Friday, November 09, 2007

The Good Book

"The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart," that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: that if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, "Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame." For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile--the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"

But not all the Israelites accepted the good news. For Isaiah says, "Lord, who has believed our message?" Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ (Romans 10:8b-17).

We take the Bible for granted.

Publishers tell us that there are more copies of the Bible in print than any other book. Most Christian homes have at least one Bible in them, and many have two or more copies of the Good Book stashed away someplace. And even if your home doesn’t have a Bible, every bookstore sells them; every church has stacks of them available for your use.

With so many Bibles surrounding us, let me ask you: how often do you pick a Bible up and read from it? Do you read a few verses every day? Do you open a Bible and read from it at least once a week? Are you in the habit of picking up a Bible at least once a month?

Do you know where your Bible is? What kind of books or magazines is it piled together with? Are its pages creased from heavy use? Is there dust on the cover?

When is the last time that you gave a Bible as a gift to someone that you cared about?

If we are honest with God and with ourselves, we must admit that we take His Holy Scriptures far too much for granted. God has blessed our society with overwhelming access to His Book of Life. There may be parishes where there is no pastor, or where he can only preach every other week because he is serving such a large area, but there is no place in our country where God has not laid out His Word for our use. We have such easy access to the written testimony about our Lord Jesus that we often regard its presence in our living rooms as no more remarkable than having a newspaper or a TV Guide on the coffee table.

My friend, it wasn’t always so.

Prior to the creation of the printing press in Martin Luther’s time, people did not have copies of the Scriptures in their homes. Before Gutenberg’s wonderful invention, every copy of God’s word had to be copied by hand, making the Bible a rare and expensive book. Only churches had copies of these precious writings; if you wanted to hear God’s Word, you could only do so in a church; in fact, some churches went so far as to chain their Bibles to the reading stand to prevent their being stolen!

Language was another problem. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of the Jews, while the New Testament was written in Greek, the language that was spoken by most people who lived near the Mediterranean Sea. Eventually all of the Bible was translated into Latin, the official language of the Roman Empire, and all church Bibles were copied from this Latin translation for a thousand years and more. But Latin was not the language of most Europeans; if you were German or Scandinavian or English or Russian, you could not read the Latin edition of the Bible. And if your priest followed the custom of reading the Scriptures in Latin during worship, you could live your entire life as a Christian without ever hearing Jesus speak to you directly in words that you could understand.

Think of it: living your whole life and never hearing Jesus say, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16). Imagine never hearing our Lord promise, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). Try to picture a life without the words "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die" (John 11:25-26). Imagine going to a funeral and being unable to understand the words "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want…" (Psalm 23:1)

Sermons can be wonderful things. Sermons take God’s teachings and break them down for us, to help us understand the Bible better. And God’s people in Germany, Scandinavia, England and Russia understood the sermons of the priests; they were hearing about the promises of God in their own languages.

But all people are tainted with sin. Our fallen nature clouds our reason, makes our understanding imperfect. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter three, the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. Even Paul, blessed as he was with the Holy Spirit, had to write Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully (1 Corinthians 13:12). Until we are freed of sin by death in Christ, every thing we think, say and do is corrupted by sin. This is as true for pastors as it is for anyone else. Every pastor studies the Scriptures and prays to the Holy Spirit for guidance in writing a sermon that is free from all error, but realistically all of us who preach know that at times we make mistakes, because like you we are sinners. And thus we can never assume that our sermons give perfect treatment to God’s perfect Word.

But God’s Book of the Word is different. Peter tells us, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:20-21). This is why Paul writes 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 (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Unlike sermons which are written by sinful men, the Bible is God’s own words set down by those who wrote under the authority and power of the Holy Spirit of God. Unlike human sermons, God’s Holy Scriptures are perfect and filled with life.

Speaking about the written word of God, Jesus said these are the Scriptures that testify about me (John 5:39). Near the end of his Gospel, John writes Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. This is the one and only purpose of the Holy Scriptures—to reveal the Lord of Life to us, so that we might believe that He died to save us from our sins and rose from the dead to take us to be with Him in heaven. This is the only record of the great work that God has done for us, and the only place where His wonderful promise of salvation is recorded for our peace of mind. Because of the Bible’s unique and eternal importance, the Holy Spirit has ensured that the Bible makes no mistakes in bringing God’s words to us.

Imperfect sermons were a significant problem in Luther’s time. The clergy of the church were making many mistakes in their preaching and teaching, and this was why Luther wanted the Bible to be translated into German. Luther believed that if the people could read the Word of God for themselves, they would be able to tell when a preacher made a statement in error; but without access to God’s perfect Word, there was no way for a believer to be able to tell truth from falsehood.

With the introduction of the printing press, it was finally feasible to reproduce the Bible in large quantities. This new technology was used to get Luther’s German translation of the Bible into print, and ever since that time Protestants have continued the important work of translating God’s Holy Scriptures into the languages of people who are hungering to know Christ personally by hearing His words.

And how has humanity reacted to having the Word of God available to read at home? As was said earlier, more copies of the Bible have been printed than any other book in human history. The Bible is filled with the message of hope, peace and everlasting life; the Bible is filled with forgiving, sheltering love. The Bible is filled with truth. Such a book is a true Godsend to a world filled with despair, fighting, and death; a world that harbors grudges and encourages selfishness; a world where people don’t know right from wrong because they are ignorant of the truth.

We often take the Bible for granted, but many do not. A missionary from Russia recently spoke of how Stalin had Russian Bibles collected and burned, and how the Christians wrote down as many pieces of the Bible as they could from memory so that they could have the comfort of God’s Word and share it with others until the day came that complete Bibles could once again be obtained. Those Russian Christians treasured their Savior’s words so much that they committed large portions of the Bible to memory; how many Bible verses do you know by heart?

There is only one way to be freed of sin, only one way to find release from the mistakes of the past and be given a new start on life—through faith in Jesus, the Son of God. Paul tells us that the Bible is the means by which the Holy Spirit brings that faith to us: how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? … Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. This message of freedom from the curse of sin and restoration to the family of God is the best of news—we call it the Good News, the Gospel of Reconciliation. There is no message more wonderful than the message of the Bible; that is why Paul says, How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!

My friend, that is what mission work is—bringing God’s Good News to someone else. We do mission work when we support the translation of the Bible into another language. We do mission work when we support the Gideons in placing Bibles. We do mission work when we take a Bible to a friend who does not know Jesus and say: "I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. He’s done more to make me feel safe and contented than anyone I’ve ever known, and because I love you, I want to share Him with you." That is mission work that every one of us can do.

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