Trusted with God’s Words I: Who Does God Speak To and Through?

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder, and today we begin a new miniseries in our podcast, and we could name this series perhaps,

People That God Can Trust With His Message. I want to get

Teddy to join us in the coming weeks. He'll be with us for about four or five weeks, depending on how long this goes, but today it's just me.

I want to introduce this topic and try to demonstrate why it's a critical topic, not just a good topic for us to consider.

We're still at the beginning of 2024, and as believers, there are certainly things that we see in our society, particularly in the

West, that are alarming. They're alarming in a way that perhaps we never expected you would be alarmed.

They are alarming in a way that even in my lifetime, unbelievers might have looked at choices that are now being presented to society as reasonable and appropriate and acceptable choices.

I think that years prior to this, even the unbeliever might have looked at that and said,

I'm all for you doing what you want to do. You have a right to do what you want to do.

And yet, that choice seems so kind of unimaginably dangerous.

It doesn't seem to be a wise choice. So while we live in a day that there have been many events and moral shifts in the culture that alarm us, we don't want to give in to the habit that is so common in churches, and that is that we say that our day is so particularly bad, so particularly sinful, that it's uniquely bad.

I think that our day has things, as I mentioned, that are alarming, but it doesn't mean that it's unique.

If we believe that our day is unique, and perhaps we're tempted to have that attitude because we feel like if we don't have that strong of a reaction to the cultural, moral downgrade, that maybe we'll appear to be people who have our heads in the sand, and maybe we'll be people that aren't really bothered by things that should bother us.

And so, you know, it seems very humble or perhaps very godly to be alarmed and to overstate the problem and to say, as Christians have in every generation, this is the worst that it's ever been.

But I don't think that that's helpful. I think it brings a crippling problem.

The crippling problem, it seems to me, is that if today is uniquely bad, then the common things of Scripture, the common cures that were offered, the work of the gospel, the witness of the church, prayer, truth, these things perhaps might seem to us to be effective in common problems or in the normal downward spiral of a nation, of the churches, of a family.

But if we're in uniquely bad times, then perhaps these don't apply to us. We are in a situation that is separate.

It's isolated by its uniqueness, and therefore the common truths of Scripture, the common commands of Scripture don't really apply to us, or they don't work in our situation.

And that is a perilous lie. It cripples us.

It keeps us from crying out to the Lord. It keeps us from bringing truth to bear in our homes, churches, our workplaces, our neighborhoods.

It makes us the kind of people that just isolate ourselves and we say, well, it's so bad.

It's never been this bad. Therefore Jesus is probably about to show up. So the best thing for us to do is just to get away from sinners and to wait on Christ to get us out of this ruin.

But I think that would be, even though it's a common response, I think it would be an unbiblical response.

And I think it would dishonor the Lord. One of the problems is that we view our present day through a

Bible that we have read with rose colored glasses. So we read the New Testament, take the book of Acts, take the

Gospels. How many times I've read the Gospels or the book of Acts, where we have these eyewitness accounts of the work of God through his son or through the spirit working in the church, and we shut our

Bibles and walk away. And somehow, in spite of all the detail that we've just read, we have this idea that those accounts glow with a halo of holy, uninterrupted, godly effectiveness.

And yet, if you were to go to the Gospels and to the book of Acts, and you were to write down every time we have an example of the world rejecting truth, opposing

God's work, I think it would be surprising how many of those are included in these accounts.

The Bible is wonderfully realistic. So when we read the book of Acts and Paul goes into a town and he brings the

Gospel, there may be a handful of people wonderfully saved, and that becomes the nucleus of a church that will spread and the kingdom will spread, like Colossians says, when

Paul writes from prison and he writes to the Colossians and he tells them that the same Gospel that came to you has been going to every corner of the earth.

And it's producing the same results there as it produced in you. It's saving people. It's giving them an objective hope that they grab hold of by faith and that guides their choices.

And yet, we also know that alongside that wonderful work of God in spreading his kingdom, there is the constant work of an opposite kingdom, a kingdom of darkness.

If we don't read the Bible accurately, we can feel that what we're reading in the

Bible is just wonderful, and what we're seeing in our day is only terrible, and neither of those are true.

So don't read your Bible with rose -colored glasses. But another source of this kind of, you know, we live in such a bad day that the things in this book that God has given us, the commands, the principles, they can't really help our day.

Another source of that wrong idea is that we're ignorant of Christian history.

Church history includes seasons of grace that are extraordinary at times, where it's like the tide of grace comes in and sweeps across the beach of humanity.

And that beach that's covered in, you know, in trash and garbage, and people are doing things that, you know, they should be ashamed of, but they're bold.

It's like the tide comes in, and all those evidences of man's self -worship have to flee, and the beach is washed clean.

But there are also times where the tide seems to recede, the tide is out.

It's as if God leaves us to ourselves, and we read periods of Christian history where those low ebb times, those times where the church has walked in compromise for so long that God graciously judges

His own people, and as a result, the world seems free to do whatever it wants.

So both of those are found in Christian history, and we can't look at our day and say, well, this is one of those bad times, therefore it's uniquely bad, therefore the common guidance of Scripture and the principles and commands don't apply to us.

Now, having said that, I want to say something that I don't want you to mistake as unraveling what

I just said, but I do want to emphasize the seriousness of our present day and a difference, something that we're facing that perhaps hasn't been faced in this particular way.

From the beginning of man's choosing self over God, sin has brought ruin in different forms, and sin basically uses the same lies, and it has the same impact.

But in each generation, there are different things that rise to the surface. There are different things that seem to be particularly effective vehicles or openings for sin that weren't in previous generations.

In our day, I think that we do face something that's an old problem, but it's come up in a new way, and knowing the times is important.

We need to know God, we know the gospel, we know ourselves, but we also need to know the times.

We don't just repeat what Puritan said, what Great Awakening men said, you know, we don't just repeat what our favorite preacher said in a previous generation.

We look at our day and ask, how does the truth of God answer this lie? How does it warn these people?

How does it give light and guidance? How does it drive us to the cross in our situation?

Well, an age -old problem that has shown up in perhaps new clothing in our day is that there are so many voices that we're hearing today, which confuse.

They claim to give guidance or to provide, you know, a clear path to happiness, but they are deceptive.

Now, that has been around since Eden, where the enemy says to Adam or to Eve, and Eve to Adam, you know, has

God really said that you can't do this and this and why

God's not telling you the whole story? This is the whole story, and Eve believing and Adam embracing also that lie, ruin came.

And that will last until the end. We see it in the book of Revelation, the false prophet, and so many symbolic ways of showing that lies continue.

The enemy is primarily a deceiver and his strength lies in that deception. But in our day, while this has always been the problem that we face, in our day, what is new is that the number of voices that can reach you, that can get into your life if you're not careful, that is what's different.

Can you imagine hearing what everyone thinks about a moral topic from China, Korea, you know,

Africa, France, Germany, South America, Canada, the United States, people from every walk of life, from every type of religion, from every type of deception, half -truth.

They can give you their opinion about a moral issue and they can be in your living room, in your dining room every morning when you get up and you grab your cup of coffee and, you know, your piece of toast and you get your electronic device out, your iPhone, your iPad, whatever you use, and you're scrolling through things and you can hear what every liar says about a moral topic in a way that Christians before us could not have heard.

It's not just that the voices are out there, you can hear them and they can be in your living room with you through your devices.

And so we are facing a time where there is such a sea of voices that aren't speaking the way

God would have them speak, so they are deceptive and they can be with us at any moment 24 -7.

That has never been the case before. Now I'm not just talking about people that are atheists or that worship other gods, but even those that claim to love the

God of the Bible or to speak on behalf of Jesus of Nazareth, even those voices, countless tens of thousands, can come right into your bedroom, into your breakfast time, and they can say things to you that are dangerous because they are not what

God would say to that particular situation. Even though they quote the same

Bible you own, like the Pharisees did in the days of Christ, they do not quote the

Bible in a way that is helpful. It is applied in a way that is dangerously twisted, half -truths mixed with lies.

So in a time like this, where this has come in a way that we've never faced before, this sea that we're drowning in of voices that do not represent

God, surely we can understand that as Christians who love

God and love people in the church and outside of the church, we want to know the times, and understanding this particular problem that we have, that is coming in a new way, we want to be the kind of people that God can trust with His Word, His message.

We want to be the kind of people who, when we speak, we can be trusted to say things that God once said in that situation.

And that's what we're going to be looking at over the coming weeks. How can we be that kind of people? What kind of people does

God not trust? It's not enough to have a Bible. The Pharisees had a Bible. It's not enough to have a

Bible and a good hermeneutic, or the right approach to interpreting the Bible, so that when we come to the

Bible, we're not ripping texts out of their context and just using it to support our views, but we're actually saying things that the

Bible wants us to say. We're saying what it says, and we're conveying what it means. But even that is not enough.

We need to be the kind of people that when we say what the Bible says, and we convey what the

Bible means when it says that, our words are the words that God can add weight to, or God can give authority to, so that these truths come with wonderful impact.

We all know what it's like to sit in a church service. Perhaps you go to a conference, and let's say we have two men speaking that morning, and they both have gone to the same seminary.

They both have the same books in their library. They both believe the same doctrines, adhere to the same confession of faith.

They both have the same kind of gifts in speaking, and they both are very passionate, and they get up and speak.

And one man gets up and teaches, and while the things he says are biblical and true, they seem to fall flat.

Maybe you could say it this way. I know that what the man said was true, but if I were honest, it feels optional.

Then another man gets up and says the same kinds of truths from the same book, with the same kind of doctrine, and the same library, and gifts, and when that man speaks, it comes with weight.

It comes with impact, and you feel it is not optional. I have to respond to what

God has said through this sermon. What's the difference? There is that spiritual dynamic that's always there.

It's not enough to have Bibles and good principles for interpreting the Bible. Christ did not, when he ascended on high, he did not say in those last moments on earth with his disciples,

I'm going to leave you hundreds of thousands of copies of Old and New Testament and every language of the world, and I want you to distribute them until I come again.

And the Bible is the word of God, just what he wants us to have, only what he wants us to have.

It is not only infallible, it is all sufficient, but it is not all we need.

It is sufficient for what God has given it for. It has revealed all we need to know about life and faith, but that is not all that God has designed for the spread of the kingdom.

That includes us. So how can we be the kind of people that can be trusted to speak on behalf of God?

You remember when Christ was speaking in the gospels, two commands that he gives regarding listening.

We've talked about these before. Be careful what you hear and be careful who you hear. Both of those are important.

If we ignore either one, listening to someone we really like who's saying wrong things or listening to someone who says right doctrine, but whose lives don't match the doctrine, either of those is a disobedience to Christ.

It's disregarding the Lord of the church and the American church has suffered greatly by ignoring it.

How can we be people who can be trusted to give guidance to those who are wandering lost, whether it's in our home, workplace, church, neighborhood?

How can we be people who can give words that strengthen those who are weak?

And about to give up. How can we be people who can be trusted to speak on behalf of the

Lord, to comfort those who are wounded and, you know, tempted to just despair?

How can we be people who warn those who are walking on the edge of a cliff? And what we say has to come with impact.

It's not optional. And for that, the scripture gives us so many wonderful examples, both positive and negative.

So as we draw this podcast to an end, and before we start next week looking at specific examples of the kind of people that God will speak to and through, let's ask this question.

What will it look like if those who have the living

God who speaks are careless? And perhaps we're happy just to have religious cliches that are true, or we're happy to have a good doctrinal understanding of scripture.

So what we say is accurate and balanced, but we do not have God's stamp of approval.

We do not have that weight, that authority that comes from the spirit of God.

And so we speak in a way that's flat.

We say things that it's just one of the many voices and it doesn't stick out.

Can your family afford, let's say, five years of you having religious phrases that you quote when things, you know, you're sitting at the dinner table and things are said and you say, well, you know, the preacher says this, or I remember reading this and, and you're quoting religious cliches, but you really don't know what

God would have you say in five years. What will your marriage look like?

What will your children look like? What will your grandchildren look like if you who know the

God who speaks have nothing to say? What will the culture look like?

What would the church look like? If the teachers and the leaders and the pastors, the preachers get up and repeat wonderful sermons and quotes from great old writers, but their voice is weightless, hollow chested men and people come and they nod and they say, that was interesting.

I had not thought of that before, but they treat your words as optional in five years. Where will the church be?

Does it have to be that way? Is there a way according to scripture that we can walk in harmony with our

God so that the one God who speaks can trust us to speak on his behalf?