Why do People Want More than the Bible?

Andrew Rappaport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community of which this podcast is a proud member.

We are here on this episode going to be looking at the conference, the

Rise Up Conference that was done up in upper state New York, and this episode will be my message on our responsibility to scripture.

We're answering the question, why do people want more than just the Bible? Sufficiency of scripture is the topic here.

This is an important one for us to realize our responsibility to scripture. Hope you enjoy this, and remember, this podcast is supported by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee.

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This helps support a Christian family in their business, and you get a good wake up in the morning.

Go to strivingforeternity .org slash coffee to order your bags of Squirrelly Joe's Coffee.

Also remember, if you are a first time buyer, use the promo code SFE, stands for striving for eternity, to get 20 % off of your first purchase, and on all your other purchases, remember to go to strivingforeternity .org

to make your order so that they know you heard about them here. And now, your responsibility to scripture on The Wrap Report.

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, thank you very much. You know, Aaron said that if you got up before he did at 4, then you're allowed to fall asleep.

If he does, this is a farming community. Most people get up before 4. What was he thinking? So I'll do it different.

If you got less sleep than I normally do. So who gets less than three hours of sleep a night?

Okay. I have to get three hours of sleep because I promised my bride when we got married that I would sleep every night because I didn't used to.

I'd sleep every two to three nights. And she found that out and was like, what is wrong with you?

And everyone else said, we've been warning you. So let me introduce myself just briefly in case you don't know me, which you probably don't.

My name is Andrew Rappaport. I come from a little, small little communist country known as New Jersey.

It was ruined by the same city that you guys have moved far enough away from, but stayed in the same state.

So you understand, I could come up here and I could talk bad about New York City and you guys all feel my pain.

All right. Not everywhere in the country understands that.

They think New York's a good thing. And they only think of the city when you say New York. You guys really understand that, right?

Everyone says, when they say you're from Jersey, they're like, oh, New Jersey? No, I'm not from New York City. Okay. We don't talk like that.

But I grew up in a Jewish home. That seems to intrigue some people, but I got saved the same way everyone else did.

There's nothing special about a Jewish person getting saved, okay? So, I am the present executive director of Striving for Eternity Ministries.

We're a discipleship ministry. We travel around and try to help. We actually are really weird.

We try to help and target small churches. That's not a good business model for Parachurch Ministries.

Yeah, that's why we do it. Because while all the other Parachurch Ministries are targeting the big churches with lots of money and lots of people, that's not the majority of churches, and the majority of churches are hurting.

And so, we try to go in where…to areas where there's not a lot of people so that we can help smaller churches.

Strange business model. That's because it's not a business. All right. So, we talked about our responsibility to God.

That was the last session. In this session, what we're going to talk about is our responsibility to Scripture.

And just so that you know, I am a street evangelist.

You just heard Aaron talk bad about street evangelists. Yeah, I hate the guys with the sandwich boards as well.

But I go to New York City. I do evangelism there. And so, I know for a fact because I actually have video that I can keep an audience for three and a half hours without them leaving.

So, I hope that you're ready. I hope you went to the bathrooms and you found them by now because we plan to go through all of Psalm 119 in this session.

Yes, all 176 verses. So, I hope you're ready.

You got a good sleep. All right. If not, go get on MyPillow, use our promo code,

SFE, and you get a discount. No. They do sponsor our podcast.

But so, we are going to go through all Psalm 119, so you could open there to start.

But before we get there, what I want to do is address a major problem that we see within Christianity, and this is what it is.

There are a lot of people that don't ask this directly, but they do ask this indirectly.

Why do people want more than just the Bible? There's a book that came out some years ago that really started a movement within Christianity.

If you read it and you like it, I'm sorry. I'll just say it up front, forgive me, but it's called

Experiencing God. So here's the problem that I find with that book.

It talks about our experience, and a lot of people took that, and from there, there became a whole lot of this view of Christianity where we have to view it as how

I experience it. This is actually very common within some circles within Christianity, where their whole worship service is about experience.

And what we end up seeing is that many of these people, they're looking for something more than the

Bible. The Bible just is not enough. Why do we do that? Why is it that we feel like we need something more?

I need to have a direct revelation. I need God to be able to speak directly to me.

He has in the Bible. I have a friend of mine,

Justin Peters, he says this, if you would like to hear God speak to you, read the

Bible. If you'd like to hear Him speak to you audibly, read it out loud.

But we have so many Christians that they're trying to figure out, make decisions for their life.

I remember someone that came to me, they were trying to struggle with two jobs. One was north and one was south, and they came to me for counseling to try to figure out which would be a good job to take.

And I really, in evaluating them, I knew their heart was kind of set on the one in the north.

It was making more money. It was a little bit easier. There were different advantages to the one in the south that they just didn't kind of think about.

But in the end, they said God spoke to them, and God told him to take the job up north.

I said, God doesn't speak outside the Bible. He goes, oh, no, no. I got it from the Bible, because he read a verse that said go north.

Now, I was telling that story to a friend of mine, Greg Hochul, and he told me that he was actually in a church where he had…that he spoke at, and they told this story about a choir director that was single, and he ended up opening

God's Word and realized who he should marry. Because he was reading there as he's praying, who should

I marry, and he read, grace be unto you. And one of the ladies in the choir's name was

Grace. This is how people read their

Bible. This is what we end up seeing, where people want something more than just the

Bible. I need a feeling. I need God to speak to me. I need some nudging, or a dream, or a vision, or some way of God speaking to me.

I had a guy, he ended up working for our ministry many years later, so I'm glad that we recovered from our first experience.

I'm in New York City, I'm standing on a street corner, I'm evangelizing. He had been saved about three months, and he was in the

Word of Faith movement. If you don't know what that is, good, congratulations. You get to avoid a lot of bad things.

But it's basically the people that think that they name it and claim it, they just say, well, if you want something,

God's kind of obligated to give it to you. And he was in that movement, and so he came up. They went food shopping, and they go to the food shopping, and they heard me doing open air, so they stood there, listened for a while, and when

I got done, he comes up to me and says, you know, God just, God just, I felt within me, God telling me to just come and listen to you.

And I don't remember saying this, but I believe that I would say something like this when he told me I said it. I said, it was probably just the intergestion, you know, you probably just had heartburn.

He was so bothered by that, because he was saying the right language that he was taught, like, that God speaks to him, and God moves him from within.

And I, in his opinion, looked light on that. And so he'd come week after week.

The one thing I never understood is that he didn't learn for several weeks. It took a whole summer for him to realize that he should listen to me and then go food shopping.

I mean, ice cream melts in the heat of the August summer, right?

I mean, he's sitting there, and just, there was one time where we heard a pop, and it was his can of whatever, the biscuits that just popped from the heat, right?

But he'd listen to me on the street as I would talk, and people would ask me questions and challenge me. And they'd say, what do you think about this verse?

And I would just back up a few verses, and let's read it in context. And by the time I get to the verse that they're saying, it says something that I think

I'm not going to like, and I go, oh, yeah, that's what it means. Well, he started doing that in church and ended up leaving the

Word of Faith, getting into a good church, and then ended up working for our ministry for some years. So I'm glad that he did survive that first initial thing, but what was he talking?

He was taught that we should have some experience. I think this is a problem for Christianity.

I'll recommend a good book that I don't have on the back table, but we do usually resell it. I just didn't have a lot of copies.

It's called God Doesn't Whisper by Jim Osmond. I recommend you get that if you have people that say they hear from God, they hear the voice of God.

He goes through all the passages that people try to use to argue for that and says, yeah, nope, that's out of context. Okay?

So when we think about this, what is our responsibility to God's Word? Is our responsibility to God's Word to take this book that God has given us to see what it means for me?

Is that the purpose of it? You know, unfortunately, many people's favorite verse these days,

John 3 .16 has been replaced, and again, I'm going to apologize. If this is on your refrigerator, if this is maybe hanging up in a picture on your wall,

I know you're going to want to take it down now, and I'm sorry. You know, I know that this upsets a lot of people, but the most quoted verse for people today, their favorite life verse is

Jeremiah 29 .11. Let me read it for you. For I know the plans

I have for you, declares the Lord's plans of welfare and not calamity, to give you a future and a hope.

That sounds great, doesn't it? I want that to be for me. I just wonder why no one goes seven verses later and says this.

For thus says the Lord, behold, I'm sending upon them a sword, famine, and pestilence, and I will make them like split -open figs that cannot be eaten because they're rotten.

I will pursue them with sword and famine and pestilence, and I will make them a terror of the kingdoms and of the earth to be a curse and a horror and a hissing and a reproach among all the nations where I have driven them.

Why is that on no one's refrigerator? Because the first one just sounds so good, right?

And the second not. So we just take the thing that we like and go, well, this is for me. That other one

I don't like, that's not for me. And some of you are saying, well, Andrew, then how can we know who

Jeremiah 29 .11 is for? I'm so glad you asked that question. Let's back up one verse.

Jeremiah 29 .10, it says this, thus says the Lord, when 70 years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill my good word to you and bring you back to this place.

So if you are one of the Israelites that lived through the 70 -year Babylonian captivity, that's for you.

I know I look like I'm old enough to have lived through it, but I didn't. The reality is that that passage is very specific to a specific group of people that God made a promise to.

I will put you in captivity for 70 years. After 70 years, I will bring you back into the promised land.

You say, that's who that's for. Some of you are now asking yourself, but Andrew, then are you saying that Jeremiah 29 .11

has nothing for me? Oh, I didn't say that at all. You see, what we could do is look at what we see in Jeremiah 10 all the way through 18.

Don't just stop at 11. Don't just stop at the ones that we like. And what do we do? We look at the context and say, you know what?

God made a promise to the nation of Israel. He was going to put them into a captivity for 70 years.

Anyone know how long they stayed in that captivity? Yeah, 70 years. It's amazing how that happens.

Something like God was in control of it. And they were in captivity for 70 years. And even

Daniel reading back at Jeremiah is praying and going, hey,

I've been in captivity for about 70 years now, the time must be getting close. And an angel comes and says, yep, it's close.

So 70 -year captivity, Daniel lived through that whole 70 years, which means he wasn't a young child in the lion's den, if you do the math.

Because it was 70 years later, right? So here's the thing, though. What can we learn from it?

Well, if God was faithful to take Israel and say, I'm going to put you under this judgment because of your sin of idolatry,

I will then, after 70 years, bring you back to this nation. And you will be back in the land.

And if you obey, you'll be blessed. And if you don't, you'll be cursed. The very thing that they heard back on Mount Sinai.

Well, guess what? God was faithful to Israel. Guess what that also means?

God will be faithful to us. It doesn't mean that Jeremiah 11 specifically applies to us.

It means that God's faithfulness is always true. We can learn how He is faithful to Israel and know He'll be faithful to us.

So I'm sorry if I just ruined your life first. So with that,

I want to look at Psalm 119. Now I know that many of you know where Psalms is.

It's, you know, it's when you start the January, you start doing your, you know, your yearly reading, you get committed, you're going to read the

Bible and it's Genesis, Exodus, Psalms. So just go right there. Open the book kind of halfway.

So as we're going to go through this, obviously, I'm not going to...I was half tempted just to read the entire

Psalm and sit down because it really is that...and I encourage you tonight to do that.

It doesn't take all that long. But when you see this Psalm, there is one thing that is in almost every verse.

By the way, the verses are not inspired, okay? That wasn't in the originals.

Verse numbers didn't show up for about six, seven, eight hundred years. So when we look at this, though, out of 176 verses, a reference to the

Word of God is in almost every verse. Now, I'm going to give you a little bit of a clue how to read any of the

Psalms, but to read Psalm 119, because I want you to go home and read the whole thing, this is called Hebrew poetry.

Hebrew poetry is not based off of rhyme, right? That's how we think of poetry.

Roses are red, violets are blue, and then you think of something that rhymes with you. Okay, that's the way we think of poetry, but Hebrew poetry is based on a thing called parallelism.

So you'll have one line and another line, and there's going to be some connection between those that make them parallel.

Sometimes it's something they have in common, sometimes it's a contrast. So what he's doing in this particular

Psalm is very interesting. If you look in your Bible, some of you may have, in the very beginning you have a title, you have

Psalm 119, and maybe you have it say, Meditations and Prayers Related to the Lord God.

But then you have something called Aleph. Anyone know what the Aleph was? Any of you ever curious why that says

Aleph there? And then after a couple of verses it says Beth? You know what it...

Alphabet. That's the Hebrew alphabet. Now, do you know why they put the

Aleph there? Because what you see here is eight verses, and the first verses, it's going to start with the letter

Aleph, and then you have another eight that start with Beth. So this is really amazing in the

Hebrew, it's amazing work, because what he did was he went through the entire Hebrew alphabet, starting with the phrases with each letter of the alphabet.

You try writing something that's poetic that way. It's not easy. So what he does is he goes through this, but the whole thing of this, the whole driving force of Psalm 119 is one singular focus, that the

Scriptures are sufficient for you and I. There is nothing more that you and I need in our life from God outside His Word.

We do not need some special revelation. We do not need to hear a voice from God.

We don't need a feeling or a nudging. We have God -spoken words written down by men that we can look through that have stood the test of time, that is a foundation for all of our faith and practice.

So what is our responsibility of Scripture? Quite simply, it is to bow down and realize it has the answers we need.

How do you know who God is? The Scriptures. Oh yes, we can look at creation,

Romans 1, Psalm 19. You can look at creation and know something of the Creator, but you can only know a little bit.

You won't know about salvation. That you know from Scripture. We can look at the stars and see that God is a great

God of design, that He is powerful, but that's limited.

But when we look to Scripture, the Scripture is the self -disclosure of God to His people.

It is Him revealing Himself to us. You want to know God? Study the

Scriptures. You want to know yourself? Study the

Scriptures. Aaron just talked about things he knows about you. I get on the streets and I'll sit in New York and I'll say,

I know something about everybody in this room. I do this, I'll say, I know something about everyone in the street.

You all know God. And I do that on the street and somebody says, no, I don't.

Oh yes, you do. God says so. He just says you suppress that in unrighteousness. I am not.

Really? Let me ask you a question. Every December, do you go to the mall and yell at someone when kids are taking pictures and say,

Santa Claus doesn't exist. I don't know anyone that does that. And I say, why don't you do that?

And they go, because we know he doesn't exist. So tell me why you keep trying to tell people

God doesn't exist? Because you know he does and you're suppressing that in unrighteousness. Thank you very much.

See, they know God exists. How do I know that? Because God who knows everything told me so.

Where? Romans chapter 1. That's how I know. How do

I know about you? How do I know about me? Because I read it in Scripture. If God wanted you to know specifically, you are going to marry this person, you're going to meet them on this date, he would have written it in Scripture.

We don't necessarily have all the answers that we might like in Scripture. In fact, most of the times, we have the answers we wish that weren't in the

Scriptures. I mean, there are some people, Thomas Jefferson, who just said, you know,

I'm going to cut this out, I'll cut that out, I don't really like this, I don't like that, we'll just There's a slaver's

Bible, if you've ever seen that. In the slaver's Bible, what they did was they cut out anything about kidnapping people.

They didn't like that. They had everything about slaves' obedience to their masters, but they somehow removed all the parts about the master's responsibility to the slaves.

So they just, well, take out the parts we don't like. Well, what is our responsibility to Scripture? Our responsibility to Scripture is not to tell the

Scripture what we wish it would say, but we come to Scripture and ask, what does it say?

You see, we do not interpret Scripture by looking at our life and saying,

I think this means, the Scripture means this to me. Quite frankly,

I could care less what you think the Scripture means to you, and you should care less what

I think the Scripture means to me. And the only question we should ask is, what does the Scripture mean?

This is why I hate these Bible studies where they're really not Bible studies. People get together, my one pastor used to call them a show your ignorance study.

No one actually read the text, no one actually prepared, but they just open up and go, what do you think this means to you?

Well, I don't know, but I think if you didn't do the study, then maybe you should just keep your mouth shut.

So what we have to realize is the psalmist here is laying this out, and I'm just going to go over,

I want you to just see, obviously I'm not reading everything, but I want you to see some of the ways that we see him talk about, and he's got many different names that refer to Scripture.

First one, walk in the law of the Lord. What's the law of the Lord? The Scripture. That's actually what the

Old Testament was called, okay? We would call the Bible, basically you have the

Torah, those first five books, you have the prophets, and you have the writings, okay?

And so sometimes you'd see the whole Old Testament referred to as the law and the prophets.

That's what it means. So he says, walk in the law of the Lord. Verse 2, observe his testimonies, referring to the

Bible. Verse 4, ordain your precepts. Verse 5, keep your statutes.

Verse 6, I will look upon all your commandments. Verse 7, I learn your righteous judgments.

That's again referring to the Bible. I will keep your statutes. Verse 9, how can a young man keep his eye pure?

Good question. What's the answer? By keeping it according to your word. Verse 10, do not let me wander from your commandments, your word

I have treasured in my heart. Verse 12, teach me your statutes.

Verse 13, with my lips

I have told of all the ordinance of your mouth. Verse 14, I have rejoiced in all the way of your testimonies.

Verse 15, I will meditate on your precepts. Verse 16, I shall delight in your statutes, not forget your word.

17, live and keep your word. Verse 18, behold wonderful things from your law.

Verse 19, do not hide your commandments from me. My soul is crushed with longing after your ordinances all the time.

You rebuke the arrogant, the cursed who wander from your commandments.

Verse 22 says, observe your testimonies, meaning God's word.

Verse 23, he mentions to meditate on God's statutes. Verse 24, he says,

God's testimonies also are my delight. They are my counselors.

You just heard Aaron talk about being a counselor. Where does he get his wisdom to give people counsel?

Well, according to the psalmist, his testimonies were a delight and God's word is what gives him counsels.

Verse 25, he says, revive me according to your word. The next verse, he says, teach me your statutes, understand the way of your precepts, meditate on your wonders, strengthen me according to your word, graciously grant me your law.

I have been placed in your ordinances before me. I cling to your testimonies.

I shall run the way of your commandments. You're seeing this repeated throughout.

What is the psalmist's focus? Is he looking to the world for answers?

No. Does the world have answers? Well, we'll get to that tomorrow.

We'll get to our responsibility to culture. But the short answer, and some of you already said it, no.

We're not going to find the answers in the world. No, no, the psalmist is saying, teach me,

O Lord, the way of your statutes. Give me understanding that I may observe your law and keep it with all my heart.

Verse 35, make me walk in the path of your commandments, incline my heart to your testimonies.

Verse 37 and 38, revive me in your ways, establish your word.

Verse 39, your ordinances are good, long for your precepts.

You see, what we end up seeing is he's making it crystal clear. Almost every single verse here, he is focusing on God's word.

The amazing thing is that he has a different style the way he does it within each one of these groups. Sometimes he does it where he's calling out the person who is against him or against God.

He says in verse 42, so I have an answer for him who reproaches me, for I trust your word.

Is that what we say when people have reproached us? When they slander us, do we just look at it and say,

I have the word of God, or do we want to defend ourselves? Don't answer.

He says that he was going to, the psalmist will seek God's precepts, verse 45.

He will speak of God's testimonies, 46. I shall delight in your commandments, 47.

I shall lift up my hands in your commandments, and I will meditate on your statutes, 48.

You see, our responsibility as scripture is not to get the scripture to bow to our will, it is to get our will to bow to it.

That is what the psalmist is saying throughout the psalm, that we are to bow ourself to what scripture says and submit to it.

This means that sometimes it says things we don't like too bad.

Job had that problem, right? Job had some things go bad, he thought.

And basically it summarizes, Job is basically saying, when I see God, I got some questions he's going to have to answer for me.

He's got a whole bunch of questions God's got to answer to him. What happened when God showed up? Yeah, Job's mouth was shut.

Let me throw some more ashes on my head, sorry. Was I opening my mouth, Lord? I'm sorry. God, where were you when

I set the foundations of the earth? I put the channels in the water, I make the wind go where it goes.

Where were you? Where were you when I set the stars in place? Did Job actually get an answer to any of his questions?

No. It's actually the exact same thing that Paul says in Romans chapter 9.

What are you, oh man? Can the potter do what he wants with the clay? Yeah.

Who are you to answer back to God? We have God's Word.

We have something that is an absolute universal authority for every human being.

Now, some could deny it, but they're going to have to answer for that. They can walk away and just, hey,

I'm going to live in sin and just ignore what God says. But this is the standard by which when we face

God, He's going to say, you're without excuse. He gave enough of creation for everyone to know

God exists. He put within each one of us a conscience so we know right from wrong, so that we know when we break

God's law, we have that thing called guilt. And most people think guilt is a bad thing.

No, it's a good thing. It helps us to realize when we are going against God's will,

God's Word, but more specifically, God's nature. We can feel that guilt and know that lying is wrong because God's not a liar.

We're created in the image of God, so because of that, God gave us this conscience, and we know when we lie, we're doing something against God's nature.

How do we know this? Scripture. You see, our conscience can inform us a little bit, but Scripture is the one that gives us the detail,

Titus 1 -2. God cannot lie. So when people say, is there anything

God cannot do? Yes. God can't lie. God can't sin. It's kind of impossible for God to sin because sin is something that is in opposition to the nature of God.

So it's impossible for God to do outside of His own nature. So when we look at the Scripture, we look at what the psalmist says, let me drop down to verse 57.

The Lord is my portion. I have promised to keep your words. Many of us have said that, haven't we?

We've made that promise. How many of us have kept that? Let's not show a raise of hands on that one either.

I sought your favor with all my heart. Be gracious to me according to your word.

Now we understand why he said the second part, right? We need that same graciousness. How do we know about the graciousness of God, though?

Where are we going to find out about that? In this what? In the

Word, in Scripture. Verse 61, he says, the cords of the wicked have encircled me, but I have not forgotten your law.

That's a good thing to remember. My church right now on Wednesday nights, we're teaching through 1

Peter. Pastor and I are co -teaching it, and we're basically saying, hey, persecution is coming.

Are you ready? Because that's what 1 Peter is about. How are you going to be prepared for persecution? Know the

Word of God. In fact, it's even better to memorize it, because if you memorize it when they take the

Bible away, you still have it in your heart. Well, that's what the psalmist is going to say. He says he's going to keep his precepts.

He's going to hide it in his heart. He's going to believe in God's commandments, the light in his law.

What we end up seeing here throughout this psalm is the fact, in many different ways, he is giving us ways of understanding not only our responsibility to Scripture, that we are to hide it in our heart, that we are to keep it on our mouth, that we are to learn the commandments, verse 73, that we are to wait for your

Word in 74, that we are to delight in the

Word, verse 77, to meditate upon it in 78, to know it in 79, that my heart may be blameless in your statutes, verse 80.

We are to be longing for the Word in verse 82, not forget it in verse 83.

Why? Well, verse 86 says, all your commandments are faithful. Verse 87 says, do not forsake

God's precepts. Verse 88 is to keep his testimony. This entire psalm is teaching us what our responsibility is to Scripture.

This is why we can't read the whole thing, although I'd love to just read it and sit down because there's nothing I could say better than this.

But I do want you to engage with this passage tonight. Go home and read it.

It'll only take you about 20 minutes, okay? Even if you're a slow reader, maybe 25.

Why? Why should we do this? Verse 97, oh, how I love your law.

It is my meditation all the day. Can we say that? I can't.

Maybe some of you can. Your commandments make me wiser. Your testimonies are my meditation.

Observe, I will observe your precepts and keep your word. He keeps saying that. Why do you think he keeps repeating that part?

Is it hard for any of you? Maybe it's just me. Is it hard for any of you other people? Hard for you to keep the Word of God?

Am I alone in that? No? Okay. Good, because sometimes I feel alone in that. Verse 104, your precepts

I get understanding. 105, he says, your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.

Many people know that one because it's a song, right? That's just one part of an entire psalm that's focused on the

Word of God. You see, what the psalmist wants people to do, and this is why

I think the psalm that is the longest, okay?

Now, remember, in case you didn't know, psalms were the songs of the day.

By the way, most of our theology can be found in the book of Psalms. You know why? For a very simple reason.

If I was to ask you to sing a song that you haven't heard for maybe 40 years, but you grew up hearing it,

I bet you'd remember all the lyrics, right? Why? Because you sang it to a song, and whether you realized it or not, you memorized it.

What the psalmist is doing here is he wanted to drive the people of Israel to know their responsibility to Scripture by giving them the longest psalm that they would have to sing, and over and over and over and over and over and over again, see what our responsibility is to Scripture.

That it revive me, O Lord, according to your word, verse 107. Teach me your ordinances, 108.

Yet I do not forget your law, 109. Inherit your testimony,

I have inherited your testimonies forever, for they are the joy of my heart, 111.

Incline my heart to perform your statutes, 112. But I love your law, 113.

I wait for your word, 114. That I may observe the commandments of my

God. Sustain me according to your word that I may live.

The psalmist is making it pretty clear, I think. Our responsibility to Scripture is not to take the

Word of God and say, what does it mean to me? You all got a little booklet in your handout when you came in here, and if you look at that, the title of the book, it's one of the bloggers at Striving Fraternity wrote it.

It says, what does it mean to me? What's crossed out there? To me.

The question is not, what does it mean to me? The question is, what does it mean? That little booklet, as short as it is, will give you some very simple tips on how to interpret the

Bible. There's nothing more important that we could do than know how to rightly interpret God's Word and to study it.

So let me ask you a question. If you were to get a gold invitation,

I've actually seen one, to go to the prince's palace to be invited to a dinner with the king, would you hold on to that gold invitation?

Well, the guy that I know who has one has kept it. Even some people might frame it.

You have an invitation to go to the king. Is that something that you might talk to your friends about, share with others?

You might want to really make sure you know some things about the king better so you don't embarrass yourself at dinner, right?

It's going to be a big event for you. I have news for every one of us.

Those of us who know Christ have been invited to a dinner far greater than one that comes with a golden invitation and a private jet to fly you over to Abu Dhabi.

No, you have one that you have in the Word of God that tells you how you can get this invitation when you receive

Christ to a feast of feasts, to the feast of the king, the king of kings.

How do you learn about Him in His Word, the

Scripture? The simple thing is we say, oh, we love

Christ. He died for me. He paid my sin. How well do you love

Him? You know, I could tell a little bit about how well you love your spouse very simply. How much time do you spend with them?

I get people all the time telling me when I'm evangelizing, I'm a Christian. Really, you're a

Christian? Let me ask you, how many times a week do you read your Bible?

Let's go with how many times a month. You know what the average is that I hear for once a month, for within a month period?

The average number I hear is four. Anyone want to take a guess what four, they read their

Bible four times in a month? Where do you think they are when they're reading the Bible in church?

I remember doing this to one lady. She reads the Bible maybe four times a month, and I said, all right, let me ask you a question.

Let's just say you got married. You have this great honeymoon. I mean, it's just great. You come back from the honeymoon, and your husband says, hey, you know what?

That was great, but I'm going to go back to my place. You know, I'll give you a call, you know, a couple times a month.

She goes, I'd kill the guy. I said, why? Because we got no relationship.

I said, oh, four times a month is no relationship? And she went, oh, she realized what

I was saying. If you're reading the Bible four times a month, what kind of relationship do you have?

If you're just reading God's, you know, our daily bread, you're just reading a verse and getting an inspiring word, are you really spending time with God?

Oh, we all pray. We all want to tell God what we want Him to do for us. But how much are we listening to Him so He can correct our prayers?

I'll give you my prayer list. It's actually in the back on the table. It's a little sheet. It says the attributes of God.

There's about 31 attributes on there. That's how I start my prayers. I start praying to God about who

God is. Usually by the end of that, yeah, a lot of the things I thought I needed to talk to the

Lord about have already been corrected because I don't need to…I need to correct me, not ask Him for something.

What kind of relationship do we have with God? I'll tell you, you know by how much you spend in God's Word.

The Creator of the universe has spoken to you. He paid an eternal debt.

He paid a debt that is forever, and He paid that for you.

And we can't find more than 15 minutes a morning to just read the Bible and get about with our day. We start with asking our responsibility to God because when we understand our responsibility to God, well, we understand our responsibility to Scripture because we understand who

God is and we learn about Him through the Scripture. So, we must be about the study of God's Word.

It is the one thing I think that we must spend more time at. Now, granted, we all have to work. I get it.

But throughout this psalm, read it and see how much the psalmist talks about meditating on the

Word of God. You can be working and still meditating on the Word of God, but we should be doing it.

The Jewish way of thinking from Deuteronomy chapter 6 is that from when you rise up or when you sit down, when you go out or when you come in, you should be having the

Word of God in your mind. You should be thinking about the Lord and serving Him with all your mind, heart, soul, and strength.

That you should be putting it on the frontlets of your eyes so you're seeing everything through God's Word. How many of us do that?

Don't answer. We can look at the Jewish people and see how legalistic they are.

They actually take that portion of Scripture and tie it to their head because it says, put it on the frontlets of your eyes.

They put it on your door because it says, put it on your doorposts. They structure their whole day around prayer. And in all their legalism, they miss the

Messiah. We know the Messiah. A rabbi told me, he says, you

Christians, the problem with you Christians, we structure our entire life around God. We have specific times for prayer.

We do everything about our day is praying to God. You Christians think you could just come and go with God. You could just enter into His presence anytime, just say a little prayer and then be about your day.

That's pretty convicting for us. He's actually kind of right. Maybe we just have prayers before our meals.

How often are we in the Scriptures? Let me tell you something else.

I have a podcast called Rap Report, Andrew Rap Report's Rap Report. It's a corny name. I got stuck with it.

I really didn't want it, but I got outvoted by like everybody. They're like, oh, you got to keep that. The episode that just dropped this

Wednesday, someone just plug pastor's ears, don't let him hear this, is probably one of the more important ones

I've done on how to encourage your pastor. I did a whole series on what is a pastor.

Why? Because I want people to know what a pastor's day is like. You know what the pastor's week is?

Studying the Scriptures to bring it to you on Sunday or on midweek, whenever he's teaching, to bring

God's Word to you so that you know it. Because it is not easy knowing a culture that's 2 ,000 years removed from us or 5 ,000 years removed from us, 4 ,000 years removed from us.

We can't comprehend what it was like for Adam and Eve, for Moses, or even for the disciples.

I mean, my daughter asked me once, Dad, what did you do when your kids took away your cell phone? Oh, I'm sorry, dear.

No, we had one phone in the entire house, and we were glad when we finally got a 25 -foot cord so we could go in the other room, like talk in the bathroom.

Some of you may remember those days, and some of you are going, what? Your pastor studies his heart out to bring you

God's Word so you can better understand it so that you can go about your day at your job but meditate all week on what he's helping you to learn.

That's a pastor's job. So I gave many different ways to encourage a pastor.

Actually, at the end of that, I actually played in different AI -generated voices, 40 different people giving their different ways to encourage a pastor.

So there's plenty of different things, ideas you can come up with. But I want you to go and listen to that and encourage your pastor this week.

Okay, unplug pastors here. So what's our responsibility to the

Scripture? Very simply, we're to submit to it. That's our responsibility.

I'm going to give you some... Aaron said I'll talk to you about some of the things that we have on the back table. I mentioned my podcast, so if you have your phone out, you can go search for my podcasts.

I told you Andrew Rapport's rap report is one of mine. I also have...

So there, what we do is one hour, we talk about biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life.

If you want to search for it easier, just rap with two Ps. It's not about rap music.

I got an email about someone who was like, this has nothing to do with rap music. Yeah, it's rap with two

Ps. All right, if you ever want to contact me, my office hours are Thursday nights, 8 to 10 o 'clock at night.

You just go to apologeticslive .com. That's another one of my podcasts. It's a live stream.

Anyone can come in and ask me any question about God in the Bible. In fact, I tell everyone every week, I can answer any question that you have about God in the

Bible. I can. Some of you are thinking really hard questions, and you're going to come up to me and ask me later, and you know what my answer is going to be?

I don't know. That's a perfectly good answer. I'll have you know. That's an apologetic show.

We teach a lot of things, but we have at the Christian Podcast Community, you have this card in your handouts, we have over 50 vetted podcasts.

So we have something for everyone. We got things for women. We got things for homeschoolers. We got a counselor, deals with family, kids.

I don't know if kids are out of the house, but now I have grandkids. He's talking about, you know, wanting to show.

I got grandkids now. I just want to show everyone the grandkids, right? That's the fun of being a grandparent. But we have podcasts for everyone on there, and so I encourage you to check out the different podcasts if you want.

If you just search for Christian Podcast Community, it's one feed. We produce, okay, so if there's people who are truck drivers or people who are working in like in a farm, and you just stick some earbuds in that maybe drown out other noise, we have roughly about,

I think we generate 40 to 50 hours of content a week. So there will be something you will like, okay?

We have daily podcasts. We have weekly podcasts. We have podcasts from seminary professors.

We have podcasts on homeschoolers, you know, from homeschoolers. So we got something for everybody. The two books that I've written that we have back there is

What Do They Believe is my first book. This is on world religion, so it's going to cover the major Western religions,

Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah Witness, and Christianity.

It's going to look at what's their authority, what's their view of God, what's their view of Christ, man, sinfulness, salvation, and end times.

But the difference with this book is it's not going to tell you how to refute them. It's going to tell you what they believe so when they come to you, you can speak to them intelligently from their sources.

I quote a lot of their sources so you have it. Whenever a Muslim comes to me and says, you believe in three gods,

I go, you don't know Christianity, and I reject everything else they say. We don't want to be treated that way when we speak to other religions, okay?

My other book is What Do We Believe? This is a Christian systematic theology, and if you know anything about Christian systematic theologies, they're usually about 800 pages thick and are scary.

This is not scary. Look, it's only like 200 pages. It's easy to read. It actually has the one thing that most systematic theologies don't have.

Most important chapter probably is chapter 2. It teaches you how to know that the Bible is reliable, okay?

That's the number one challenge that we get. In the back also, if you talk to Denise, we got a bunch of different packages together to get you, like, all the resources put together.

I'm going to let you know now. We came out here with the bundles. We didn't have all of our products together, so there are some things.

If you buy some of the bundles, we're going to ship things to you. And if we ship things, we're headed to the Philippines for three weeks where I'll be preaching,

I don't know, it's like 15 times. So, offices are going to be closed for a while, so it's going to take us a month to ship.

Sorry, but for that purpose, we threw some extra gifts into the bundles that weren't supposed to be in there.

So, that's your blessing. But we also know that we live in a country that's planning to shut off all

Christian Internet. You realize that, right? Okay, if you didn't realize that, they're going to do it soon.

That's why we're starting to put things on flash drives. So, we have two different flash drives back there, 32 gig, 65 gig, 64 gig, sorry.

And basically, what it has is it has hundreds of hours of my podcasts, one or two of our video classes.

They all have the class on how to interpret the Bible. So, it's something that you can plug into the computer even when they shut our

Internet off for Christians. You can still have something to help you learn. So, I hope you make yourself available to those.

One of the things I want you all to know is I am here to answer questions. So, you can grab me and say, hey,

I want to talk to you, even if it's not about anything we've talked about here, okay? You just got a burning question.

I may say, I don't know. I'm good at that. But I may have an answer. I try.

So, let's close in a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we are grateful that we have Your Word. We have something that You have left us on this earth.

There's two things that You have left us with, You Yourself and the person of the

Holy Spirit indwelling us, and Your Word, and the ministry of the

Holy Spirit that illuminates Your Word to our understanding and the application thereof.

So, we ask, Lord, that we would take our responsibility of Scripture seriously, that we would not just submit to it, which we should do, but study it, which we must do, that You would receive all the honor and the glory and the praise.

And all God's people say, Amen. Are you tired of pillows that go flat or every couple of years they smell bad?

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