by Pastor Glenn Layne

November 24, 2002
(2 Timothy 3:16-17)

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Grounded in Truth:
The Power of the Word of God
Participation in the Kingdom: Service, Stewardship and Evangelism

The word of God is the tape measure in the toolbox because any job is going to require a reference to a standard. The saying is, measure twice, cut once-for a reason! (I have an odd-looking tile in a bathroom at our house that's proof of the wisdom on that one!)

What we need is a measuring rod outside of the way we feel that will enable us to deal with life and understand the world.

However, that is a hard proposition for a lot of 21st century people to swallow. All around us, like the water all around a fish, we are surrounded with a view of life that has difficulty accepting the idea that God spoke through an ancient book, and that that book still is relevant to us today.

Why do we find it hard to believe in Truth anymore?

There are reasons why there's been this massive change in thinking. Set the way-back machine for 1960, and you'll find a whole different mentality in this country. The vast majority of Americans, including people who were not active in any church, believed that the Bible was the truth. They believed that its teachings should be honored. But just as important, they believed that there was such a thing as Truth with a capital T. Some things were True, and some things weren't, and that was that.

The early 21st century mentality is different. Amazingly high numbers of Americans still have a high regard for the Bible. Politicians still speak about their faith in God, and it's hard to imagine an avowed atheist attaining high office in this country.

The most important change in our culture is that the average America-Christian not excepted-has difficulty believing in universal, absolute, truth. That is, the idea that something may be always, everywhere, without exception, true whether or not you may or may not agree with it. You cannot spell truth with a capital T anymore; it's always going to be a small t, because your truth and my truth may clash. And I'm not going to be so presumptuous to say that you're wrong. That sounds awfully arrogant to modern ears.

There are reasons for this change. Let me give you a few:

Massive migration

There was a time most people lived and died in a 50 mile radius. People with different view-religious, political, social-for most of human history, never met each other. But now we live in an era of massive migration-of people mixing-on a world scale. Now we have the Buddhist family who lives next door, the Sikh down the street, and the Muslim who works at K-Mart.

And a lot of them are nice people. It was a lot easier to say that they're wrong when they stayed in Taipei, New Delhi and Cairo. But now they're next door. They seem to be a lot like the rest of us. So who's to say who's wrong? Can't we all just get along?

Urbanization (from Garden to City)

Another factor is urbanization. The Bible starts in a garden, but ends with a city-the New Jerusalem. And we are a planet of cities now-massive cities. Everything moves faster in cities. People, ideas, technology-they all move faster. Since cities attract people from many places, they are the centers of massive migration. Los Angeles may be the cultural capital of the new world that's sprung up in the last 40 years.

Information overload.

When Thomas Jefferson built Montecello in Virginia, he also had one of the finest libraries of his time. It contained about a thousand books and could truly be said to hold the sum of the knowledge of the world at that time. In such a world, it was easier to believe that you could define truth-that you could put your finger on it and say, ah-here it is!

Today, the "gift" of technology is Info-Trivia. Info-Trivia is a massive amount of data without coherent meaning. On a given Saturday, a family might watch 2 or 3 movies, play half a dozen video games and spend a couple of hours surfing the web. In those moves, games and on the web, you will find three or four completely different ways of viewing the world (secular, mystical, hedonist and Christian). This kind of information overload makes the task of sorting out the truth seem like an exercise in futility.

"Curved" thinking

Closely related to that is that our very way of thinking has been altered by technology. Here's just one example. In 1960, apart from 3 or 4 fuzzy TV stations and maybe a trip to the Saturday afternoon matinee, if a person wanted to get information about the world, they read. Books start on page 1 and go to the last page. Book-reading encourages a view of the world that is logical, orderly and sensible. You might think of it as straight-line thinking.

Now we have video games. Video games do not start on page 1 and go to the end; they have a thousand routes. You are part of the story. Video games encourage a view of the world that has no sequence, no order and little logic. It's curved thinking. You have the same "curved" experience of truth when surfing the web.

So we have the mixing of peoples and maxing of information technology. What does that produce?

Fluid worldviews

Well, a person's way of viewing life is called their worldview. An atheist has one worldview, a Buddhist another, a Christian another. In years past, people understood that their worldview was not only distinct, but incompatible with others. The mixing of peoples and the maxing of information has produced something new, at least in the western world: fluid worldviews. A person will flit from one worldview (literally in the space of minutes!) to another like a butterfly from one flower to another. 20 years ago, this was rare. Not today. Today, not only does a Muslim and a Hindu live next door to each other, sometimes they live inside the same person! It's all a half-hearted quest to discern what "works for you" with the all the choices of a cafeteria.

The decline of a Biblical worldview-among Christians

Maybe-thinking soothes; Jesus irritates!

Somebody called this maybe-thinking. Maybe Jesus today and Muhammad tomorrow and Buddhist the next day and then back to Jesus. Maybe.

But Jesus stubbornly won't go along with the maybe project. Jesus' claims are absolute. "I'm the Way, I'm the Truth; I'm the fount of real life; if you want to know Eternal God, you have to go in through Me!"

Maybe-thinking soothes; Jesus irritates! He is the square peg in the round hole of maybe thinking. He says in effect, "It's my way or the highway!"

And don't think you are exempt because you say you follow Jesus. The smooth curve of maybe-thinking gives us an excuse to back off from that unbelieving neighbor; after all, what he has seems to work for him, right?

The problem with hell

And that smooth curve makes believing in hell hard for us. Maybe you even felt that when I was talking about hell last week. Dale Salico, our regional executive minister, preached at our conference a month ago in Las Vegas that a semi-conscious, uncritical acceptance of relativism may be the single biggest barrier we face when it comes to evangelism…the idea that all religions are the same, that heaven is earned by a good life, that hell, if there is such a place, is reserved for the really, really bad people, and that good people should not be bothered by Christians trying to convert them. He mentioned one recent survey of born-again Christians when asked, "Do the Scriptures of the Bible, the Quran and the Book of the Mormon teach basically the same thing?" 44% answered "yes"! Folks, they do not!

Where does the Bible come from? What is it's nature?

But the Bible claims some radical things for itself. Here's what Paul said in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 about the Bible:

16All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Let's take that thought by thought and phrase by phrase:

16All Scripture is God-breathed {theoneustos}

Here, we're talking about the source of the Bible ("Scripture" is just another term for the Bible). The NIV translates the word theoneustos as "God-breathed"; most other translations say "inspired by God." "God-breathed" is a very literal translation. There's a kind of word picture being drawn here: God breathed out, and lo and behold, the Scriptures! Kind of like blowing up a balloon: His work given human words their shape, strength and reality.

Let's be clear: the Bible is the inspired word of God, in its entirety. It has no errors in its original manuscripts. It is fully inspired and fully trustworthy, just as God Himself is fully reliable and without error.

And to say that it's inspired doesn't mean the same thing that it's inspiring! To say that something's "inspiring" is to say that it makes me feel a certain way. But the inspiration of Scripture is true whether or not I feel a certain way. It says that the ultimate source of the Bible is with God Himself, and therefore it is unique truth. It is the God-breathed out book-the exhaled, "expired" book of God.

What is the Bible good for?

So the Bible says it's the heaven sent book. What's it good for? Paul goes on to say that it's good for two basic things:

a. It tells us the truth about the things that last

…and is useful for teaching, {doctrine}

"Teaching" has to do with reliable truth about eternal matters. The Bible is "useful" for giving us that truth-Truth with a capital T. Basically, this means that when the Bible speaks, it can be trusted. When it speaks about God, about human nature, about how the world came to be, about God's plan to rescue people from sin by the cross of Jesus.

Do you want the inside scoop? In recent weeks, first in Great Britain and the other night on ABC, Princess Diana's butler gave all the inside info on the Princess of Wales.

The Bible is the ultimate inside scoop. It's the scoop about the Royal Lord of the whole creation, provided by that King Himself.

With that kind of "inside information", it's no surprise that it also tells us…

b. it tells us how to live life to its potential

It's no surprise that a God of love would provide us with everything we really need to make it in this life. Paul describes that this way:

rebuking, {negative}
correcting {neutral} and
training in righteousness {positive},

Sometimes the Bible rebukes us. I was unjustifiably anger this week, and it wasn't circumstances or consequences that rebuked me; it was God's word that rebuked me (Proverbs 29:22, "An angry man stirs up dissension, and a hot-tempered one commits many sins.")

But God's word has more that a corrective power; it has a constructive power. Paul says that it's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. "Correcting" is a neutral word, but the phrase, "training in righteousness" is definitely positive. Soak your mind and heart in God's word, and your life is trained in paths that bring glory to God and that ultimately bring you joy.

Finally, one more question:

What's God's desire that we achieve through our interaction with the Bible?

Paul lays that out in verse 17:

…so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Equipped! Are you equipped-

To be the best husband or wife you can be?
To be the best parent or student you can be?
To be the best witness for Christ you can be?
To be the best worker or businessperson you can be?
To be the best encourager you can be?
To be the best leader you can be?
To be the best follower you can be?

The Bible has the equipment in it for all these tasks and way more. This is more and better and surer that a Ph.D. in 10 subjects!

Becoming a "Bible" person:

Here's some tips for using the tape measure effective-how to become a Bible-person:

1. Read with a plan: any plan will do. The simplest is one chapter from the OT and one from the NT. Another is set forth month by month in the church newsletter where we a "book of the month" (this month it's 1 Chronicles; next, it's Colossians). Whatever you do, don't just start in Genesis are plow through. The Bible is a library of 66 books, and you don't read through a library in strict order!
2. Get some basic tools. (Best: a study Bible [NIV Study Bible]; a Bible dictionary and a one volume Bible commentary.)
3. Mark and jot. Mark, underline, make notes in your Bible! This is NOT an act of irreverence, but the sign of a student. When you hit something that totally baffles you, put a star by and ask someone who knows the Bible better.
4. Ask, seek, find! It's not just a matter of study; to encounter the Bible is to encounter God Himself. In Jeremiah 33:3, God invited Jeremiah to call to Him:

"Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know."

God is delighted to tell us things by means of His word. He calls us to call to Him, to ask of Him, to seek Him, and He promises that we will then find Him-and His will and ways. It's a promise from God and therefore you can take it to the bank.

Truth does come with a capital T, and it can be found in the Bible. J.I. Packer is one of the great elder statesmen of evangelicalism. Listen to what he wrote:

If I were the devil, one of my first aims would be to stop folk from digging into the Bible. Knowing that it is the Word of God, teaching men to known and love and serve the God of the Word, I should do all I could to surround it with the spiritual equivalent of pits, thorn hedges, and man traps, to frighten people off…At all costs I should want to keep them from using their minds in a disciplined way [as a tool!] to get the measure of its message.

Folks, let's be Bible people. Commit right now to be students of the word, and to carry and read your Bible. To take it with you and to redeem the time by reading it and storing it in your heart. I absolutely, positively guarantee that you will not regret it.

© Copyright 2002, Pastor Glenn Layne, www.templecitybaptist.org