Good morning. A quick question. By a show of hands, who loves reading scripture? That is good because I need some volunteers to read some passages from today’s sermon.
Thanks for volunteering to read, if you were listening, you know that in some sense they are all connected because they speak to the importance of the WORD, and lend to support the value of living a Word-centered life. And that is what I want to briefly preach on today, what it means to live a life centered on the written word of God. And the main reason we want to live a Word-centered life is because that is where God most often reveals himself to us.
But we also know to be Word-centered is also to be Christ-centered because John 1:1 speaks of Jesus AS The Word. John writes: “In the beginning was the Word (being Jesus) and the Word was with God and the word was God.” The underlying Greek word here for word is the word logos, which really is a different idea of the word Word. It is the idea that it contains the whole expression, the thought life of God, or particularly the message of God. Jesus is the Word of God that took on flesh and walked this earth for 33 years.
But not only was Jesus The Word of God, we also know that he had a very high view of the written word that we refer to as scripture. In fact, we know that he had a high view of the first five books of the Old Testament, what is referred to as the Torah or the LAW. We know that because he quotes from the Old Testament very often, especially in the gospels.
One of his favorite books to quote from was the book of Deuteronomy. In the opening passage today, we see that he quotes directly from the book of Deuteronomy when he is in the desert having a discussion with the devil. As the Gospels tell us, following Jesus’ baptism he was led into the desert by the Holy Spirit where it is said that he prayed and fasted for 40 days. Consequently, he was very hungry.
We are told that the devil approached him and said if you really are the son of God, then maybe you should turn these stones into bread. This is where Jesus gives his classic response in Matthew 4.4. He says “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” You may have heard this passage in many places, but you may not know that this is actually pretty much a direct quotation from the book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Bible. You may not know that the subsequent answers that Jesus gave the devil were also taken from the book of Deuteronomy.
More importantly, what this passage reveals to us is Jesus did indeed have a high view of the word of God. When he is quoting to the devil, he is basically letting the devil know and really us know that the word is more than words on pages. He sees the word of God that is something that is very alive and very life giving. When he uses the word ‘live’ here, he is not talking about biological life. He is talking about what is called the Zoe life, a vitality of life that characterizes people in the kingdom of God. A kingdom life that that Christ invited people into from the moment that Jesus stepped foot on this earth.
Moses seems to affirm also the life-giving quality of the God’s word. He writes in Deuteronomy 32.45-46 “Take to heart all the words I have solemnly declared to you this day so that you may command your children to obey carefully all the words of the law. They are not just idle words for you. They are your life.” Just as Jesus had a high view of the word, we see that Moses had a very high view of the word, so we too should have a high view of the word.
But if we are honest with ourselves, sometimes we see a gap between Jesus’ view of the word, of scripture, and our view of scripture. We don’t often see the word of God as this life-giving thing. We have a low view of the Bible because sometimes we just see it as words on a page. Words that we just read through to check it off our list. I would suggest that this low view of the Bible has less to do with the amount of time we spend reading the Bible and really more to do with how we read the Bible. Many Christians read the Bible on a regular basis, which is good, but the way we read it can limit the life-giving qualities of it. I would suggest when it comes to our approach to reading the Bible, there are two primary approaches. What I would call the informative and the transformative approach to Bible reading.
The informative approach is pretty easy to understand. Basically it means we are trying to read to the Bible for information. To get data and to get facts. Kind of the way we would scroll through the news feed on a Smartphone or for people who still subscribe to the newspaper how they might read a newspaper. You look at the headlines. You see if it is something that catches your interest. If it does, you quickly go through it as fast as you can trying to glean nuggets of facts that you can share with your family or friends.
Unfortunately, many of us read the Bible that way. We look at the Bible. We open it up and see the Bible has some chapter headings, so we read them and say that seems kind of interesting. I will quickly read through that section and hopefully grab a nugget or two of information. What happens is we read the Bible very quickly such as when we take up some sort of a challenge to read your complete Bible in 90 days. Or over six months or even over a year. Those are good and noble goals, but the reality is when you get to the end of the reading, a lot of times you don’t remember a thing that you have read. I have been there and done that. I read through it very quickly, and I don’t remember anything. That is one of the flaws of the informative approach to reading the Bible.
Another flaw in the informative approach is that we tend to try to control what we read. We keep the things that we like and we get rid of the things we don’t. If we are reading along in a passage and it just doesn’t agree with us, we are just going to skip by it and not retain it. We are going to move on to something else. Kind of like we do when we read our news streams. So we are reading the Bible often with a subconscious filter in our brain. A hidden-agenda, a worldview, or bias. So when we come across a scripture and it doesn’t agree with things like lifestyle, attitudes, prejudices, or even belief system, if it doesn’t match that, we tend to push it aside. We all do that because we bring our bias when we read the Bible.
So the informative approach might work when you are reading through the sports page, it really has limited value when it comes to reading the Bible. Don’t get me wrong. There is good information in the Bible that we should try to get our hands around. Especially if you are a new believer. It is helpful for a new believer to understand some of the basic facts of the Bible. Understanding things like history, geography, archaeology and the different genres of literature are important. But we cannot rely on strictly information and facts to do the thing we are trying to do through our Bible reading, which is to continue to transform us into Christ-likeness.
In order to do that, it is helpful to take a different approach. We have to take a transformative approach to reading the Bible. Which means that instead of reading the Bible like a textbook, a news stream, or a newspaper you are reading for quality, not quantity. Which means you really shouldn’t rush through your reading. You should slow down when you read for transformation. You may even get to the place where you are comfortable maybe camping out on a chapter or passage or even a word or two for a couple days or a couple weeks and be okay with that.
Again, list people struggle with this. I know there are list people here today. Anybody that makes a lot of lists. List people kind of struggle with this approach because the daily goal is to get through their daily list, which often includes checking off their Bible reading list daily. Again, I am not suggesting that is a bad thing to have a preplanned Bible reading. It is a good thing. It is okay to have a preplanned Bible reading schedule to maintain focus, but you just have to be careful that you do not allow that to restrict you. It is just a tool. That is all it is. Again, we are guilty of reading the Bible too fast so in transformative reading we have to slow down.
The other thing we have to do in transformative reading is we have to release control of it. When you read for information, you are in control of how you read. You hold on to what you want and you get rid of what you don’t want. Transformative reading is the opposite. You don’t control the Bible. In fact, some people suggest in transformative reading you don’t read the Bible. You let the Bible read you. You let the Bible begin to read your very soul, which means you have to submit yourself to the word of God. That means when you come to the word of God you have to be open to hear from God. You have to receive what God would give you through it and ideally that you would respond to the word of God in whatever way he tells you to do that.
I am suggesting when you come to the Bible in a transformative approach you have to be willing to surrender your soul to God. In some sense allow him to take a flashlight to your interior life and highlight all of you. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And allowing him to probe deeply within your soul and take the scalpel out and whatever he has to do and begin to really do some hard investigation of what is going on inside.
Really what you are doing is allowing God to judge the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. In Hebrews 4:12 it says “The word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitude of the heart.” What this passage suggests is the word is designed to evaluate what is going in in here, to see if your heart lines up with the heart of Christ, the character of Christ. If it doesn’t, ideally you make adjustments through life until it begins to do that. In order for that to do it, you have to take a transformative approach to reading the Bible.
I know that some people really put up a wall to this type of thing because this seems to involve a lot of feelings and emotions and some of you people, especially some men, are not comfortable with sharing any sort of emotions, revealing it of course. I get that. I really get that. I am German. Any Germans out there? Mostly Italians I suspect. Italians freely express many different moods. But Germans have two moods. We have crabby and more crabby, so we are not the most touchy feely sort of people. I get that. If we are serious about our growth, hopefully we would see some value in this type of approach, to open up our hearts and emotions to God’s word to us.
Some of you may be thinking, “Chuck I see some benefit to this, but how do I make the switch? How do I switch over from the informative approach that I have practiced all my life to the transformative approach to reading the Bible?”
Good questions. So what I would like to do in the remaining time is just simply suggest four things that you can do to begin to move you from the informative approach to the transformative approach of Bible reading. They are really pretty straightforward. They all begin with M. Meditate it. Memorize it. Mouth it. Manifest it. I purposely put an M before everything. You should be able to remember these four Ms.
Let’s think first about the idea of meditation. Meditating on the word of God. The Bible speaks of meditation a lot. In fact, over 50 passages use the word meditation. It is a translation of the Hebrew word called hagah. Meditating, reflecting, chewing on something, and even murmuring it a little bit. There are over 50 passages in the Old Testament that use the word meditate or some form of it including Psalm 1:1 that says “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law (the word) he meditates day and night.”
It is obvious in this passage that meditation is something that at least we know the Jewish people have done. But what is meditation? Meditation can be described in a lot of ways depending on who you are. There is a man by the name of Richard Foster. He wrote a book about the spiritual disciplines called Celebration of Discipline. A very good book on the basic Christian practices. He describes meditation as “internalizing and personalizing the word of God.” I would even simplify it a little bit more. I suggest that meditation is the discipline of reading the Bible in a manner that helps move the passage from the head to the heart. You are moving what you read from the intellect down into the soul. That is really what meditation is. I know meditation has gotten a really bad rap especially in protestant circles. A lot of times we associate meditation with the Eastern religions. We think of it as emptying your brain and detaching yourself from reality. Some forms of meditation does aim to do that. Christian meditation isn’t really like that.
There is a certain amount of detachment that you often do when you start meditation, but you are not really emptying your mind. You are detaching yourself from what I refer to as the thought monkeys that are jumping around in your brain. You are trying to calm your brain down enough so you can reattach your mind to God. It is detachment with the purpose of attaching yourself to God and coming closer to God so that you can hear his voice.
How do you do it? There are many ways to meditate. One simply way is to take one passage or two and at the most three and read through it slowly. Three or four times. Then as you go through those readings you are paying attention to the words that start jumping off the page. They will. Not always. Not right away but a lot of times they will.
The next step is simply just reflecting on what has been jumping out of the page at you. Closing your eyes if necessary and thinking about why do these words seem to be jumping off the page? Why does this particular situation make me anxious? Why does it make me nervous? Why does it make me feel convicted? What is going on inside of me? What is stirring up inside of me? What is it telling me about God?
You try to identify that stuff. If you want, you write it down or remember it for later. Then you are pretty much done other than closing in prayer and saying “God you showed me some things, I am not sure I quite understand it, but I am trusting that throughout the rest of the week, you might reveal yourself to me. You might explain it every further.”
Does that sound too weird? Did you hear anything un-biblical in that? No. It is not. It is something that we can do. And the nice thing about meditation is it is very mobile. You can take meditation anywhere. You can take it in your home. You can take it in the school. You can take it in the workplace.
Some of you are saying, Chuck, you don’t know my office. I really can’t sit in a big meeting and start opening up the Bible and meditating on a verse. This is where I would give you a little pushback because many of you have smartphones and you are taking them out all day long every place anyway. You could open the smartphone and open the Bible. In fact there is a great app called Pray as you Go that I would highly recommend. It reads the scripture and asks a few questions around it.
But if you don’t have an app handy, I would suggest that you practice the second M, which is memorization. Memorize the word. How many of you have ever memorized anything? Pretty much everybody in this room. Most of us, if we are 30 or older, we have been trained how to memorize things all through our life, using a lot of different methods.
One of my favorite books is a book by a former basketball player. A guy named Jerry Lucas. In a addition to being a basketball star at Ohio State and the Sacramento Kings he wrote a little book called The Memory Book, that I have had in my library since I was a kid.
I used to love memorizing stuff as a kid. Remember when you used to have to remember phone numbers and addresses. If we had to do that now we would be lost. We grew up memorizing, so we know we can do it, but technology has made memorizing obsolete. Why would you memorize when you have everything at your fingertips. Any information, just go on your smartphone and you can find out anything. There is no need to memorize. What happened is we have lost the appreciation for memorization.
Specifically how the first, second, third-century Christians had to memorize because they didn’t have access Bible apps on smartphones. They didn’t have 5 Bibles sitting on their shelves at home like many of us do. They didn’t even have access to scrolls.
If the teachers and the preachers and the students wanted to know the scripture, they had to memorize it. They would memorize complete books of the Bible. Even though it is no longer necessary to memorize Bible passage, I suggest that there is still benefit it.
When you memorize the word, you have this complete interior library of the word right there that you can access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with or without a Bible or a smartphone. But more importantly it can help keep you from sinning.
A good verse that reminds us of that is Psalm 119.11 that says. “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.”
I know some of you are saying I can’t memorize anything. I can’t. I don’t want to. I would challenge you and say if you were to leave here today and I said I would give you $1,000 for every passage in the book of Psalms that you memorize between now and next Sunday, would I have any takers? You would figure it out. It is something that we would do, because we made up our minds to do it. Has anyone memorized Psalm 150:6?
It goes like this. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.” Can you say that verse? “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.” Now say it again. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.” Say it one more time. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.” Say it one more time. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.” Now say it. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.” Congratulations.
You have proven you can memorize a passage.
Now go back home and memorize the other preceding five verses there and you will have remembered a whole Psalm this week. You can do that. It is really quite simple. It is just taking a passage, writing it on a piece of paper, putting it in your smartphone, or whatever and bringing it out often and referring to it throughout your week. That is all it is. Some people use images to help remember. I personally like using images to remember a passage. If I was trying to remember something like Psalm 119.11 “I have hidden your word in your heart that I might not sin against you,” in my brain I would see a picture. I would see a Bible hidden inside of a heart, maybe the word sin leaning up to a statue of Jesus. If you close your eyes and you saw that, you would remember that verse. God has given us the ability of creativity and imagination. We remember pictures better than we remember numbers or words. If you want to memorize, put it into a picture form. It is very easy to do.
So again, if we want to approach the Bible in a transformative way, we have to meditate on it and memorize it, but ideally we also need to mouth it. We need to speak it. That word hagah is not just meditation. It is the idea of murmuring something. I think one passage has growl associated with it in Isaiah. It is implied that if you are going to meditate, you are going to speak it also. You are going to murmur it. When you speak the word, you are imprinting over and over and over again that passage in your head.
On a site note, I am trying to learn Spanish. I am getting pretty good at memorizing words and grammar which is important, but I am learning that the way you really learn it is to speak it, otherwise it just remains a glob of words in your head.
The monks figured out the importance of mouthing scripture a long time ago. St. Benedict’s was a 6th century monk who was the founder of the Benedictines. The Benedictines were hard workers. They would spend all day working, not just reading their Bibles.
As they worked, they would recite scripture. All just kind of mumbling pieces of the Psalms as they worked. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Let everything that has breath, Praise the Lord. They would just constantly be mouthing the word of God crystalizing the words in their brains. Not only that, it made them very attentive to God. The way you be God attentive is you don’t reserve your quiet time and prayer time to your prayer closet. That is a good place to start, but you bring it throughout the day and you try to remember God and pay attention to God throughout the day.
So being word-centered it is helpful to mouth scripture throughout the day.
But really, if we are serious about spiritual formation, we can’t leave out the fourth M, which is to manifest it. A good definition of manifest is action displayed, which means that you do it. The classic passage that speaks to this idea comes from the book of James 1:22 where it says “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” The passage implies obedience. The big O that we try to avoid. Obedience, trying to align our will, our freedom with God’s will like Jesus did. If we simply meditate and simply memorize and even mouth it, but we never allow it to manifest itself in our lives, we really haven’t experienced the transformative approach to Bible study.
The transformative approach involves moving from the head to the heart, but it also involves moving to our legs and taking action on what you have read. It may be something as simple as being more patient when you are in the grocery line or with the other drivers on the street or something more challenging like holding your opinion to yourself on social media, or forgiving those who may have offended you in the past. It may involve volunteering your time and or money to a worthwhile non-profit or this church.
Only you and God know what that obedience to the word might look like, but the key thing is that follow James advice…you do it.
In closing, those are four quick ways to approach this transformative reading. Meditate on it, memorize it, mouth it, and manifest it. And if you do this even marginally well, hopefully, you will seeing there is some benefit to doing this. That it is slowly transforming you from the inside out and causing you to not only be a better Christian but a better human being.
And God knows there is a shortage of good human being around.
As you know times are tough. Not only because of the pandemic but everything else we see in the world, shootings, abuse, racism, pride, greed, and anger to name a few. We are in the middle of chaos. And in the midst of this chaos, the only real solution is change. Specifically a change of heart. A change of what is going on in the inside of humanity because there is something within humanity that is broken, and the world does not see it. Jesus saw it. He talked about how the problem is in the heart.
The book of Mark 7:21-23 he says, this is Jesus talking, “From within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts – sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly.” Out of the heart.
If you are a spreadsheet type of person, you could probably list these categories across the top and then go down the last three or four months and list all the killings and major events in the world and you could probably match these up pretty good. Jesus predicted that. He identified the problem 2,000 years ago, and we are still trying to figure out the solution. The solution is fixing the heart or what Dallas Willard refers to as “renovation of the heart.”
He writes: “The greatest need you have and I have, the greatest need of collective humanity is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed. Indeed, the only hope of humanity lies in the fact that as our spiritual dimension has been formed so it also can be transformed.”
That is the only way out. Transformation of the heart. Renovation of the heart. You ask ‘Where does that begin?’ It begins right here. It begins with me. It begins with you. It begins with the church. It is not out there saying let’s fix the problems out there. We have to fix the problem in our heart. We have to start here. Each one of us and me included, we have parts of our heart that just aren’t right. When we are not paying attention, it causes harm not only to ourselves but other people in the world and other people in the community.
If we are serious about this stuff, we have to start by changing our heart. We have to start by exposing our heart to God and saying take that spotlight over me and reveal the stuff in me that does not look like Jesus – anger, bitterness, prejudice, lust, envy, greed. All that stuff that Jesus mentioned. Show it to me. I give you permission and then I am going to cooperate with you God, the Holy Spirit, in making it better.
And as we open ourselves up to the work of the Holy Spirit slowly that broken, corrupt, sin-filled heart starts being made whole again. If we do that, if we start with us, we will slowly begin to have a bunch of individuals with a changed heart, and if it happens inside the church, we are going to have a church with a changed heart. If we continue on, it is going to be a changed heart that spills out into the community. Begins to change the homes, the families, the problems in the city. Ultimately it begins to spill out into the United States of America, and even the world. It is the only solution.
It gets back to transformative approach to not only reading the Bible but your whole Christian walk. To be willing to allow God to form you into the image of Christ. An image that begins now and will continue for all eternity. Let us pray.
