Battle Plan — Dean Taylor

So today is probably gonna be the most academic of the different sessions. And I have a burden on my heart to give you some meaty understanding of ways to read your Bibles and to dig into the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

So we're gonna look at the battle plan, which is what we're gonna discuss today. Okay. And so get your thinking caps on and so I'm gonna hope to address ways and give you something that can give you some foundational thinking as you have your journey.

So let's start with a word of prayer and come before God in this time. Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you, Lord, that you saved us, that you redeemed us by the blood of the Lamb. And I pray, God, that you would send your Holy Spirit and be here present with us today.

Lord, I ask you that you would let all my words of my own and my own ambitions and my own thoughts fall to the ground, but that the ways of you, that your word, your spirit be lifted up and mostly that we would glorify you in all that is said and all that is done.

So Lord, we thank you, we praise you, we ask you today to be with this session. In Jesus' name, amen. So I think it was D .L. Moody years ago gave a story that I really found fascinating. And it was a story of early 1900s.

There was a telegraph office that had a job offering. So they put in the paper and some people showed up for the job offering and as they did that, about nine or 10 people showed up. And when they showed up, they got there and there was a sign in the room when you all walked into this little room.

And it said, on the receptionist counter, it instructed the job applicants to fill out a form and wait until they were summoned to enter into the inner office. So wait there, fill out a form and wait till you're summoned to enter into the inner office.

And then in big print, pay attention. You will be notified when to come in. So they're all there, they're sitting in there. And in this day, people would be pulling out cigarettes and they're getting rowdy and there's about 10 people and everything and this one young man is there.

And then all of a sudden, they look and this one young man stands up and walks into the door right there. They're thinking, oh, this guy just blew it. I mean, it says very clearly, wait, you will be summoned when to come in.

But then he's not in there for about five or 10 minutes and next thing you know, the boss of the telegraph office comes out with the young man, his arms around him and he says, gentlemen, thank you very much for coming but the job has just been filled.

And they're like, what's going on? The other people grumbled at each other and spoke up and saying, wait a minute, I don't understand, he was the last one to come in and we never even got a chance to be interviewed.

What went on? And he said this, while you were all sitting here talking and smoking and carrying on and all this, overhead, the telegraph was clicking out. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And it said, if you understand this message, then come right in, the job is yours.

And out of all of you that were talking and carrying on and everything, only this young man paid attention, came in and took the job. That's the man we want for the job. Fascinating story. In today's environment, and I think that even more so than when maybe D .L. Moody gave this analogy, that there is so many distractions, so many things that can just get your attention off so much more than they had in the 1920s or even earlier.

And so in this, it is my concern, it is my burden that you are, it's hard in all of that static, in all of those distractions, to pay attention to the voice of God, to understand your place in the journey of following God.

As a matter of fact, you see throughout all the generations also kind of like systems of the world intentionally wanting to distract you. It's been the same forever. Even way back in ancient Roman times, they would have just distracted them with circuses and breads and this thing.

As a matter of fact, one of the ancient saying, there was a poet by the name of Juvenal that said, he talked about that all they were given is panum et circenses, which just meant bread and circuses. Give them enough bread and circuses and they won't revolt.

It's interesting. Give them enough bread and circuses and they will never revolt. You think about now, I was, you know, just in the last few years, you see many states legalizing marijuana and different things and different distractions and all these types of things.

What do you think is going on at the higher thing, at the higher level? Just keep them all distracted. Keep them all fed and playing enough games. You think of all the phone games and all the different things that we have as distractions for us.

Remember, Paul says, all things are lawful, but all things do not edify. And having this understanding, you have to be careful that there is a system, there always has been, that wants to keep you with bread and circuses.

Matter of fact, that was first written about 150 BC. Cicero, who was a big senator in the time of Julius Caesar in about 40 BC, interestingly spoke about this. And he said, the evil was not in bread and circuses per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease.

That's what can happen to you in your generation and even more so than in his generation. So as we go into this new kind of concept, I see one more wave. I don't think it's anything necessarily different, but it's just a different wave to attract us to bread and circuses.

It's amazing. During the time of the Renaissance, living in Rome, let's say around the 1400s and that kind of a thing, was kind of curious. It was like this. You still had the ruins around you, but people had little houses and little places and everything.

And then there was all these, you know, kind of pillars and stuff laying around. Many of the Renaissance artists actually drew this. So there's the Colosseum and you see people had a little farm on top there and all this kind of a thing.

And it was very odd. This one's one of my favorite. You actually get an old cathedral or whatever it was, not a cathedral, but an old whatever, and then the sheeps and everything. But then interestingly, in the midst of all that, there was a few people in this, now we're talking about the classical world here and everything, that started to look around going, wait a minute, we're living here.

How did they ever build that? And even though they were living around and around them, right around them was all this incredible classic, you know, literature and art and architecture and all these types of things, they were living in squalor.

And all this, now maybe for our purposes, we can see that's actually an improvement. But for the sake of analogy, for the sake of analogy, they were seeing that what they were trying to create, that there was something that they have lost.

I bring to you today the concept that this is in many way happened to us in our Christian walk. We get very, very shallow. Shallow thinking, shallow understanding, and you have no graphs of the church that has gone before you.

It's one of my burdens that I wanna bring to you is a historic Christianity, a faithfulness that you can say, wow, we can do this better. And I think we can. Nowadays, I think of some of the different ways that we're creating, and your generation, this whole meta concept, this is the way it's gonna be here.

I think in about 10 years, there's gonna be people coming to Bible school with these glasses on, you know. And so this is your generation right around the corner. All right, so as you have all of these facts and all these things that are gonna be known to you and everything, right on the outside are these deeper thoughts, deeper ways of thinking.

And yeah, you may know, okay, that that guy's body temperature is, I don't know, whatever, and that, you know what I mean, all these little random facts, but it's to distract you from the deeper thinking.

And so I would like to look at our battle plan of how we're gonna go in to this next generation and keep going. And I will say that when we ask the question, what is our Bible plan? And I do believe it is the Bible.

It is the word of God. And I mean that seriously. I know that many people have abused it in generation after generation. People have taken it this way and done all things, but it's still the answer for humanity.

It still is. But I want you to think of the Bible now practically, not just devotionally, which is great, but practically. There's a analogy that I love. I picked this up from actually an old New York Times article from 1879.

And the story went that there was this musicologist, this is a guy who studies manuscripts of music and that kind of a thing. And he was trying to discover, to find some of the actual manuscripts of old Johann Sebastian Bach manuscripts.

From his diary, apparently there are many actual works that we don't have. And so he was trying to find them. So he's going through all the different mansions in Germany and Austria and all these different things to see if he could find some of these manuscripts.

As he was walking along in one of the mansions, so the article says, as he was walking along, he saw some gardeners in front of one of these mansions and it had a tree that they were putting the ropes on to get the tree straight.

And he noticed that wrapped around the tree was some odd looking paper. So he went up and inspected the odd paper. He said, what is that? He said, oh, it's some sort of old music stuff. It's up in the attic.

We had a trunk. We've been using this for years. He begins to inspect it and he looks and this was actually an original copy, according to the story, of a Bach music. So he ran up and said, where is this?

And he ran up to the attic and saw this trunk and sure enough, he found these original pieces and he was aghast and then wrote about it and talked about the thing. So in this, though, I want you to think of the irony or the tragedy of what was happening there.

Here, the brilliant and genius musician Bach wrote something that was intended to be a symphony, a beautiful song that actually plays and sings and everything and people were using it to wad around the paper for a tree.

How do we use the word of God? Do you use it practically as a guide to your life, a symphony to be sung, a plan, a blueprint for humanity or is it something you just kinda read and say, oh, that feels good and oh, that feels good and those are good things.

I don't wanna distract the sentimental or the devotional side of the scripture but there's also a practical, a guide to your life and I would like to lift up this way of looking at the scriptures in a very practical way today.

Now, there's different ways to come to the word of God and different people have kind of different focuses. I'm a historical guy so that's my take but it's just one part of it and so I'll give you my take and then I want to give a bit of a disclaimer that there's other ways that you balance out.

So here's the belt. Those are my abs. Tonya took a picture there but no, okay. All right, so I would use historical theology but there's other things. Exegetical would be like looking at the languages and these are tools that we use to look at the word of God.

Okay, you don't have to laugh so hard but anyway. So like Brother Andrew here, it's focusing on Greek and I think these are great. Looking into Greek and Hebrew basics I think are good and nowadays the resources that you have at your fingertips to do this are amazing.

Do you, how many people here have on your devices the ability and you use it that you have your scriptures, you touch a button and bam, the Hebrew and Greek comes up? Have you got it set up that way? Good, that's crazy and compared to the old times of old.

I love that, I use it all the time on mine. Okay, a biblical theology, as someone who really studies, Paul does this a lot, how the whole themes of the Bible fit together and that's great to look at how we study and in systematic theology, we look at different systems.

I like that one the least but the systematic theology is system and this is good to balance. I'm a history guy in historical theology and what I intend to do today in that balance is to give you something that you can hold onto that is a robust historical faith and so that when you want to study and want to go further in your study of the word of God, where do you start?

How do you do these things? What do you go with this? I would like to offer a historical approach to you and I think it is healthy for you. The scripture says and so in Jude 3, I could say 1, 3, this passage which is one of my guiding principles to looking at the word of God.

The Bible says in Jude 3, it says beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you, exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.

This is to me an axiom of my life, a foundational principle or something that I stand on, that the faith was given to us complete from the apostles. And so I looked at this and it drives me this concept of understanding how to study and how to learn and that type of a thing.

To give you an analogy, so here is a, I can see like a water, so the wells or the spring is coming here and the water comes out and everything and it comes all the way out to here till you got some cows here and some factories here and everything.

If I was to drink some water, what would you do? I'd go up here. I wouldn't probably go here. And I certainly wouldn't go over here. It's actually one of my favorite scenes in the second part of The Pilgrim's Progress when, and Christiana is there and the interpreter is showing him there, they look at a well.

And as they're looking at the well, they said, this is where your father drank from these waters. The children were like, it's all muddy. Why is it so muddy? They said, well, the theologians have muddied it up.

And so I will argue that I think that there is a faith that was very simple given to us from the word of God. A very simple message. And in that simple following of Jesus Christ, I think you can have some foundational principles that can keep you going.

So the other scripture that is, I think, important to a historic understanding of the faith comes in 2 Thessalonians 2 .15. Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle.

And so this is a principle that, and I'll touch on this a little bit later. So, I am intentionally unoriginal. And I'm gonna say that today, particularly in your generation, that the distractions and the heresies and the factions and the Pharisees and the cult leaders and all this are gonna be continually growing and increasing and grabbing at you to try to move you to and fro.

You more diligent ones would be easily drawn away to cults and to different factions. The others could be drawn away to different tangents and different things like this. And so today, I'm going to try to make a clear line that you can stand on a historic faith of the church and study within that as something that you can go through your whole life.

I love this quote by G .K. Chesterton. I didn't like where he ended up, but still a great quote. And it's the intro to his famous book, Orthodoxy. And he talks about this idea of digging deep into historic Christianity and how that strengthened him.

And this is the way he gave the preface to his book in Orthodoxy. He says this. He says, I will not call it my philosophy, for I did not make it. God and humanity made it, and it made me. Everyone heard that phrase before?

I didn't make it, it is making me. An old song creed would use that. When I fancied that I stood alone, I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original, but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion.

The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England, I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own, and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was Orthodoxy.

In the pursuit of, in all the distractions, and you can let the Holy Spirit take and lead you in all the different directions, but today I'm going to give you at least some sense of a foundation of historic Christianity for you to study on and to go.

So I use a principle, I use a hermeneutic, which is a big word for a biblical principle, and I'm gonna give it to you today. It's very simple, and here's what I use, and it's called the Apostolic Quadrilateral, I called it, and it uses this thing.

The picture that I give here is Thomas looking at Jesus' wounds on his hand, and if you recall, he was doubting, and so he wanted to know if I could just touch this scar, let me see the scars on his hand, then I will believe.

So I use this as the acronym for my principle, and this is where we're gonna go through these four steps today. So scar, scripture, Christocentric, antiquity, and real. Scripture, nothing can be required of us for faith in salvation and practice that's not written explicitly in the word of God.

Number two, Christocentric, I read the Bible, and I'll break these down, I'll read the Bible, and I'll interpret the Bible in focusing on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Number three, antiquity, I try to find a practice that agrees to my interpretation within the earliest church like the water thing, analogy that I gave you, and number four, it's real.

It's not just a bunch of thoughts, but it's real. So let's look at the Bible first, and I wanna really lift up the word of God today to you, and have you fall in love with it, and use it, and use it practically.

Scripture, so we're looking at the scar, the first S is scripture, and by the way, it goes in line of being more exacting from scripture down to real. It gets a little bit more fluffy. The most staunch part of the one is scripture.

The Bible is received as the sole and fallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice. Do you believe that today? We have to look at this today. There's all kinds of distractions and different things that wanna drag you away from it.

The word of God is your guide. The scripture, if there's any scripture that I wanna surround the message today, it's found in 2 Timothy 2 .14. Know this verse. This was given for Paul to give to Timothy to give to his people.

I give it to you, and I pass the tradition on to you from the apostle Paul, and he says this about the word of God. Listen to it and own it. He says this. Remind them these things, charging them before the Lord not to strive about words to no profit, to the ruin of the hearers.

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth, but shun profane and idle babblings, for they will increase the more ungodliness, and their message will spread like cancer.

It's interesting here in another place the Bible says, talks about people getting involved in vain janglings, the King James puts it, in different contentions about words. I love talking about theological subjects.

You wanna sit around and talk about this minutia of the atonement or whatever, I love it. But I do put that on a different category, and I think the Bible was meant very significantly to be very simply understood.

As a matter of fact, one of the early Anabaptists, Conrad Grebel, when he was writing during the Reformation to try to say, to explain his old counselor and friend Vadian, to try explain to me this message, what's going on, and he said like this.

He said, I believe the Bible without a complicated interpretation, and out of that I speak. It's that simple. He also said in another letter, the words of Jesus were meant to be put into practice. These are simple things, and so even though I love the deep theological things, well-grounded in the word of God and looking at it practically, I think is very good.

So let's just for a minute look, what does the scripture say about itself? These are powerful passages, and there's many. I was trying to look and look up some, but I just grabbed six that I thought were very powerful.

In 2 Peter 119, it says, this is what the scripture says about itself. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart.

Notice how the word of God causes this faith to rise up in your hearts. Knowing this first, that no prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

Do you believe, and you need to believe, the word of God is inspired word of God? Not people just trying to think of a writing literature. There's a real big tangent that's coming on in your generation.

It's actually, it's been in the early 1900s too, but it's rising again. Oh, the Bible's literature, the Old Testament, those things couldn't have happened and all these types of things. Be very careful about that.

They were inspired, it's the inspired word of God. The next one, 2 Timothy 3 .16. You ever think of this one in your mind? Think of John 3 .16 and then think of 2 Timothy 3 .16. I don't know. All scripture, he's referring to the Old Testament and the New Testament.

In particular, he was probably referring to the Old Testament. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

It's practical and the life lessons there are meant to give you a life of victory in God. Isaiah 48, the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of God stands forever. In all the debates about the different text types and the different things, I come back and I rely on this promise.

The word of God endures forever and I can count on that. Three more. For whatever things were written, Romans 15 .4 says, for whatever things were written before were written for our learning that we, through the patience and comfort of the scriptures, might have hope.

Hebrews 4 .12, for the word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow and is the discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

I love that. To divide between the soul and the spirit. Do you know that when I was in medical school and looking at this thing is that when you break down the soul and the spirit, it's like the body and the spirit, you can break that down physically like the body and the breath and everything.

Do you know that I was in middle, I remember in middle of anatomy and physiology and when you take the red blood cell and break it into the different heme, which is the parts that make up the red blood cell, and then break it to its very detailed part, the atomic part, particles, you end up, I should have done a picture, you end up with this little heme group that has a cross.

And I remember looking at this, it was amazing. And in the middle of that cross is a little iron molecule, which I thought, and then that iron molecule is where an oxygen molecule pops on and it carries your oxygen through your body and everything.

And I just had a revelation when I was looking at that and learned that, praise God. I thought, you know, probably the iron was what they nailed Jesus' hand to the cross and the breath and the spirit and all those things.

I got excited in the middle of anatomy and physiology. He uses the word of God to get deep into your life. Allow it, let it, that's as far as you can possibly go, I guess, they're explaining there. And then finally, and there's many more, but 1 Thessalonians 2 .13, and we also thank God constantly for this, that when you receive the word of God, which you heard from us, watch now, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.

This is amazing. The reformers during the Reformation broke off and had different sacraments. During the Reformation, there was fights over water sacraments and the Catholics and the reformers had everything.

And one of the things I really appreciate about the Reformed tradition is they actually look at the reading of the gospel as a sacrament. And so when the faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, when the gospel is presented, when the scripture is read, there's something supernatural going on.

Allow God during this week to take the word of God, to engraft it into your heart and do things there that would just bless you and change your life. Matter of fact, in the Grossmünster, which is actually the church where the reformers had and the Anabaptists would have come from, they broke down the altar and used it, that wood, that same wood, to make a pulpit.

Probably making some kind of a statement there. But granted, people went to extremes and all that and everything, but whatever. I think there's a point there that we need to receive that there's something powerful about the word of God that goes beyond just learning.

It goes beyond just thoughts of men, but it does something into us. The external evidence. The Bible has the most surviving copies of any ancient document to put its text to the test for variance or for corruption.

There are around 24 ,000 manuscripts from all over the ancient world, some as early as the second century. So in other words, okay, that's great. The Bible says that about itself, but yeah, what does that mean?

This is an important point. I wanna put this onto your mind. So the different documents that we found, like for instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls, was an amazing find. One of the things I really, on my bucket list, is apparently in Jerusalem, there's this museum that shows the Isaiah Scrolls.

Anyone ever been there? Oh yeah, I've always wanted to go there. And in that, there was one of these scrolls, they found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and scholars would have said, oh, Isaiah was written by these people.

And they'd dig up and they'd find some of these things, and it's just amazing, the different archeological discoveries. This little stone proving in Daniel and such. But let me show you this little chart and just put this inside of your mind to give you some encouragement.

So you won't be able to read that from your seats here, but these are like all the ancient literature. So people like Tacitus, the historian, and Pliny the Elder, Plato, and all this, Homer, Herodotus, and all those.

So they've written all these ancient works and everything. And what kind of documents do we actually have to believe that they really existed? And these would be the amount of documents that we have. Now you don't see people in colleges and universities trying to say, well, did they really, you know, and all this, because they would just receive it.

And then you compare that to the New Testament. And it's amazing. So this kind of ancient manuscripts that we have, I think it encourages my faith of what we have there. The other thing is just the quotes from the early church.

The one thing that I've noticed, and I'll give you this slide, I'll come back. When I started reading the early Christians, I noticed they weren't arguing about what church councils said or whatever. You see them constantly just talking about the Word of God.

Always talking about the Word of God. And look at this. Here's just a little, I'll just give a little graph here. Like for instance, here, Justin Martyr, one of the early writers from the hundreds, had 330 Bible passages given.

Here, Origen has 17 ,992 passages. And so even though Hippolytus has 1 ,300, Eusebius, 5 ,000. And so when you look at these types of things, to me, and I'm hoping that this will bless you too, it encourages me that the church has received the Word of God.

And that Word of God has always shaped the church. It's, and it's been something that guides us and directs us our whole life. And we can, and that gives us encouragement. Seeing the way they discuss the scriptures, even before those manuscripts were discovered, is a secondary source of us being able to have a confidence.

So, all scripture is God-breathed, inspired, God-breathed, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

I'll tell you, the church that I was raised in as a young man, I remember we stood, and every single sermon, we'd say, okay, everyone stand up. Ah, you don't have to do this, but. And he said, everyone raise up your Bible.

And we'd all raise up our Bibles, and he would say, repeat after me. I believe the Bible. It is the Word of God. Every Word of God is true. Where the Bible differs in the way I think or I practice, I will change.

We chanted that as a congregation, a huge church, and I think it was those things that were put into my heart as a young man that I said, okay. And when I found the Word of God, and it did change me. And so, I want to really lift up.

You have answers here. Don't let distractors and all the different things get you away from that. All right, the second part of the, so let's look at that again. The scar, scripture, Christocentric. So then, how are we going to interpret the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament, the different things?

What do you do with the wars and the genocide and the different laws of the Old Testament? What do you do with the different ways to interpret the New Testament? And I'll give you something very simple today.

That this, Christocentric, that scripture is interpreted through the person and teaching of Jesus Christ, both Old Testament and New Testament. Here's what I think about the whole idea of who Jesus is.

Years ago, it was a charity Bible school. Years ago, my girls were tiny. I had them come up, and we opened up a oyster. And we opened up that oyster, and I said, okay, I want you to get this oyster, and tomorrow at the Bible school, I want you to come out, and I want you to describe it.

So they went home, and they said, okay, I said, just write it down. I gave them some crayons, and they said, okay, write it down. So, you know what they say, it was wet, you know, round, icky, or whatever they said, you know.

It was the way they described it. Then I gave two of the young men that were staying at my house for Bible school the chemical equation and the description of a pearl. You know, and so I said, now, tomorrow, I want you to come to Bible school, and I want you to present the best you can one of those pearls.

So, the next day, my little girls come up, and they explain, you know, their whole thing on that, and the young men came and presented it. Now, the description that my little girls had could have been sort of juvenile, obviously.

Incomplete, certainly, but the thing is, it was a pearl. They had it. The young men, even though they were very astute, and very, you know, trying to do a great job, the best they could do under the best circumstances is that what they had to present was a counterfeit.

It was not real, and so when we look it through all the Bible and all the distractions and all the things, Jesus Christ. You must have the real Jesus Christ, not a thought of him, not a devotion of him, not a theology of him, but Jesus Christ within you.

He is the interpretation of the Bible. He is your salvation. Our salvation is not a creed or a sacrament or anything else. Our salvation is a person, and that person is Jesus Christ. Colossians 115 says, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

For by him, all things were created that are in heaven and that are on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominion or principalities or power. All things were created through him and for him.

And he is before all things, and in him, all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church, who was the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he may have the preeminence.

And that includes the way we hold everything in our life. Hebrews 1 .3, who being the brightness of his glory and the expressed image of his person and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

And then 1 Corinthians 1 .30, we think about, again, your salvation and even your sanctification is not in theologies but in the actual presence of Christ. But of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

Are you struggling with holiness today? Are you struggling with purity? Are you struggling with having wisdom? Jesus is not only our salvation, he is our sanctification. He is our holiness, he is our life, he is our doctrine.

I tell you, I had a revelation once in my life, it was in one of those moments, focusing on this passage, it was actually a devotional by Andrew Murray on Life in the Vine, focusing on this passage, that my holiness is in the very person of Jesus Christ.

Not a theology, not a thought, but the presence of Jesus in me. He is our wisdom, our life, our everything. So how do we read the Bible then? How are you gonna interpret? So I'm gonna give you a principle, Christocentric.

So everyone's looked at binoculars and everyone knows what happens when you turn the binoculars the wrong way, right? So instead of everything getting big, everything gets kinda little. And so having the right way, the right focus is very important when you're using binoculars, right?

Well, it's the same thing with the word of God. We can look through different ways and things have to be, we're supposed to rightly divide the word of God. You have to look at this Old Testament passage and this New Testament passage, these things and the other things.