Sin is a plague, yea, the greatest and most infectious plague in the world; and yet, ah! how few are there that tremble at it, that keep at a distance from it! —Thomas Brooks
The above quote has absolutely nothing to do with what is really on my mind, but it is a very good thing to think about, isn’t it?
What is really on my mind today is something Paul wrote in the 3rd chapter of Philippians. In verses 7 – 11 Paul says,
But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
The part I want to focus in on is the first part of verse 10 where Paul states, “that I may know him.” When you think about the fact that Paul had his salvation experience while on the road to Damascus over 25 years prior to writing this, isn’t it amazing that he makes the statement that he is still in the process of “knowing” Jesus? Maybe I’m overly cynical, but it seems like in today’s age, within a week or two of a person’s salvation experience, they have it all figured out. Yes, I do admit that I am being overly cynical, but, it does seem that what Paul considered to be a lifelong pursuit is not sought as a first course today. If anything, it is more of an afterthought.
One of the marks of what you are passionate about in life is what you pursue. Is Jesus the first pursuit every day? Do you take the time to read the Word? Do you open your heart to pray over the Word so that it might be burned into your soul? Do you think about God and all that He has blessed you with throughout the day? If He is not a large part of your thought life; a large part of your reading life; a large part of your praying life, then maybe the sin talked about in the quote above is closer than you think.
2 Timothy 2:15
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.
The Bible is full of what are known as “Imperatives” and “Indicatives”. You can not read the Bible for very long without coming to grips with that. You may not realize what they are, but you certainly understand the implications. We use them all the time without thinking about them. What do these words mean? Well, an Imperative, basically, is a command or direction to do something. An Indicative, on the other hand, is a statement informing us of an accomplished task.
An example would be something like this. You turn to your 8 year old and tell them that if they clean up their room, you will allow them to watch TV for 30 minutes. Or you say to your 18 year old, if you want to take the car out on Friday night, you need to mow the yard. You are telling them what you will do (because you have the provision to do so) if they will do what you ask. They are required (the Imperative) to do something and by doing so, will receive from you something (the Indicative) they desire.
So, let me lay it out for you in just one verse from Ephesians. Ephesians 4:32 states:
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
The Imperative in the above passage can be broken down to the fact that we should live changed lives towards others. The Indicative is summed up in the last part of the verse where we are told that we can live a changed life because, “God in Christ forgave you.”
So, what does this have to do with the title? Well, if you don’t study the Bible to find the little snippets like Ephesians 4:32, you probably won’t be much of a Christian. Now, I realize that that is a bold statement. But, go back to my lead off passage. The Imperative is to, “do your best to present (show) yourself to God as one approved,” and the Indicative is that we do that by “rightly handling the word of truth.” Looking at this passage from a negative standpoint, it indicates that “if you don’t handle the word of God by studying it, you won’t be able to present yourself to God as one approved.” This can also be expressed positively, “if you rightly handle (study” the Word of God) you will be able to present yourself as one approved before God. Two ways of looking at the same thing.
So, this leads me to something I listened to this morning. As best as I can tell, what I transcribed came from the sermon entitled Call of Duty 2 by Eric Dykstra from The Crossing located in Elk River, MN. While I am not totally sure of what the title of the sermon is, it was featured on Pirate Christian Radio and the link to the podcast is located here. If you don’t care to listen to the whole broadcast, fast forward to around the 34 minute mark and listen for the next 10 minutes or so. I did not transcribe the whole thing, just a portion. So, I do encourage you to listen in for yourself to make sure I did not take what Mr. Dykstra said to his congregation out of context. It is a sermon that is dealing with the things that distract us from Jesus. Here is the portion I transcribed:
We end up sidetracked from what God has called us too so easily, which is supposed to be Jesus. We know this in relationship to bad things. Bad things distract us. Everybody understands that sexual misconduct will distract you from following God, right? It’s going to mess you up. Addictions are going to distract you, it’s going to get you sidetracked from following God. Makes sense, right? Bitterness, anger, gossip, gonna get you sidetracked from following God. Everybody gets the fact that bad things distract us. But, you know what, I don’t think it’s just bad things that distract us, most of the time I think it’s good things that distract us. Good things that aren’t the main thing become bad things. Let me just talk about that for a second. What are some good things that jack us up and get us off focus from Christ? How about this one; Learning the Bible. Is it a good idea, church people in here, to learn the bible? Absolutely, you should learn the bible, you should know your faith, you should figure that out. But seriously, there are so many church people in particular that get so caught up in, “What’s this verse saying,” “what is this all about” and their nose is in the book all the time and now they are theology nerds. And they are talking about stuff that nobody else on planet earth cares at all about. And here is what I have to tell you, you are out of focus.
This was very confusing to me. It sounds like he is saying that “learning the Bible” causes us to be distracted. Then he says that we should learn the bible because it will lead us to know what we believe. But then he says that we shouldn’t learn it too much because we will become theology nerds who are out of focus. Now, in light of 2 Timothy 2:15, Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit tells Timothy to show himself approved to God by handling (studying) the Word of God, which in Timothy’s case was the Old Testament Canon that was know in that time (The New Testament that we have today was not part of the Bible we have today).
So, what are we to believe by what I have written so far? Are we to do what Scripture tells us, or follow the confusing double speak brought forth by Eric Dykstra, and believe me when I say this, Dykstra is not alone in saying stuff like this. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more common to hear pastors of church’s that are running thousands on the weekend say very similar things. I kind of have my own hypothesis about this and that is that the pastors themselves are only passing along what they practice.
Since we live in a relativistic day and age, it is frowned upon to call things out in a black and white fashion. But, let someone do you wrong and things become very absolute in your mind! The moment you have the attitude that what someone has done to you is wrong, you have crossed out of relativism and into an absolute, intolerable (in our modern age) mindset. No way, you might say. Let me clarify a bit. You might believe and say that you don’t think there is such a thing as right or wrong, there is just no way that there is a standard of what is morally right, that there is an no absolute truth. But you come home from vacation to find that your house has been broken into and your Plasma TV, your killer surround sound stereo, and several thousand dollars in jewelry are missing. I guarantee that your first thought isn’t, “well, I guess whoever took it needed it more than I did.” No, your first order of business is to call the police and file a stolen property report and hope that whoever broke in to your house left enough evidence that they are eventually caught. See, if you really had a “relativistic” world view that believed no one was right and no one was wrong, you would not do anything but just go on with life. The moment you have the thought that something “should” not or “ought” not to happen, you have just crossed out of relativism into an absolute mindset because, obviously, the person who stole your stuff didn’t think it was wrong. So, who are you to push your values on someone else?
So, having said that, let me ask you when is the last time you heard a pastor tell his congregation that, “The soul that sins shall die” (Ezekiel 18:20). Yes, there is forgiveness (just keep reading in Ezekiel 18), but we don’t want to call sin for what it is because doing that makes us look at a standard that we have to live up to. Maybe I’m reading into what Dykstra said, but it seems to me that he is saying we loose focus if we put our noses in The Book. If that is the case, then were does that leave us, what do we who call ourselves Christ followers hold as our standard? What exactly gives us focus. I’m of the opinion that “putting ones nose in The Book” helps clarify ones focus. To me, it sounds like Eric Dykstra is telling his congregation that really digging into the Bible will lead us to distraction, and that is not a good thing. If that is the case, he doesn’t seem to give any suggestion as to what we are to really look towards.
John Piper posted a tweet yesterday that I think pretty much sums it up. He said: “A plea to all Christian book reviewers. Only the Bible is a “must read”. Really. Let’s drop this phrase forever. Seriously.”
Something has to be the standard. I choose to be what Eric Dykstra calls a “Theology Nerd” over the alternative. I’ll take the Bible as my standard and gladly wear the title, Theology Nerd.
Luke, the physician, not only wrote The Gospel of Luke, but also The Book of Acts. A careful reading of either of these books shows that Luke did quite a lot of investigative homework. At times he was right in the thick of the action he wrote about and at other times he went back to the sources and did interviews with people who had been there and personally seen the things that Luke included in his narratives, which later became a part of the New Testament.
The Book of Acts is like an action adventure novel. In it, Luke captured highlights of the early church that spans from the time right after Jesus’ resurrection to somewhere around the year 62 AD. This morning we studied one of the highlights that happened during the very early, formative days of the Church that Jesus built through the boldness of the Apostles Peter and John. The back story begins in Acts 3. Peter and John were on their way to the temple to pray and came across a man who had been crippled all his life. In that day, there was no welfare system to help take care of someone like this man, so he was left to beg for anything he could get from the people passing by to sustain his life. As Peter and John walked by, the man asked them to help him out. Unfortunately, neither Peter nor John had any cash on them, so they reached down, took the man by the hand and told him to rise up and walk in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth (Acts 3:6).
This was an amazing thing to all who saw it because all the people recognized the man and knew that he had sat for years at the gate, unable to walk. But now he was walking, and even leaping in praise to God. Peter, who not long before denied even knowing Jesus Christ, took the opportunity to preach the Gospel, the good news of all that God has done to redeem fallen, sinful man, through the life, death and resurrection of His son Jesus Christ, to the crowd. As the Apostles were speaking, the priests, the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came and arrested them because they were annoyed that the Apostles were teaching the people and proclaiming Jesus was resurrected from the dead.
The next day, Peter and John were hauled before the ruling council of Israel. This council was composed of 71 ruling elders that were allowed to rule the nation of Israel by the occupying Roman super-power of that day. They had temporal power over the nation and their recommendations carried quite a lot of weight, but all final decisions were made by the Romans. During a council investigation, the procedure was to bring the accused into the middle of all the council member who were arrayed in a semi-circle around the accused. According to the Intervarsity Press Commentary on the Book of Acts, . . . the council wanted to know by what kind of power (Acts 4:7) or in what kind of name Peter and John had healed the beggar. Thus, the council charged with distinguishing between truth and error in Jewish religion exercised its prerogative to test the basis for this healing. Their interrogation, however, was not unprejudiced. The emphatic placement of you in the question asked in Acts 4:7 lets us know the contempt with which they hold these unschooled, ordinary men.
“Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, ‘Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead – by him this man is standing before you all’” (Acts 4:8-10). I’m sure that Peter and John were well aware that the Pharisees hated Jesus because of his harsh words towards them, and that the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection. So, by this BOLD statement, the Apostles declared war against the council. In today’s vernacular, they certainly didn’t try to win them over to their side of the argument.
One of the questions asked this weekend during the 1st Bold Sermon was, “Why don’t we see God working today like we read about in the book of Acts?” The answer, at least in my opinion is that we do not have the boldness that we are exposed to when we read about men like the Apostles and others mentioned later in the Book of Acts. Boldness, by definition, is behavior born out of belief. This belief that leads to boldness is born out of knowing who our God is. The way that we begin to know who our God is, is by spending time in prayer and studying the word of God. This is not something that will happen by spending just five minutes a day in prayer or reading a verse or two. It is a lifetime of commitment he studying the word and praying that God will open our eyes to a deeper understanding of it.
This is exactly what happened with Peter and John when they stood before the council. Their boldness was related to the fact that they had spent time with Jesus and much time in prayer. Acts 4:13 brings this to light. Luke writes, “. . . now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognize that they had been with Jesus.” God gives ordinary people extraordinary boldness but this only comes through a deep relationship with Jesus Christ.
One of the last things that was brought out in the sermon this weekend was a circular graphic. At the top of the circle was the word “time” and that signified time spent in prayer and study the Word. This “time” then lead to an increase in “faith”, which in turn led to “boldness”, which led to “results” just like we read about in this passage from Acts chapter 3 and 4. But with the “results” the circle completed by going back to spending more time in prayer and study the Word and the cycle started all over again in a deeper way.
My challenge to you is to begin to spend more time in prayer and study of the word of God so that this boldness may be evident in your life because of the faith you have in who God is and what he has accomplished in the death, burial, and resurrection of his son Jesus Christ. With this boldness we can begin to see mighty things take place for the kingdom of God and more people ushered into salvation.
