here or there (I emphasized that by tearing pages out of the fake Bible I’d had on stage), or maybe a whole section (I tore our several other pages from my prop) or they’ll maybe tear out a portion or a corner of a page.
I call some of these folks “thread-pullers” because they’re like the people who pull on a loose thread of a sweater and keep pulling and pulling until the entire sweater is unraveled.
Why do these people do that? Often it’s because of their sin, or pride or doubt. And there’s an almost smug self-righteousness to their actions.
These “Christians” really annoy me. No they anger me. I despise them for they try to do to the Bible.
Why? Because everything we know about God and what He’s done for us is in this book. Everything we know about what He expects of us and how He works in our lives is in this book. Everything we know about Jesus and what He said and did and how He came down to earth and became a man and faced the cross and rose from the dead is in this book. If I can’t rely on part of the Bible to be trustworthy, how will I know that ANY of it is dependable? How do I know that Jesus was really who He said He was and that He actually died for my sins?
These “thread-pullers” often pass themselves off as responsible believers as they create doubt in the minds of the people around them. I once had a FB conversation with a young man who was part of the staff at a fairly large congregation somewhere. He spent some of his time on the FB page slowly casting doubt on the Bible’s trustworthiness – and I called him on the carpet for it. Some of his friends rallied to his defense telling me that he was really a nice guy.
“No he’s not.” I responded. “He might be a nice guy to go out for a burger and coke with but he’s spreading doubt and undermining the faith of others by the nonsense he’s spouting. He’s not a nice man. He’s a false teacher and destroyer of the faith.”
Now, let me go on record here - I trust the entire Bible. I have a saying I constantly repeat “I can be wrong, but the Bible is NEVER wrong.” (I repeated that for emphasis)
Did you realize that that’s what Jesus believed? He believed the Bible was never wrong. In His final earthly prayer Jesus prayed that the Father would “Sanctify (His followers) through thy truth: thy word is truth. John 17:17
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Matthew 5:17-18
And when tempted by Satan in the desert do you remember the phrase he kept repeating?
“IT IS WRITTEN” Matthew 4:4, 6, and 11
Why didn’t Jesus just tell Satan “I say unto you” or “I believe” or “In my opinion?” After all, Jesus was God – His opinion was as good as anything ever written in Scripture. But Jesus repeated “It is written” that we might realize that He was trusting in the very book we’ve been given and if “it was written” was good enough for Him, it should be good enough for us.
The New Testament writers drove that point home as well. Paul wrote: “ALL Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” 2 Timothy 3:16
And Peter wrote: “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” 2 Peter 1:21
Someone once noted that the Bible
• was composed by 40 different authors over a period of 1500 years and yet it has a marvelous singlemindedness and unity to its message. And the message is this: Because man has sinned - God worked down through history to bring about the coming of the Messiah who would save us from our sins.
• In addition, the Bible has claimed to be the Word of God over 2700 times.
• It contains over 300 fulfilled prophecies concerning the person and work of Jesus and it has numerous other prophecies that have been fulfilled about various men and nations down thru history.
• The Bible does not contradict one proven scientific fact.
• It does not contain one absolute contradiction. But instead Scripture has been the “roadmap” for 1000s of archaeological discoveries and has never been wrong once.
• And it has transformed the lives of millions of people who have loved its promises.
ILLUS: Just to give you an idea of how accurate Scripture is, let me tell you the story of Jericho. Of course you remember what the Bible tells us about how the Joshua and the Israelites took that city. It was a formidable walled city, perhaps the most impregnable city in all Palestine.
Now walled cities were usually conquered in one of two ways. The enemy either broke the wall inward with battering rams, or they simply waited outside until folks inside ran out of food and water, which usually took a long period of time.
But Scripture tells us Jericho fell in a mere 7 days. The first day, the Israelites marched once around the city. And the 2nd day they marched once around the city. And the 3rd day, and the 4th day, and the 5th day and the 6th day they marched once around the city.
But on the 7th day, they marched around it 7 times and then the priests blew their trumpets, and the people shouted and "The wall came a-tumblin down". And when that happened the people then rushed into the city and burned everything… just as God commanded.
For centuries scoffers and skeptics mocked this story as just one more of fantastic but stories out of Scripture. I mean - the very idea that a walled city would collapse like that – it just wasn’t feasible.
Well… then somebody dug the place up. Beginning in the 1920s archeologists began excavating the site, and this is what they found:
1. Jericho had a double wall, with houses built across the two walls. This explained how Rahab's house could have been built upon the wall.
2. They learned that the wall had been destroyed by a violent convulsion such as the one described in the Bible, and that when the wall fell - it fell outward - down the hillside.
3. And buried beneath a heavy layer of soot (suggesting the city was burned) they found bushels of grain (which meant the city fell after a short siege).
(Time March 5, 1990 and other sources)
And that’s just ONE of the many stories archeologists have proven to be true from Scripture.
But the Bible is more than just an “accurate” set of stories. Its very words have a powerful influence on people. Hebrews tells us that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12
God said much the same thing back in the Old Testament: “as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” Isaiah 55:10-11
The Bible repeatedly presents itself as an almost mystical and mighty tool. It is so mighty, in fact, that Spurgeon’s words are right on the mark: “Just turn the Bible loose. It will defend itself.”
But the Bible can do more than just defend itself. Scripture has the power in its words to transform the minds and hearts of unrepentant men and women and to transform the lives of those are broken and shattered.
ILLUS: There once a famous British atheist named Bradlaugh who often attempted to get preachers into public debates where he felt confident he could embarrass them and shame their faith. But he made a mistake when he challenged an evangelist named Hugh Price Hughes who worked in the slums of London to a debate.
Hughes prayed a long time before accepting the public challenge but he finally accepted… and responded with a challenge of his own.
"I propose that we each bring some concrete evidences of the validity of our beliefs in the form of men and women who have been redeemed from the lives of sin and shame by the influence of our teaching. I will bring 100 such men and women and I challenge you to do the same. If you cannot bring 100, Mr. Bradlaugh, to match my 100, I will be satisfied if you will bring 50 such men and women who will stand and testify that they have been lifted up from lives of shame by the influence of your teachings. If you can't bring 50, then bring 20 people who will say, as my 100 will, that they have a great joy in a life of self respect as a result of your atheistic teachings. If you cannot bring 20, I will be satisfied if you bring 10. Nay, Mr. Bradlaugh, I challenge you to bring one, just one man or woman who will make such a testimony regarding the uplifting of your atheistic teachings."
Bradlaugh withdrew his challenge.
You see, THAT is the power of the book we call the Bible. Everything we know about Jesus and His forgiveness and His mercy are found in this book. The words of Scripture are GOD BREATHED and have the power to change lives from sin and shame to life and joy. So, if you’re going to contend for the faith once delivered to the Saints you have got to realize that THIS IS THE book, and this book is trustworthy. And this book gives you the advantage in a world that would mock your faith.
ILLUS: I once had an email conversation with an atheist who was offended I quoted Scripture. He said if I was going to continue to quote the Bible then he’d start quoting the Koran or the Hindu Scriptures. I said go ahead – knock yourself out – because I’m NOT going to quit quoting God’s Word in such conversations. I am convinced this book has the power to change lives because it is the Word of GOD!!!
Now, as I said earlier, there are folks that don’t like our Bible. They most often oppose it because of their sin, or their pride or their doubt.
There folks who oppose it because it condemns their lifestyle. There’s the story a friend of W. C. Fields who walked into the actor’s dressing room and caught him reading the Bible. Fields was a notoriously sinful man but he seemed embarrassed and quickly shut the book. He looked at his friend and said "Just looking for loopholes." (Christianity Today)
Jude says “For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God INTO SENSUALITY and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” Jude 1:4
ILLUS: I knew a man once who was talking about “errors” in the Bible. He’d been a faithful Christian and yet he was now boldly attacking Scripture. I later found out he was involved in adultery. Attacking the Bible was his way of trying to get out from under God’s condemnation for his sin.
Other people pervert and reject Scripture because of their pride. Opposing God (the big dog in the universe) allows them to create a following. That’s why many professors at secular universities do everything in their power to undermine the faith of their students. As long as the Bible has any chance of controlling the minds and hearts of those pupils, the professors have a hard time reshaping and reforming their brains in their image.
Paul warned the Elders at Miletus:
“I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Acts 20:29-30
And then there are others who simply don’t trust God…
• Their God’s not big enough to create the world in 7 days.
• Their God’s not big enough to create a worldwide flood.
• Their God’s not big enough to part the sea so His people can cross on dry land.
• Their God’s not big enough to bring down the walls of Jericho, or to protect His people in the Lion’s Den or in the Fiery Furnace.
• You have to wonder if their God is even big at all. If their God is big enough to come down out of heaven, go to cross for our sins and rise from the dead to conquer death itself.
I believe ALL that stuff because – it’s in the book! And I believe all that stuff because my God is big enough to do all that – and more. If it’s in the book you can take it to the bank… because it’s true.
CLOSE: Tony Campolo was a preacher who also taught in a secular college. One day when he’d finished the lecture, a student stood and said: "Doctor, you seem like a reasonable man. How can you with your sophistication really believe the Bible?"
He replied, "It's easy. I decided to. And, I have to explain; once I decided to that I believe in it, I spent the next 35 years of my life accumulating arguments to support what I already believed. But reason only came in afterwards. It only supported what I'd already committed myself to.
Now before you get nasty with me (he said to the student) I have got to ask you a question. Why don't you believe the Bible? Isn't it because you've decided to? Please, don't tell me you've read it from cover to cover. Spare me that. And don't give me that jazz that it's full of contradictions. Because you can't name 5 (and they never can).
This is the thing: somewhere along the line, you decided not to believe and after you decided not to believe you've been accumulating ideas to support your commitment to non-belief.
That kid looked at Campolo and said: "You don't understand. For me to believe in God, I have to have a God that I can understand."
Campolo replied, "God refuses to be that small!"
INVITATION
