We are continuing our discussion about what we call the four core values: worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. This week’s focus is on discipleship. Keep in mind that we are not interested in any type of discipleship, but what I refer to as deep-rooted discipleship. Discipleship that is willing to go deep into God’s word. And if we are interested in deep-rooted discipleship that goes deep into God’s word then that means that our primary tool is the Bible. We are going to see how discipleship and the love of God’s word goes together, and to do that we are going to look at a few particular characters in both Testaments that truly loved to study God’s word. If you have your Bibles, please open up to the book of Eli 7:11.
A little bit of background on Eli. Eli was a priest who lived about the sixth century B.C., before Christ. During that time, the Jewish people, particularly the southern kingdom of Judah, were in captivity with the Babylonians in the city of Babylon. At some point, King Cyrus decided he was going to allow the Jews to go back home to their homeland and reestablish their temple in Jerusalem. This guy Eli was the open responsible not simply for setting up the temple but bringing back the very word of God to bring people back in line with the commands of God. That is who Eli was.
So that is a little background on Eli now let’s dig into the text. And since I usually read the passage I thought to get more participation maybe somebody would go ahead and read it. E Any volunteers to read Eli 7:11? I don’t see any volunteers.
I suspect that no one is volunteering to read it because it is one of those passages that is difficult to find. In fact it is impossible to find it because it is not in the Bible. There is no Book of Eli in the Bible. But there is a movie with the same title starring Denzel Washington. Has anybody seen The Book of Eli? It is a good movie. I don’t want to spoil it for any of you in case you haven’t seen it, but a quick synopsis is that Eli was this guy that was living in they call it a post-nuclear war America. It is kind of an apocalyptic end-of-the-world-type scenario. The movie takes place about 30 years after the nuclear war or whatever happened. Eli, played by Denzel Washington, is on this mission to cross America from the East coast to the West and he is not sure why. It is just that somebody told him, God, a spirit, or somebody, told him that he needs to just travel west. Basically he starts heading west and the only things he takes with him are some minor supplies and minor mementos from the 90s, and a knife, some guns, and some ammunition. In addition to that, he has what is believed to be the last remaining copy of the Bible, particularly the King James Bible.
The move is the unfolding of him walking across America and because it is a movie that is post-nuclear war, there is a lot of chaos going on. I don’t know if you ever saw Road Warrior but it is kind of that type of scenario. He is going through the barren parts of the country encountering all these really rough people that manage to survive but really are up to no good. He encounters these bandits that are trying to take what he has. He encounters people that are trying to kill him. He encounters people that are actually trying to eat him. Remember that scene? It is not a family friendly movie. It is not G-rated. In fact, it is R-rated.
In the middle of that movie, you get introduced to a new character; I think his name is Carnegie. This is a man who has somehow managed to survive in this apocalyptic time and he has decided he wants to set up his own town and hopefully grow into a city and then take over America. He has these bad characters surrounding him, and he has everything he needs to get this new town going except he is missing one thing: the only remaining copy of the King James Bible. The only Bible that exists in America at the time. He is not interested in killing Denzel Washington. He is interested in what he has. He is interested in this Bible that he has because he believes, even though he is evil, he knows that the Bible holds this unique power. He knows that the Bible holds words of wisdom. He knows that the Bible holds the ultimate truth and the ultimate source of life so he does everything he can to get his hands on that Bible. I am going to stop right there in case you decide to watch the movie. I do warn you that it is an R-rated movie. While I don’t make it a habit of going to R-rated movies, it is probably one of the best secular R-rated movies that has a spiritual theme. It is phenomenal because by the end of the movie you can’t help but have an exalted view of God’s word. In fact, that movie motivated me to go back and study the word deeper and actually begin to memorize large chunks of the Bible. So that is the background of the movie The Book of Eli.
Anyway, I began to reflect on what if that were to happen today. What if there was some sort of a nuclear war and all the books were burned and all of them were destroyed including the Bibles? How would we view the last remaining Bible on earth? Would we value it as much as Eli did or even as much as Carnegie did? Would we see it as the ultimate source of truth and life and power? Power for living. Would we see that? I am not sure about any of you but I do know that the degree that we see it as a source of power, life and truth is directly correlated with the degree that we are willing to study it and to go deep into the word.
That is what we are going to look at today. We are going to look at a few characters from the Old and the New Testament to see people that are really interested in studying the word. We are going to look actually at a true character. It is a character called Ezra. Ezra is a true character from the sixth century B.C. He was actually a priest who had been taken off into captivity and because he was someone who was not willing to go along with the norms of the pagan world of Babylonia but to stay true to the word of God, to stay true to the scriptures. God rewarded him as the one who would bring spiritual reform back to Israel when they returned back to Jerusalem. He was put in charge of basically putting the people back on track. We know that God’s hand was upon him because it says actually in the book of Ezra 7:9-10, “He had begun his journey from Babylon on the first day of the first month, and he arrived in Jerusalem on the first day of the fifth month, for the gracious hand of his God was on him. For Ezra had devoted himself to the study and observance of the Law of the LORD, and to teaching its decrees and laws in Israel.” When he speaks of the decrees and the laws, he is talking about the early books of the Old Testament. Some would say it is the first five books and maybe some of the books of the prophets but that would be the law that he is referring to. Really what we see here is a priest that was in many ways the first true disciple or actually discipler because he did the exact thing that we are trying to teach everybody to do here; to study the word; to observe the word, which means apply or obey the commandments and then do the same and teach others. Ezra was a priest that was willing to do that. I can see how some people could read this and say well the guy was a priest and that is what priests do right? Priests and pastors are paid to study the word. They are paid to go deep into the word. They should be practicing what they preach and then they should be teaching what they preach. But I want to stop right there and say, if you buy into that, you will never ever experience deep-rooted discipleship because you are relying on somebody else to read the word and to spoon feed the word to you. I hate to pick on the Catholics but I think I can get away with it because I was raised Catholic. Like my father said, once a Catholic always a Catholic, and I can show you my baptism certificate to prove it so I can say what I want to say. I can talk as a Catholic because I experienced a lot growing up in the Catholic faith. One thing I did experience was that we didn’t read the Bible. Can anybody relate to that? I don’t think we owned a Bible. My dad went to church every Sunday but we didn’t ever read the Bible. Because that was the priest’s job. You go to church on Sunday and he gives you the homily and you get a nice little thought and you leave. That is not a good thing. Once you make the Bible the exclusive domain of a priest or a pastor, you will never experience deep-rooted discipleship. You will never experience it. That is why it is important that you understand from the very onset that the Bible is your Bible. It is not Chuck’s Bible. It is not the priest’s Bible. It is your Bible so you need to have your own personal Bible. When I say personal Bible, it is yours. A Bible that you feel comfortable writing in, marking on, marking the pages, spilling coffee on, writing the sermons notes on, whatever you want. You need your own personal Bible because that is your primary tool for discipleship. If you don’t have one, we will figure out how to get you one, but you need to have a copy of the Bible or several copies of the Bible because those are your primary tools for discipleship. That is what we learn from Ezra is that it is not just the domain of a few select people. The Bible is for the people. It is a tool for the people.
Then we jump over to the New Testament and we see another group of people who really enjoyed studying the word. These people were known as the Bereans because they were from the city of Berea. A little bit of background on that. Some of you are familiar with the apostle Paul. We talked about him last week. The apostle Paul had what they would call a Damascus Road experience where he encountered the living Christ on the road to Damascus. When he was actually going to persecute Christians, Jesus encountered him and said why are you doing this? Why are you persecuting me? And he blinded him and the story goes for several days and then he spent some time with different people and after a few years, God sent him to begin to start the missionary journeys all across Asia and Europe and those places. In this particular section in the book of Acts about 17, Paul is on his second missionary journey. He is traveling through the area called Macedonia. I am terrible with general geography, and not an expert in biblical lands geography, but Macedonia I believe is a little bit north of Greece. It is a huge area up there. Paul is traveling through this area and what he would do is, as he traveled through, he would think about if I am trying to get this message out there about the risen Christ, where is the most logical place to go? He would go to the synagogue because the synagogue was basically where the Jewish people met to discuss the word. Paul was a Jew. He was a smart Jew who was a scholar so he would be accepted into these synagogues. The synagogue was really just a Jewish church. They would sing hymns. They would do prayers. They would love to roll out the big scrolls because they didn’t have the regular Bible. They had these big scrolls they would roll out and they would invite people to come in and basically expound on them to teach on those particular scrolls. So Paul would go into these areas and he would go into these synagogues and sometimes the reception would be good and they would listen to him and sometimes it would be awful and they would run him out of town. In this particular case, in Acts 17 the first few verses, he is going through Thessalonica, a major city in Macedonia, and he goes into the synagogue and starts teaching. After about three days, he has persuaded the people that Jesus was mentioned in the Old Testament. He tied the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ back to their Old Testament scriptures. It says that many people were persuaded and basically began to follow Jesus at that time. Some people got wind of this and started a riot and started to stir things up and before they knew it Paul and his buddy Silas were run out of town. Actually they got out of town before they were killed, and they ended up in the city of Berea.
Berea was very similar. In fact, if you read on in chapter 17 of Acts, you see that Paul’s approach was basically the same. He would go into a synagogue. He would unroll the scrolls the talk about it and then the people were convinced and some of them would follow Christ. But there was something very different about the Bereans. The Bereans were considered a special breed of Jewish people. We see why. They didn’t take everything that Paul said on face value. What they did was they looked at the scriptures themselves. We see that actually in Acts 17:11 where it says “The Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians but they received the message with great eagerness and examined the scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. Many of the Jews believed as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men.” The only difference between the Thessalonians and the Bereans was that one line. They took it “with greater eagerness and examined the scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Now because Paul was a Jewish scholar, I would suspect that Paul could get very offended by this. He was a smart guy. He just thought I will go through town and go in the synagogues and of course they are going to receive what I said. Why wouldn’t they? I am a scholar. But the Bereans said I don’t think so. Give us some time. Give us a few days Paul and we are going to open up the scrolls and we are going to study the scriptures ourselves. I don’t think this offended Paul at all. I think he was very pleased about it. He was very encouraged about it and that is why he says they are more noble. They are of a higher status because they didn’t take what Paul said on face value. They said I am going to dig in and I want to find out about this myself. I want to prove it and that is what they did. The reason Paul would think this is such a good thing is because you have to remember that we are in the first century when the church is just kicking off. You have this thing called Christianity, which at that point was considered a cult of Judaism, starting up and you have all these people that are going to be coming and questioning it. What do you mean Jesus is in the Old Testament? I don’t see it. Based on who they are talking to, they may be convinced or they may not be.
Let’s say there are people coming through and they come across the church in Thessalonica. In this particular situation, if this is true, when somebody comes through and they begin to question the teachings about Jesus being prophesized in the Old Testament and somebody says prove it to me Mr. Thessalonian, he is going to say I am not sure I can. Paul spoke here a couple times and he did a pretty good job. He had this certain personality, this certain rhetoric about him. He was a very skilled orator. He was a very good spokesman. I remember talking about something like this. He actually had some nice power point slides and they went back to Ezra or Eli or something like that and even showed a movie clip or something like that but I really can’t remember where I saw it. On the other hand, the guy goes to the Bereans and says Mr. Berean you tell me that Jesus is in the scripture. You show me. He says yeah, come on. I’ll meet you for lunch. We’ll roll out those scrolls and we will dig deep into those scriptures and we will examine it and I will show you exactly where the scriptures point out Jesus starting in Genesis and going to Zachariah and going to Isaiah and all the way through. I will demonstrate that Jesus was the messiah that had to die and had to be raised from the dead. I will show it to you. That is why the Bereans got the recognition. They were the noble ones.
Fast forward about 2,000 years about this time. I stand here today and I say it is really nice for you people to come out and hear me at this ungodly hour in the morning. I know there are other places you would rather be. I think there are a lot of places you would rather be, but I appreciate you coming out. Because I really appreciate that, I hope you understand that I do my absolute best to do my homework and to do my research before I come and preach because I take it very seriously. One of my fears is that I would proclaim something as true when it is false. Especially if I think that someone might even act on what I say. I want to correctly handle the word of truth but saying that, I am just a flawed human too. I mess up. Sometimes I say things that aren’t 100% true. It is not that I am trying to trip you up like I did with The Book of Eli but sometimes as you know I kind of preach off the cuff because I don’t preach from a manuscript. I know what I am going to say, but I don’t preach from a manuscript so I can inject things as I preach. Sometimes those things haven’t been researched very well and so sometimes I say things that just aren’t 100% true. Again, it’s not the intention to defraud. It is just sometimes innocent facts. Take for instance last Sunday. I was preaching on the value of worship. I talked about this idea of communion and I talked about how Paul says in Corinthians “What I receive from the Lord I pass on to you…” and goes on and on and on. I made a comment that said Paul must have received it in a spiritual sense from Jesus because Paul wasn’t alive when Jesus was. That is flat out false. He was. But it was like an off-the-cuff comment and I just said it without doing my homework. It is funny because only one person caught me in that. Granted there might have been other people that caught me and just though Chuck had too much coffee or not enough sleep or a combination of both, so I am not going to challenge him on that. But I imagine that with a lot of people it just went right by them. It went right by them maybe because they weren’t listening or maybe because they just didn’t really know. Because I am up here and I am the expert so what I say is true all the time right? Wrong.
But all kidding aside, those are just trivial facts that really probably don’t mean a lot. But let’s say my intention was to defraud. My intention was to deceive. Like maybe the guy in the movie, Carnegie, my intention is to use the Bible as a tool of spiritual abuse. I want to use this as a way to manipulate people. I want to use it as a way to get ahold of their minds and really mess with them. I could do that because a lot of you don’t know the word. You don’t. So if I was going to do that, it would be very easy. In fact, there are a lot of preachers out there doing that. Their motives are not pure because they are dealing with so many insecurities that their whole thing is about power and status and control. If you have an intentional distortion of the Bible and a charismatic personality, and by charismatic I mean someone who has the personality to draw people in just because of their personality, and you take those two together and at a minimum you have a highly dysfunctional church. At a maximum you have a deadly cult.
How many of you are old enough to remember a guy by the name of Jim Jones? Jim Jones was not a good guy. He started out good. He started out as a preacher. In fact, he has some loose ties to our particular movement by way of the Disciples of Christ. He was ordained in The Disciples of Christ denomination, then he decided to go on his own and break away from any sort of accountability and moved to California and he started The Peoples Temple. People loved him. They flocked to him because he was very charismatic. He was a very good expositor of the word, and he did good things in the community. But after a while the family members started getting worried about him. They were worried about their family members because they felt that they were getting too drawn into this particular cult. So Jim Jones gets nervous and heads over to South America near Guyana and he sets up his own little town, Jonestown. And you remember what happened then. It was a great place to live. It was a great community. Everybody cared for each other. But then somebody got wind that they were sending over a senator. They were sending the CIA or the FBI to investigate him and what did he do? He brought out the Kool-Aid and he laced the Kool-Aid with cyanide and 900 people committed a mass suicide in 1978 in Jonestown. People are still talking about that today. What about the other guy? Remember David Koresh? Remember Waco 1993? David Koresh was another charismatic guy. A very likable guy. A good looking guy. He almost looked like John Denver. He was very charismatic and the same sort of thing. He started his own cult. He started distorting the word. He started attracting the followers. He ended up with his ranch in Waco, TX and people started getting wind that there is something not right. The family members are not allowed to leave. What is going on here? So the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms came in and said you better get out of here or we are going to come in. What did he do? He set the place on fire and burned 54 people to death plus 30 children. 1993, Waco, TX. It was a combination of a distortion of the word of God in a charismatic personality.
I don’t tell you that just to frighten you to keep you out of a cult. I don’t say you have to study the word because of that. I don’t say you have to study the word to answer trivial questions or even play stump the pastor. That is not the point of studying the word. But you do have to see the word as your ultimate source of truth; as your filter to take lies through and see what comes out and see how it meshes with the word. It is really not just about what pastors say; it is about what the world says. The world nowadays 24/7 is feeding all sorts of junk into the minds of everybody starting with the youngest child and to the oldest adult. 24/7 we have access to all this garbage. Some of it sounds good. All this stuff is appealing to certain parts of us that should be directed towards God. It appeals to our base desires of food and alcohol and sex or whatever. It sounds good, but it is a lie. There are messages that appeal to our need for power and control and it all sounds good but it is a lie. There are messages that come through that appeal to our desire to really worship something. It could be technology. It could be cars. It could be anything. It could be celebrities. The idea of worshiping something when our worship should be directed by God.
We look at the third character that enjoyed the study of the word. He studied the word because he wanted to be able to filter out the lies of the devil basically. The lies of the world. And that is Jesus. I don’t have time to go into the passage really deeply, but if you are familiar with Matthew 4 Jesus was just coming off his baptism. If you have ever been baptized up here you know it is a very spiritual high. But I always warn people that when you come out of that spiritual high anticipate that you are going to get hit with a low real quick. You are going to get all these questions and doubts and things. Jesus knew that and he went out in the desert and he was very vulnerable because he was fasting and praying. After 40 days the devil shows up and decides he is going to mess with his mind. He says if you are really that hungry turn those rocks into bread. What does Jesus say? In Matthew 4:4 he says: “Man does not live by bread alone but every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Then the devil is frustrated so he says how about this? I am going to take you up to the top of the temple and I want you to put on a little show for the people. How about you just jump off the temple and the word says that angels will protect you and land you safely. Jesus says in Matthew 4:7 “It is written, do not put the Lord your God to a test.” Then he goes on to a third. He takes him to the highest mountain and he shows him all the kingdoms of the world and says, if you just worship me, I will give you everything. Jesus says in Matthew 4:10 “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.’” What was Jesus doing? He was quoting scripture. If you know the word and you look at all those little indentations and you check those little references you would see that they all point back to a book that very few of us even understand or could find let alone quote from and that is the book of Deuteronomy. Jesus was quoting. Those three answers came from the book of Deuteronomy. He knew the scripture. He studied the scripture since a very young age. Not simply because he was the Son of God. It is that he was a student of the word. If Jesus can use one book of the Bible to filter out all the lies of the devil, what can we do with 66 books? The Bible isn’t one book. It is 66 books spread out over 1400 years by 40 authors. That is really a very powerful and useful book.
In fact, we see this in the final verse. It comes out of Paul’s letter to Timothy. Timothy you may recall was kind of a disciple of Paul. Timothy was a young guy. We don’t know how young, but Paul was so impressed with his knowledge of the word and his just maturity that he would put him in charge of the startup churches. Timothy being a young guy it wasn’t that easy. He was forcing all sorts of outside influence. He was facing all sorts of Jews that were upset. New Christians that didn’t know how to act. Pagans coming in. He was dealing with all sorts of divisions and all sorts of things going on in the church. People being self-centered and that sort of thing. So he would get frustrated. Paul would correspond back and forth in these letters and try to encourage him. In this one particular letter, he says listen Timothy; remember what you learned since you were a little boy. Remember the word. Hold on to that stuff because that is the source of life. That is the source of truth. That is the tool that is going to get you through these hard times as you begin to deal with all those outsiders coming in. And we see that clearly in this in 2 Timothy 3:16 that says “Just remember this; that all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” This is important. It is an interesting statement because he is saying it is God-breathed. Some translations say God-inspired. What does that mean? To be honest we don’t know exactly what that means. It is a phrase that denominations and scholars have been arguing about for centuries. Does it mean that God directed the writing or held the hand of the writers? Does it mean that he breathed into them and it was just their influence on their personality? We don’t know. But we do know that the Bible is a special book. There is no other book that ever has existed like the Bible. As Christians, we do believe that it is God-breathed. Just like he breathed life into that first initial creation of man, he has done the same thing we believe to the word of God. The Bible is not some sort of a dead book with no meaning. It is living and active like it says in Hebrew it is like a “two-edged sword able to cut bone and marrow.” That is what we are dealing with. We are dealing with a powerful book and an inspired book and it had to be inspired because the one true God wanted to make sure we got His story straight.
What we see in the bible is we see what is called revelation. There are several types of revelation. You have the outside revelation where you see around and you see in creation God has revealed himself in creation. We see that God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. That is called special revelation. Then we see that he has revealed himself in the word of God and that is special revelation and that is what we have. What the word revelation means is basically like somebody pulling back the curtain so we can see behind it. And what we see behind it when we open up that curtain and the word of God, we see God’s complete plan of redemption for mankind. Starting from Genesis all the way to Revelation one continued progressive story of God bringing his people back home and smacked right in the middle of it is a guy by the name of Jesus. Jesus is the one who is smacked right in the middle of the Bible. He is the one that has spoken out in the Old Testament and spoken out in the last book in Revelation. He is the one that stands between. He is the one that holds the entire word together. Yes the word of God is inspired in an amazing way with the power to change lives. We study the Bible because we know that. But not only do we study it because it tells us about God and Jesus but it just reveals so much about ourselves. Amazing things about ourselves. You see we have all these stories. We have all these stories. We have hundreds of characters starting from Adam and Eve back in Genesis and going all the way to the Revelation with John. We have all these people going through and we begin to see their foibles. We begin to see the good, the bad, and the ugly in these particular people. We don’t just stand back as outside observers saying look what they did. They are meant to be a reflection on us. They are meant to show us who we are and our failings and our weaknesses and our triumphs and how to be encouraged by God. The Bible is just one long story. It is His story from Genesis to Revelation of the redemption of man and a great tool to be able to truly become disciples. That is what he is saying here. “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching…” For spending the time and standing up before people and teaching them. Kind of what I am doing now. It is also a good tool for rebuking. Some people need an occasional rebuke. Rebuke is basically saying why did you do this thing and why did you say this thing. That is inconsistent with where you are. People get nervous about saying something to somebody else. That is none of my business. It is your business if it is a brother or sister in Christ. You have a right to speak in somebody’s life as long as you are speaking the truth in love out of concern with an idea of restoring them back to their identity. We will talk about that when we talk more about community. You rebuke, you correct which means I am walking down this way and the person is saying maybe you better take this road because this road is not working out for you very well. Finally, you basically use the God-inspired word to equip them. To equip them for what? For every good work. Or another way of saying it is to bear good fruit. That is why it is the tool. It is so that we can have the tool that we need to go deep into discipleship and to produce good fruit and good works that will last.
In closing, I guess you have figured out by now my point is you need to study the word. At the same time, I know there are probably half of you here that say I would love to but I really don’t know how to do that so I guess I am off the hook. False. I don’t let people off the hook very easily. That is why every week we are doing these values. That is why I am putting the list in there. Opportunities for you to be a disciple or be discipled by somebody else. Opportunities for you to experience community and worship. Now I know there are some people that just don’t know how to study the word. I want to take away that excuse. In your bulletin there is an insert. If you didn’t get one, pick one up on the way out if you want. There is a survey. It is called a Bible study survey. It is not a trick question. Basically all I want to do is find out if you are interested in learning how to study the Bible. I am willing to put the time in to develop a class or a series of classes to teach you how to study the Bible so that you know how to do it and it is really not that complicated. There are a lot of basic tools. Once you get the basics, you will just be running down the road, but you have to take the time to learn how to study, so I want to find out how many people want to study before I put the time into it. Because, frankly, my time is tied up right now, but I would love to do a class like this but I am not going to do it unless I have an interest there; unless people really want to learn. If you decide you want to do that, fill out the survey. Even if you don’t, fill it out so I know and then drop it in the offering plate.
In close, we think about this idea of valuing the word of God; of seeing it as the ultimate source of truth, life, and even power for living. If we truly want to value the word of God or believe we value the word of God, then we demonstrate it by our willingness to study. To be like Eli in the movie or Ezra or the Bereans who loved to crack open their Bible and study it or even like Paul or Timothy or even Jesus. We have to be like that and we have to be willing to roll up our sleeves, sit down with a group of people, and just wrestle with the word of God so that we can begin to experience a better understanding of the scripture. As we do it, before long, we are going to know we are equipped to go out there and begin to bear good fruit not only in the church but in our homes, our families, our schools, and even our community. Fruit that will last and we will be able to do that because we truly have taken the time to study God’s word and practice deep-rooted discipleship.
