Can a collection of ancient writings still transform lives?

Michael Lockstampfor
Written By Michael Lockstampfor

WATCH

What We Believe, 2 of 11 from June 29th, 2025

"We know God and live for Him by practicing what He has written."

The Bible by Michael Lockstampfor (@miklocks)

SUMMARY

This sermon explores the nature, authority, and interpretation of the Bible as God's Word. It emphasizes that the Bible is God's chosen method of communication with humanity, containing diverse writings that reveal His character and actions throughout history. Pastor Michael stresses the importance of trusting, studying, and applying Scripture in our lives, guided by the Holy Spirit, to know God and live for Him.

Read a blog summary
 

REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  • 💬 How does our relationship with the Bible reflect our relationship with God?

  • 💬 How do our habits in the Word reflect gratitude for the work others have done to bring it to us?

  • 💬 What doubts prevent us from looking to God’s Word for guidance?

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Additional Articles

Additional Videos

  • PLEASE NOTE: The following transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.


    [Music]


    Well, hey, good morning, church. Good morning. And welcome to our neighbors. I'm going to start off, I don't know if you know this about me, I live on the edge of an existential crisis. And it depends on what question. But like most of the time, I'm like just questioning like how do we exist and how do we know that? And so my question as we're starting this morning is how do you know what you know? I'm gonna assume that there is a category of information that you know, but I want you to think about how you know the things that you think that you know. All right? So for instance, you may know what your name is, right? You hope, right? But how did you come to know what your name was? It was the name that your parents called you. Now, some of us were probably blessed with more than one name, and there was a name that our parents called us that nobody else was allowed to call us. Or we were cursed when our full name got uttered aloud. We had the first name and the middle name, and then we knew we are actually in real-life trouble, right? But what we learn, we learn from other people. We learn our name. How could you... How could you validate? Like, if you suddenly had the question of, like, what if I actually had a different name? What if I don't know what my real name is? What if the people that I grew up with have been lying to me this whole time? And what if my name is, in fact, Matt? Matt. I have a record of a birth certificate. I could go back to the documentation and see that my name is listed as Michael and my parents' name listed as Bernie and Leslie. I have omitted middle names for security reasons. Um, but like, like there's documentation. I go back and I can check, but then how do I know, how do I know that the government didn't just print off a sheet of paper? Cause they can just print whatever they want. They can literally print money. How do I know they didn't just print off an extra certificate that got fabricated? Somebody got, how do I know what I know? And can you see now why I live like on the edge of a black hole trying to figure out like what is reality? I have no idea, right? How do we know what we know? We all have to start somewhere and we all are to some degree dependent on what others have revealed to us. There's a whole category of questions, and this may be a step too far, but there's a whole category of questions that it has not even occurred to you to ask because you didn't know that you didn't know to ask the question. The category of the cloud of things that you know that you don't know is surrounded by a cloud of category of things that you don't know that you don't know to even be able to ask the question of. And so each of us is dependent to some degree on somebody kind of giving us a framework and revealing to us kind of how the world works. That's some of what we do in school. Now, for some of us, school was just a couple months ago. For some of us, it has been many moons since we were in school. But there was a time where you sat down and a teacher opened up a textbook and they told you, this is kind of how the world works. For us, we've learned... Well, I could get into examples, but then you're going to want to argue with me about the examples of the true nature of reality. We've got a lot to do today. The point that I want you to see is... that we're all dependent at some level of people telling us stuff, and that helps us to understand the world that we live in. Can we start there? All right, good. How would you, with your abilities to comprehend information, begin to understand something that you cannot see? If someone were to say, okay, there is this, or imagine, okay, hold on, let's do it even better. What if there was a person that you could not see, but you also could not hear them most of the time? How would you come to understand who that person is? Like, where would you even begin to start? If they were an invisible person, they only spoke when they wanted to speak. Like, where would you even start? And so the idea of religion, that we can understand something of God, who is an entity with a personality that speaks when he wants to, but I can't make him do anything. It's like, I'm going to need him to help me out. I'm going to need God to show me what he's like. I'm going to need, the theological term is revelation. I'm going to need him to reveal something of himself to me, and I'm dependent on him to do that. Can we start there-ish? Does that make sense? Okay, so we need God to tell us something about himself in order for us to be able to know anything about him. I don't have the ability to put him under a microscope and figure out what he is, and so I need him to tell me what that is. Now, he does this in two different ways. He communicates by the things that he does. If God exists and he does stuff and we exist within the world of the stuff that he made, we can learn some things about who he is and what he's like based on what he's made. Maybe, right? I tend to think of him as somebody who's incredibly creative, right? When I look at the diversity of the kinds of life that exist on our planet and all the different ways that it's structured together, and when I think about the irreducible minimum of the complexity on the cellular level of how we got all of the different varieties of what we got, like my imagination doesn't work like that. My imagination barely works to see and observe what he's made, much less to be the one who thought about how it ought to be. So I can learn that he's creative, but what good does that do for me? I'm going to need him to reveal something in particular. So the category, so the theological category that I'm talking about is called general revelation. There are things that all of us can kind of look at the world and think about God. So most of us have some kind of an understanding that when we're trying to fall asleep at night, we know implicitly there is a creator, he's creative, and he's more powerful than me. But that doesn't get us very far. What do we do then? Then we need another category of revelation that we call special revelation, where God communicates to us in a special and a particular way. All right? Are we tracking so far? Okay, that's all my preamble to us talking this morning about the Bible. Because we all are already dependent on revelation. We're all dependent on God to say something about himself in order for us to be able to know anything about him. And so this morning, as we're talking about who God is and what he's like, we're gonna talk about how he has chosen to communicate. God exists and God communicates. He doesn't just exist and hope that we figure it out. He didn't just set everything in motion and just be like, all right, I hope you guys don't burn the whole place down. Because, man, we totally would, right? Some days it feels like we are already, right? He made everything. He exists. He made stuff. And he communicates. And he communicates in a way to be understood, right? We communicate on our best days. We talk to one another, right? But how would we, like if we wanted to communicate in our language to something like a single cellular organism, we would have to figure out how we put our ideas and our thoughts into a language that that single cellular organism could understand, right? And so we've got infinite almighty creator of the universe who communicates in himself, but now he's got to figure out what's the best way to communicate with these simpler life forms that I've made to be like me. And him who, and I'm just assuming, that he knows everything and can see into every possible future decided the best way to communicate was to write a book. The easiest way for us to understand who God is and what he's like is through a book. Now, I don't know enough to argue with him about that, but I do want to talk about the book if we can do that this morning. Okay? Are we tracking? So this is part of a different kind of a series as we go through this summer. that we've called What We Believe. And we're going through the doctrinal statement. If you don't have one of these and you'd like one of them, I've got a couple here. There's some in the entryways. You're going out. If you want to pick one up, I'll just throw them down here on the thing. And I'm going to put everything up on the screen that we're going to need for the day. But if you want to take that home, that's kind of like what we're working through this summer. But as we do that, I don't know about you, but I would like to just stop and pray for a moment. I don't know what it is in me today that I just feel like I need a moment of silence. And so let's just take a few moments together, and I'll give you a few moments just to check in with God. If you pray for a few moments silently, and then I'll invite you to pray together with me the disciples' prayer. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. Amen. So in that document, this is called, this doctrinal statement is one that we share with our family of churches. It's called the Karis Commitment to Common Identity. And it's the worst name ever for a document. I don't know why they picked that, but that's what it is. CCCI, Karis Commitment to Common Identity. And if you're looking at the sheet, it's number four. What we're gonna talk about today is the paragraph number four on that document. I will read it to you, and then we're gonna break it down and kind of work through it. And so hopefully by the end of this, you'll be like, oh yeah, totally, I know exactly what that means. But let's start where we're gonna start. Okay, so this is what the Karis Commitment to Common Identity, our doctrinal statement, our theological statement says about the Bible. THE 66 BOOKS AND ONLY THESE, KNOWN AS THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS, ARE THE WRITTEN WORD OF GOD. GOD'S INSPIRATION AND SUPERINTENDENCE OF THE WRITING OF EVERY WORD OF THE BIBLE GUARANTEES THAT WHAT WAS WRITTEN IN HIS WORD AND THEREFORE, GUARANTEES THAT WHAT WAS WRITTEN IS HIS WORD, EXCUSE ME, AND THEREFORE AUTHORITATIVE, TRUE, AND WITHOUT ERROR IN THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS. GOD PRESERVES HIS WORD, WHICH IS POWERFUL AND EFFECTIVE TO ACCOMPLISH HIS PURPOSE OF SALVATION AMONG ALL NATIONS. God's Spirit illuminates the minds of believers in every culture to understand and apply the unchanging truth of Scripture in fresh and relevant ways for the benefit of the whole body of Christ. So that's what the Karis Commitment to Common Identity says is true of the Bible. What would your thought be? Like if you were going to, what were, shout out for me a couple of things that you would say, this is what I think about the Bible. What the Bible is. Truth. Living. Authoritative. Morals and principles. Complete. Guide. Mystery? History. Oh, also mystery. Yeah, there are mysterious parts. Okay. All right, cool. So here's the deal. Like we already, like even before you walked in, even if this is like your first time in church, we already had thoughts about what the Bible is. That means we're thinking thoughts about God. We're thinking about thoughts about his word. And so we are theologians. So what we're going to do is we're going to take this statement and break it down. I'm trying to break it down into three separate parts. I think there's three movements in this statement. And so we're gonna start with this first section, the 66 books and only these, but I'm gonna translate these sections into questions because questions make more sense to me in an odd way. And so this first section, these first sentences, we're gonna ask, what is the Bible? And then why trust the Bible? And then how do we interpret the Bible? Does that seem a little bit more manageable? OK, cool. So first, the 66 books and only these known as the Old and New Testaments are the written word of God. God's inspiration and superintendence of the writing of every word of the Bible guarantees that what was written is his word and therefore authoritative, true and without error. So what is the Bible? IF YOU'VE TAKEN MY WHAT'S IN THE BIBLE CLASS, THEN YOU'VE ALREADY HAD A PREVIEW OF MY DEFINITION OF WHAT THE BIBLE IS. THE BIBLE IS A LIBRARY OF DIVERSE WRITINGS WHICH ATTEST TO GOD'S CHARACTER AS DEMONSTRATED THROUGH HIS ACTIONS WITH AND PROVISIONS FOR HUMANITY THROUGH ONE SPECIFIC FAMILY OVER THOUSANDS OF YEARS FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL CREATION. So the Bible is not just a book, although we bind it together as a single document most of the time. It's actually, if you look at your table of contents, a whole library of smaller documents. And the smaller documents all have different genres of literature. Some are telling stories. Some are biography. There are some plays that are in here. There's poetry. There's history. There's prophecy. There's songs. And so there's all different kinds of genres of literature all bound together. And God has written this book so that we can know what he's like. It's attesting to his character. And the way that he tells us what he's like is he tells us what he does. Like... I'm not sure that I would like that. I would like it better if he'd give me a fact sheet and I could just like check off the fact sheet, right? But let me ask you, if I were to write for you a professional bio, you know what, you go speak at a conference and it's really clear that somebody's like super edited their about me paragraph, right? If I were to write one of those and give that to you, how much weight would you put that in as opposed to sitting down with all six of my children and asking my children, like which would give you a better picture probably all my kids and and how would they tell you what dad's like they would probably tell you stories about the things that dad has done for better or for worse right? And the scriptures are doing the same thing. God's saying, I want you to know who I am, and the way that I want you to know who I am is I want you to hear what I have done with my children across history. And he's telling that story about how he is working to redeem all of creation from what's broken through one specific family. And you're like, what is that? Well, stay tuned. Although there are other nuances of the phrase, like God's Word, like we use God's Word to talk about a number of different things. Wayne Grudem wrote this, and I thought that this was a really, really helpful framework for kind of setting in, like, okay, what is the Word of God? The Bible is the form of God's Word that is available for study, for public inspection, for repeated examination, and as a basis for mutual discussion. So this is God's word that's kind of set down in a way that all of us can access it. You don't have to take my word for what God's word says. You can take it home and read it. and I would encourage you to do that. And that's one of the strengths of God communicating through this, is because I can stand up here and say, well, God's word says blah, blah, blah, blah, and you can look through the whole book and be like, it actually never says that, Michael. And then we can have a conversation about why I'm putting words in God's mouth. Like, it's open for examination. It's a written record, like my birth certificate, as opposed to my memory, right? And so what are all the things? This is a chart that I did not make. This is by a guy named Wesley Huff. And if you ever want to go through a crazy rabbit trail, he's got excellent stuff on YouTube. But he put together this infographic talking about what the Bible is. And I just share it with you because it's awesome. IT'S 66 BOOKS, SO A LIBRARY OF BOOKS ALL KIND OF BOUND TOGETHER. WE GROUP IT IN TWO TESTIMENTS. WE USUALLY CALL IT THE OLD AND THE NEW TESTAMENT. BUT ONE IS WRITTEN PRIMARILY IN HEBREW, AND THE OTHER ONE'S WRITTEN PRIMARILY IN GREEK. SO I TEND TO, WHEN I'M TALKING ABOUT THEM, WE'LL TEND TO TALK TO THEM ABOUT THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES AND THE GREEK SCRIPTURES. THEY'RE TELLING ONE CONTINUOUS STORY JUST IN TWO, MOSTLY TWO DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. It was written over, or it covers a span of 1,600 years. And the oldest part, the first part that was probably written was the book of Job. There's a couple of chapters in the book of Daniel that's written in Aramaic. So you've got Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. And yeah, the rest of this stuff we'll get to here in a couple of minutes. But the Bible, if it is doing that, if it is trying to tell you what God's character is like over his interactions with this one particular family throughout this long period of history, then you should already assume that it's not exhaustive. And what I mean by not exhaustive is it means it doesn't tell us everything that it could possibly tell us. God is not concerned to answer your every whim. your every curiosity. He's not outlining for us a complete and total history of the world. It's more like there's the history of the world that's happening, and God says, if you want to know who I am and what I'm like, then let me shine a spotlight on the ways that I'm working with this one group of people. And so while the rest of the stage of world history plays out, God is shining a spotlight on this family as they move around, and particularly in Israel and in Babylon and then back in Israel again, and then all over the world, right? So he's not trying to tell us everything. It's not exhaustive, but it is sufficient. He tells us everything we need to know to know who he is, to know what he's like, and to know how we can live well with him. IN FACT, THAT'S MY BIG IDEA FOR THE WHOLE MORNING IS THAT WE KNOW GOD AND LIVE FOR HIM BY PRACTICING WHAT HE HAS WRITTEN. SO IF YOU WANT TO SUMMARIZE EVERYTHING ELSE, LIKE YOU CAN JUST TAKE THAT ONE HOME. WE KNOW GOD AND LIVE FOR HIM BY PRACTICING WHAT HE HAS WRITTEN. So there were two words in that statement that I think do need some more definition. The first is inspiration, and the second is superintendence. So inspiration. What does inspiration mean? When we say the Bible is inspired, what are we talking about? Is it like, man, Carlos was really inspired, and he just wrote like a thousand songs, and now all these songs are just so beautiful. He had a moment of inspiration, right? Right? NO. WHEN WE TALK ABOUT INSPIRATION, THE WORD THAT WE OFTEN TRANSLATE INSPIRATION IS COMING OUT OF 2 TIMOTHY 3.16 WHERE IT SAYS, ALL SCRIPTURE IS BREATHED OUT BY GOD AND PROFITABLE FOR TEACHING, FOR REPROVE, FOR CORRECTION, AND FOR TRAINING IN RIGHTEOUSNESS. THAT PHRASE THAT WE TRANSLATE IN ENGLISH, BREATHED OUT BY GOD, IS THE WORD THAT WE CALL INSPIRATION. SO IT'S NOT AS THOUGH THE BIBLE WRITERS ARE INSPIRED. And it's not as though we are inspired when we read the word, but that the very words are breathed out by God. So the words that we have on the paper are the things that are breathed out by God. Like God made sure that these are the words that I wanted written down. They're breathed out by him. Can you do that? Good thing it's not 2020 because y'all would all have COVID now. So inspiration means those breathed out by God. Now, it's not as like, again, I just want to clarify because people will say different things. It's not as though you get inspired when you read the word. It's not you as the reader are inspired and you have all these great feelings. And it's not as though the writers like had a specifically special inspiration, except that they were writing down what God wanted them to write down. And that's the process by which God had this word communicated. And that's what's meant by the word superintendence. Superintendence is a weird way to say a word that we do kind of know. Have you ever, or have you heard about like an apartment superintendent? Like somebody who's superintending something is somebody who's like overseeing a space, a superintendent of schools. They're not actually teaching every class, but they're making sure that every class gets taught. So God is superintending his word. 2 Peter 1, verse 21 says, No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man. Men didn't write it. But men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Spirit. God chose, again, knowing all the possibilities, all the ways that he could possibly communicate and have his book published, he said, the best way to have this done is to use people. He's smarter than me. I don't get it. But he did. He did. God used humans with their writing styles, with their languages, with their cultures to communicate who he is and what he's like. So when you read scripture, you notice there are different attitudes. When Nehemiah writes, Nehemiah just is really raw kind of guy. And he's just like, God, this is what happened. Remember me. Remember all of the ways that they took advantage of the thing that I was trying to do. where Moses writes in a little bit of a different style than that, a little bit more formal, where Nehemiah will write, God remember me in the way that they abused me. Moses will write, and Moses was the most humble man alive. God's using humans' writing styles and personalities. He's using human language to communicate what he's like. And he's done so without error, so didn't make any mistakes. And if it's without error, then it's true, and more importantly, it becomes authoritative. It has the ability to tell me how to live my life. What about the contradictions in the Bible? Well, bring me some contradictions, and we'll take a look at them and see, are they actually contradictions, or do I want them to be contradictions? Because most of the places where I want a contradiction is a place where it's going to let me off the hook for having to obey what he wants me to do. At least that's how it works in my house. I mean, with me and God. Without error, true, and authoritative. So, question. Let's reflect a little bit. How does our relationship with the Bible reflect our relationship with God? If you were going to say, okay, if this is true, if God really has communicated in a way that's reliable and trustworthy and authoritative, then the way that I relate to this is an indicator of how I am relating to him. Like, I don't know about that, Michael. Well, sure you do. If the authoritative word from my spouse is wash the dishes or I'll kill you, and I clean the rest of the house but leave the dishes undone, I have violated the authoritative word. And she would never do that, just for the record. But my unwillingness to obey the authoritative word would be an indicator of my relationship with the person who's giving it, right? So what does our relationship with the Bible, or how does our relationship with the Bible reflect our relationship with God? Because we know God and we live for him by practicing what was written. Are we tracking? OK, so let's take the next statement kind of here in the middle. In the original manuscripts, without error, in the original manuscripts, God preserves his word, which is powerful and effective to accomplish his purpose of salvation among the nations. So we started with what is the Bible? Here we want to answer the question with why trust the Bible? Like, okay, Michael, that's great. You said all of these things. I'm happy that the Bible thinks of itself as authoritative, but I've got a toddler who thinks of itself as authoritative, and it's not the same thing, right? Okay, why should I trust the Bible? I've talked about God's choice to use human authors. So he chose to have men actually write things down. And we're clear in this statement that they're without error in the original manuscripts. So the first time that a Bible writer wrote down that composition, it was without error on that sheet of paper. The unfortunate thing is we don't have that sheet of paper. the other word, other than manuscripts, I think actually manuscripts in this statement is a little bit confusing, the other word is autograph. So in the original autographs, which is the thing you actually write down, when the Bible writers wrote them down in the original autographs on that first sheet of paper, they were communicated without error. Like, okay, great, Michael, I'm glad that you believe that hypothetically there was a copy that had no errors in it, and now you're telling me that we don't have any of those. Why should I trust the Bible? Because... We don't have the autographs, but we have more manuscripts, more handwritten copies of those original autographs for pieces of the Scripture than we have for any other document by far. Second place is not even close. We have thousands and thousands and thousands of handwritten manuscripts attesting to what the original autographs of the Scripture are. And guess what? There are errors in the manuscripts. So in the copies, we can see that clearly these two copies don't line up. But when you have thousands of copies, you can tell which one is wrong. There's a thing that I used to be embarrassed about, and it's that when we were translating, when the translators were translating the King James Version, so 1400-ish, they did not have old manuscripts. The manuscripts they were using were Latin translations of the manuscripts. And then, and so they were using something that was a little bit less reliable, or there had been a lot of time elapsed between the time that they were translating, or the time that it was written and the time that they were translating, right? And then we found a bunch of manuscripts that were way older, hundreds of years older than the ones that they had used for the King James Version. Like, okay, sweet, so that should be a problem, right? Because clearly, like, this is religious, this is, oh gosh, words sometimes just leave my head. This is clearly just religious propaganda, and I don't need to buy into it, and so when I find an older manuscript, it's clearly going to undermine everything. In fact, it did not. When we found the older manuscripts, we just realized, oh, there were like one or two things that were a little bit off, but they weren't really significant. which tells me that the transmission, the way that these documents have been passed down, has actually been really, really reliable. There are whole schools of thought and whole schools of people dedicated to make sure that they made perfect copies by hand. And so they would sit in the schools and they would write things down and then they would count the letters in each line to make sure the lines matched up. And if they found an error anywhere on the page, they would take the whole handwritten page that they'd spent the whole day writing and burn it to make sure that errors didn't get transmitted. Now, mistakes still happened, but we can see them. There's a whole science behind this called text criticism. So if you want to read books about it, I've got books on the shelf, and I'd be happy to talk with you through text criticism, but I've already bored many of you enough. We have much more significant confidence as to what the original said by virtue of the number of manuscripts that have been preserved and cross-checked. Like, we don't have the original autographs, but we do have so many manuscripts that I think it's really, really clear that the transmission of the Bible has been as flawless as humans can do it, right? As humans can do it, like, guided by the Holy Spirit. Um... NOW, THAT LEADS ME TO TRANSLATION. LIKE, OKAY, WELL, THERE'S AN ATTITUDE IN THE CULTURE THAT I'VE HEARD A COUPLE OF TIMES FROM A COUPLE OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE, LIKE, WELL, THE BIBLE MUST BE LIKE A GAME OF TELEPHONE. THERE'S WHAT THE ORIGINAL AUTHORS WROTE, AND THAT'S GOOD BECAUSE THEY CLEARLY WERE INSPIRED, LIKE, GOD'S INSPIRING HIS WORDS, BUT NOW WE'VE HAD GENERATION AFTER GENERATION PASSING THE THING DOWN, AND IT'S KIND OF LIKE A GAME OF TELEPHONE WHERE WE GET TO THE END OF WHISPERING A SECRET AND AT THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, we have no idea what the original was, except that that's not how translations work. We're not going through, we're not starting at the Hebrew autograph and then translating into a Persian one and then translating into a Roman one and then translating into, I don't know, a German one, and then they're translating into a French one, and then translating into an English one, where every time you translate into a different language, you're adding a degree of separation. We're translating into English from the Hebrew and from the Greek. Like, yes, there are many translations in between here, but they're all coming back, the good ones, are all coming back to what was originally written down and what we have manuscript copies for. You're like, yeah, but there's so many translations. How do I keep them all straight? Here's a chart. And I didn't make this one either. This is also by Wes Huff, because he's brilliant. But if you, like, there's a way that you have to, like, when you translate from one language to another, there are things that you lose in the translation. And so you end up doing some interpretation every time that you translate from one language to another. For instance, if I were to say, Jesse's jacket is the bomb. EVERYBODY IN OUR ROOM WOULD UNDERSTAND, WOW, MICHAEL REALLY LIKES JESSE'S JACKET. BUT IF WE WERE TO RECORD THAT AND, YOU KNOW, ADD 1,000 YEARS AND TRANSLATE IT INTO A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE, THE FUTURE READERS MIGHT READ THAT STATEMENT AND GO, HE JUST SAID THAT HER JACKET'S THE BOMB AND EVERYBODY STAYED SITTING IN THE ROOM? ARE THOSE PEOPLE DUMB? DON'T THEY KNOW THERE'S AN EXPLOSIVE? LIKE, THEY'RE IN DANGER. WHY WOULD THEY JUST SIT AND LISTEN TO THAT GUY TALK? Like, no, no, no, because so I can either translate the word word for word because what I said was her jacket is the bomb, but what I meant was her jacket's really cool and really nice. So when I translate from one language to another, I might do some interpretation to make sure that the future readers can understand what it is that I meant by what I said, right? And so that's what this kind of flow chart is. is showing is the ones that are on the green side are much more literal word for word the jacket is the bomb and then as you go more into the blue they're a little bit more interpretative interpretative interpreting a little bit more that jacket's really nice michael likes it a lot right so there is some there's always some translate or there's always some interpretation in our translation how much translation do you want is is what you get there on the chart So you know we use the ESV here. And there's a lot of reasons for it. But that's one of the things that we do here, mostly just so that I can call page numbers when I want to. And you guys can look it up in the same page. OK. What else? Oh, and for the record, too, it's written down. And if you're like, yeah, that's great, Michael. I'm glad God communicated his word. But like, I hate reading. Anybody's like, yeah, I don't really want to read. OK, cool. You should also know that we live in an era where there's these things called audio Bibles and they're available for free in any of these translations. And so I did not know this when I was in school. But you can listen to the word of God. And I wish I'd have known that because there are some times where sermon prep works better when I just put a chapter on repeat and I can hear it and I hear things differently than I would read them on the page. And so if you're like, I'm not a reader, like God's got another, no, no, no, listen to it. Like I dare you, listen to a chapter three times through and see if you don't hear it different than you would read it. Okay, these are also, when the scriptures are communicating, there are actual verifiable historical time periods and places, which I say that to say, or I say that because there are religious texts which do not talk about actual variable historical time periods and places. YOU CANNOT DOUBLE CHECK THE ARCHEOLOGY OF THE BOOK OF MORMON. IT DOESN'T EXIST. THEY'RE IMAGINARY PLACES WHERE WHEN YOU COME TO SCRIPTURE, LIKE, YOU CAN ACTUALLY GO TO CAPERNUM, WHICH IS THE PLACE WHERE JESUS, LIKE, WHERE YOU CAN ACTUALLY GO TO CAPERNUM AND SEE THE STONES THAT JESUS PROBABLY WALKED ON WHEN HE WAS GOING TO VISIT THE SYNAGOGUE THAT IS THERE IN THAT PLACE. LIKE, IT'S THERE. YOU CAN GO AND SEE IT. So how do our habits in the world, in the word, so for each of these translations, you've got a whole team of people that have labored to do the work of A, understanding in the old, and B, like doing the work of moving it into a modern English translation. So we've got a whole buffet of God's word that we can choose from. And I just wonder how our habits in the word reflect gratitude for the work that others have done to bring it to us. You could learn Hebrew, and you could learn Greek, but you don't have to. So how do our habits in the Word reflect gratitude for the work that others have done to bring it to us? Because we know God and live for Him by practicing what He has written, which brings me to the last section. God's Spirit illuminates the minds of believers in every culture to understand and apply the unchanging truth of Scripture in fresh and relevant ways for the benefit of the whole body of Christ. So we've answered what is the Bible. We've answered... I've lost my questions now. WHY SHOULD WE TRUST THE BIBLE? AND NOW, HOW DO WE INTERPRET THE BIBLE? I THINK THIS IS LIKE THE THING. THE DIFFICULTY OF THIS SERMON IS I'M SUPPOSED TO TELL YOU WHAT THE BIBLE TEACHES ABOUT THE BIBLE, AND THAT FEELS A LITTLE BIT CIRCULAR. AND SO WE HAVEN'T LIKE DONE A TON OF READING OF THE SCRIPTURE, BUT HERE WE ARE GOING TO DO A TON OF READING OF THE SCRIPTURE BECAUSE THE BIBLE IS UNLIKE ANY OTHER BOOK THAT HAS EVER BEEN WRITTEN. Even if you have a person who is really, really smart and who has written extensively, and they have written down, say, a whole philosophy of education, volume upon volume upon volume of, this is my philosophy of education. And you, as an educator, can go to that, and you can read that book, and guess what? It's what you think about what they wrote. But when we come to the Scriptures, God promises to do something different. He promises that the author will show up to help guide us through what he has written. Now, your education philosopher is dead. They're not going to help you understand what they wrote. But when we say God's spirit illuminates the minds of believers, what we're saying is God turns the lights on as you read his word. You're like, well, I don't really understand the Bible. It's really, really hard, so I don't ever read it. But if you don't ever read it, you don't ever have the opportunity for God to turn the light on for you. And the best gift that I can give you is an encouragement to read the Word. When we do the What's in the Bible class, and I give the first homework assignment, people are like, we're doing homework? Is this school? And I'm like, I don't know a different way to tell you what's in the Bible than to just have you read it. And I can tell you that the reading of it is going to do more because God promises to be with you in the reading where he gives you no guarantee that you listening to me is going to be understandable at all. Thank you for chuckling. I appreciate that. 1 Corinthians 2 says, It says this, now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. So he's saying here first, first thing to notice is that we might understand the things freely given to us by God. There are some things that God does not want to tell us or has not told us. And I don't know why, but he's God and he didn't ask me for permission. So he does what he wants. But there are things that he has communicated clearly. And oftentimes the things that he's communicated clearly give me enough to work with on the questions that I can't quite answer to be able to live well. And so we might understand the things freely given to us by God, and we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. There's even, as we are reading the Scripture, because it is a spiritual exercise, that if you are hostile towards God and pushing Him away, then there's going to be a block in understanding. YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S SPIRITUAL JUST BY YOUR FLESH. IF YOU INTERPRET THE WHOLE WORLD AS IF THERE IS NO GOD AND COME TO A BOOK WHAT HIS FOUNDATION IS IN THE BEGINNING GOD, Like, there's going to be a difficulty in understanding. And so the invitation is not just to see the Scripture as a thing over there, but to enter into the story and try to meet with the author as you're reading it. We don't just come, like, when we come even on Sunday morning, we don't just come and open up the book and I just read it to us. We pray. Because I can't give you anything that God's not going to do in your soul. So we pray, give us this day our daily bread. I'm assuming that most of you already ate before you came and you probably won't be hungry until well after I'm done. I'm not praying about your foods. I'm praying about your soul. God, give me what I need for the day. Help me to understand and feast on your word. Because here's the deal. As we seek to be guided by the Holy Spirit, we are really quick to forget that the voice of the Holy Spirit sounds like the scriptures he inspired. Usually when I'm looking for God to speak to me about something special, it's because I want him to say something different than what he already said. And if God doesn't lie, then he isn't going to change his mind in my particular special circumstance. What's true is true. And so we seek to understand the intent of each biblical writer, so the human authors as they're talking to a human audience initially, by using grammatical, historical, and contextual principles of interpretation. So we want to understand what the original people as they were writing thought, they were writing to, and then to understand how God meant for that to be applied. So historical, grammatical, we think the words are real, but we're gonna focus all of that exercise on Jesus, because Jesus says the Bible is about him, and we're gonna ask the Holy Spirit to lead us as we seek to understand it, and we're going to let the whole thing be bathed in grace, which sounds like a small thing, except that grace is the thing that gives us the ability to do it together in community. Because my friends, for all my studying, I do not have mastery yet over this text. And I know I don't have mastery yet over this text because I know the areas that that text has not mastered my heart. And so as we think about reading and studying and taking seriously the written word of God, we also need to cover that exercise in grace knowing that none of us has yet arrived. None of us has the complete answer. And any statement we make will be somewhat incomplete. And yet, this is how God chose to communicate who he is and what he's like. It's almost like he wants us to be part of the process. So as a group, we accept the absolute authority of the Bible and prefer the authority of the Bible over creeds or traditions or even leaders. I would much rather, if we're doing something as a church and people are like, hey, this goes against what the Bible teaches, you should probably default to what the Bible's telling you to do as opposed to what Michael's telling you to do if I'm telling you to do something different or Ryan or Carlos or anybody who's leading. And so we commit to an ongoing study, understanding and application of God's unchanging truth in our constantly changing world. Because we know God and live for him by practicing what he has written. Because the practice is the goal. And I do mean practice. Practice. We started off with 2 Timothy 3.16, but it didn't end with a period. It ended with a comma. So I want to show you the rest of that sentence. All scriptures breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. The goal of God giving us the scripture is in order to give you the ability, and he uses the term man there, but it could be woman as well, the person of God, so that that person of God can be complete, equipped for every good work. Application is the goal. Every part of the scripture is profitable. And I can go through and I can give you points for what teaching and reproof and correction and training and righteousness. I can tell you what all those things mean. But the thing that I think we should key into is that we're equipped for every good work. Not just some good works. I'm afraid that I'm too easily satisfied with doing some things for God. Like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I gave God that hour of the day. And God says, I gave you my word so that you can be equipped for every good work, for all the good works, so that you can be complete, so that your whole life can be reflected and shaped by who I am and the story I'm trying to tell. if you want to be equipped for every good work, if you want to live your life in a way that every single thing that God puts you on this earth to do gets done by the time you close your eyes and the last day, you're going to find everything you need for that in the Word. I would give you something different if I had something better, and I don't have anything better. The scriptures are sufficient for our whole life. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who has called us to his great glory and excellence and by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire." So what doubts prevent us from looking to God's word for guidance? When stuff comes up, what are the things that are holding us back to asking God for his input? And I don't think that doubts are in opposition to faith. I think doubts sharpen our faith. And so I want to draw your attention to the doubts that you have. Like, God, I don't think you actually know anything about this thing. Or I think that your advice for relationships about this point is actually outdated. Call that a doubt and then push it through what God has said. Because we know God and live for him by practicing what he's written. Let's pray together. God, I thank you for your word. Lord, I pray that if there's anything I've said that's just been my own opinion, that that would just be real quick forgotten. But the Lord, where your truth has been proclaimed, that it would bury itself in our hearts today and we'd not be able to shake it. Lord, when we think on these kind of higher overview terms, it can feel disconnected from our life. And so I pray that you would bring to mind the areas where we need to grow? Lord, would you bring to mind the doubts that we have about whether you know what you're talking about? Would you surround us with a community of people that we can bring those doubts to and explore your word together in? Would you help us in those moments that we're bogged down in ourself. And we can see the truth, but it feels a million miles away. And we wanna get there and we just know we're not there yet. Lord, I pray that you'd meet us there too. And by your grace, by your mercy, draw us closer into what is true. Wash us, set us apart, sanctify us in truth. Your word is truth. We thank you. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. 

Listen to the audio podcast for this sermon, hosted on Spotify!

LINKS

Michael Lockstampfor https://ocalaneighborhood.church
Previous

Why does the idea of one God as three persons even matter?
Next

Is knowing God wishful thinking or a genuine possibility?