Be Intentional
#5 – Getting the Most Out of Your Bible
(Part 2)
Introduction
Two weeks ago, I gave a message about getting the most out of your Bible, and I included some tools to help you do that. I am out of the 7 Minutes with God brochure, but can get more – or you can pick it up at Anchors of Faith downtown. I can also get you copies of the application steps sheet I included in that bulletin.
As I got to thinking and praying since then, I sensed God nudging me to give another message, not on how to get into the Bible, which is what I did last time, but rather, on what you should expect to find as you explore the Word of God for yourself.
You can get some of that by coming here and listening, but you will never really possess the joy of discovery unless you do it yourself, asking God’s Holy Spirit to open your heart and mind to His Word.
The purpose of today’s message is to tell you some of the wonderful riches of the Bible you will discover as you make it more a part of your life.
The basis for this message is a passage printed at the top of your bulletin. I would ask that you read this aloud with me, okay?
2 Peter 1:3-4 –
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
I want to show you just a few of the wonderful treasures we gain from the Bible. We could go on forever about any of these, but I want to just give you some highlights of what you can gain from making the Bible a part of your life.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
From the Bible…
1. We gain knowledge:
Verse three tells us that it is our knowledge of Him that is the key to a life of godliness.
We gain that knowledge in at least three areas:
Of human life.
We learn that we are but a vapor and that we will spend way more time in eternity than we will on earth.
We learn that life is not always easy, because of the fall of man.
We learn that humans have inherited a sinful nature from Adam.
And we learn that we are God’s favorite and best creation, the objects of His love and concern.
Next, we learn…
Of God.
Among the numerous things we can learn about God is that He is the awesome Creator, who while holding all of creation in His hand, still can move to wipe the tear from our eye and rejoice in our victories in life.
We learn that He is a jealous and angry God, yet is full of love and compassion for those who call on Him.
We learn that He loves you so much He would rather die than spend eternity without you.
The Bible is full of information about the glory, holiness, justice, love, discipline, and all sorts of things about God.
You’ll just have to read the Bible to find out about it, I guess.
And we also learn…
Of eternity.
We learn that everyone will spend eternity in one of two places: heaven or hell.
Heaven is the home of those who call on Christ on earth, hell is for those who do not call on Christ on earth.
The Bible has many wonderful things to say about when we get to heaven. Read the New Testament letters and Revelation to get a glimpse of heaven. It’s awesome.
Just learning about human life, God, and eternity would take a lifetime. But remember what I’ve been saying lately:
The purpose of the Bible is not to inform, but to transform, and the knowledge you gain must be put into your life in such a way that the Holy Spirit can use it to make you more like Christ.
Well, let’s take a look at more of what the Bible has to offer. Not only do we gain knowledge, but…
2. We gain guidance:
The Bible is chock-full of practical, down to earth wisdom that anyone, anywhere can put into practice, and be better off than they are right now.
I want to discuss just three areas of guidance out of the multitudes of things we can find guidance on from the Scriptures. The first is…
Human relationships
I have often joked that instead of Shakespeare, high school and college students should be required to read How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.
Have any of you read that book? I’ve read it a number of times, and I plan on re-reading it in the future.
If you have read the book, you can see that Mr. Carnegie gets most of his principles for good relationships right out of the Bible. In fact, he quotes Scripture in a number of places.
Reading through the Bible we find awesome advice regarding family relationships, particularly husband and wife, and father and children.
We find that our lips and tongues can cause us great harm in our relationships.
One of my favorites from the book of Proverbs is that
PR 17:9 He who covers over an offense promotes love, but whoever repeats the matter separates close friends.
Any of you been guilty of bringing up someone’s past failures to them? Did it help? I doubt it.
I have tried to make it a practice to never do that. I have not always been perfect. But I can tell you that if we’ve hashed something over and we’ve settled it, that’s the last you will hear of it from me, unless you bring it up.
By the way, this doesn’t just mean when we are talking to the person face to face; it also means talking about someone about something long past.
Here’s another from Philippians 2:3-4 –
3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4 Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
If the church of Jesus Christ would put just that Scripture into practice, I’m convinced the world would be wonderfully transformed, and the church and Christians would not be looked at as a bunch of religious zealots filled with hate and hypocrisy, but rather as the church should be seen, the human manifestation of Jesus in the world.
Human relationships are meant to reflect the relationship we have with the Father. The sad fact of the matter is, that’s exactly the case.
If we treat people lousy, it’s because we have a lousy relationship with God.
Anyway, we could go on for years on just the guidance the Bible offers in the area of human relationships, but we need to move on to another area of guidance offered by the Bible, and that is in the area of…
Business practices and ethics
Did you know that the Bible has tons to say about how we do business and perform our labor?
It has stuff to say about employer and employee relationships and wages, taxes, customer service, and all sorts of stuff.
You know what I find rather discouraging? People who proclaim themselves to be Christians, yet disregard Biblical commands regarding business dealings.
When I was selling office furniture and machines, I had to be very careful to be completely honest with my customers, my vendors, and my bosses.
If something I had to offer did not meet the needs of the customer, I had to tell them that.
I didn’t always get the sale, but I knew they would be back, because they could trust me to be up front with them.
And more than that, I knew that I would be able to look them in the eye when they did come back, because I had nothing to hide.
The Bible tells us that God hates dishonest business dealings, but that He blesses honest ones.
If you’re looking to get ahead in whatever you do for a living, put Biblical practices into play, and you will succeed.
I know, I know. Sometimes doing this will mean that your competition will get ahead. But what’s the bottom line: getting ahead according to society’s standard or pleasing God?
If you focus on pleasing God by putting into practice what you find through getting into the Bible, you will get ahead, and you will never be out of work, because the integrity with which you operate will bring people to you.
God wants you to succeed; but it will only be according to His rules, not the world’s.
So gain guidance from the Bible regarding your business practices and ethics. You won’t lose. That’s a promise from God Himself.
The third area I want to cover today about the guidance we can gain from the Bible is the area of…
General life principles
This is just that we can learn to live a life that pleases God in all areas of life – work, play, relationships, speech, thought life, prayer, fellowship, leisure, and everything else.
You want to succeed in life? Live a life guided by the Bible.
Look back at the Scripture passage at the top of your bulletin:
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
Did you catch that part about “everything we need” for life and godliness? We gain that through our knowledge of God, which we gain through time in the Bible.
Let’s move on to the third thing we gain from the Bible, and that is…
3. We gain God’s promises.
Look again at verse 4 of our passage today:
Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
I tried to do some looking up how many promises God makes to His people in the pages of the Bible.
Some say there are over 7,000 promises we can claim from God in the Bible.
Well, I don’t know how accurate that figure is, but I want to highlight just three types of promises this morning – there are lots of others, but listen to these three. The first is…
His forgiveness now
If you have trusted in Jesus Christ to save you from your sins and give you a home in heaven, then you have forgiveness for all your past sins.
AND, you have access to forgiveness for your sins today. Just listen to the wonderful promise of 1 John 1:9, which many of you know:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
My point here is that if you are a Christian and have sinned, forgiveness is available for you, and it’s because of another promise we have from God, found in Lamentations 3:22-23 –
Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
Forgiveness is available not because of who we are, but because of who God is – He is compassionate to those who call on Him in love and faith.
If you’re a Christian, and you have not been calling on God for forgiveness, it’s for one of two reasons. Either you think you don’t need His forgiveness, or you don’t think God will give it.
Both of these are lies from the devil. If you think you don’t need God’s forgiveness for anything, just listen to 1 John 1:10 – the verse right after the one about forgiveness:
If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.
No one lives a perfect life before God, although those who have been filled with the Holy Spirit, being sanctified entirely by God have the power of God to say no to sin.
You need forgiveness. And God wants to grant it.
And God is not only willing to give that forgiveness, He’s waiting for you to confess your sin to Him, because He does not want your relationship with Him to be damaged and stunted.
Forgiveness of sins here on earth is a promise of God. Another area of promise from God is the promise of…
His presence and intervention now.
Let me just read one passage that describes this. There are lots more, but this is one of my favorites:
ISA 41:10 So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
Question: whose righteous right hand will hold you? God’s! In the chapter before this one, Isaiah 40, we find that God holds the whole universe together. I think He’s big enough to help us in our time of need.
He’s done it for me, more times than I can tell you, and I’m sure He’s done it more times than I even know.
Thomas Jefferson, for all his good qualities, lacked a Biblical understanding of God.
He came out with a version of the Bible that excluded all the miracles, because he just felt that a rational person could not believe in miracles. His version ends not with the triumphant coming of Christ as the victorious King of Kings, but rather, it ends with the crucifixion.
Not a lot of hope there, huh? He felt that God is just like a big clockmaker who winds the clock and just lets it run, never becoming involved in the lives of His humans.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Jesus tells us that God knows absolutely everything about us, that He hears and answers prayer, and that He is consumed with love for you as an individual.
He wants to be your all in all – He wants you to find your purpose not in this world, but in Him, because He loves you so much.
What a wonderful God we serve!
The third area of promise I want to touch on today is…
His presence in eternity.
Folks, I mentioned earlier that we will be living in eternity a lot longer than we will be living on earth. We will be living in eternity for...well, eternity!
And that’s not even the best part. The best part is that in all of that “time” we will be in the presence of the Lord.
In the presence of the Creator. Your Creator. The One who sacrificed His Son so you could be there with Him.
And all of your questions will be answered once and for all, because you will have all of eternity to ask Him, and He has all the time of eternity to listen.
You will be in the presence of unspeakable love. And you will have no choice but to respond to that love in adoration and worship at His feet.
That’s going to be awesome! I can’t wait until He calls me heavenward.
I hope you have that same anticipation. If you don’t, ask God to give it to you.
But you will gain it as you make the Bible more a part of your life.
There you have it. Among the untold riches of the Bible we find knowledge of human relationships, God, and eternity. We gain guidance for human relationships, business practices and ethics, and life in general, and we gain the promises of God, too numerous to count.
So what?
So…make the effort to dig out these treasures!
Approach the Scriptures with a sense of expectation and anticipation. Even the genealogies!
Listen to Matthew 1:1-17 and see what I mean:
1 A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham:
2 Abraham was the father of Isaac,
Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,
3 Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, (No way!)
4 Ram the father of Amminadab,
Amminadab the father of Nahshon,
Nahshon the father of Salmon, (Get out of town!)
5 Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse,
6 and Jesse the father of King David. (No kidding! That’s awesome!)
Now how many of you can tell me you read the genealogies like that? Why not start?
And that’s how you should approach the Word of God in general. Expecting to find something you never saw before, something that moves your very soul to love God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.
I want you to keep something in mind as you get into the Bible and this is very important to remember -
Remember: the Word of God is not a what – it’s a who: Jesus. John 1:1-3
He not only gives us the Bible, He opens our hearts and minds to understand it.
As we close I want to offer you an invitation and a challenge today:
First, if you have never trusted Christ as your Savior, to forgive you of your sins, give you a home in heaven, and to make you a new person born in His Spirit, I want to give you that opportunity right now.
Second, I want to challenge the rest of you to take some time today and open your Bible and just see what God has in store for you today.
Then do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. And I would challenge you to come up to me next Sunday and tell me that you did not come away from that time better for it.
Will you do that? Let’s pray.
