TPW #15 | Sinful Neglect of Scripture

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July 31, 2018

Do you read your Bible every day? If so, how much? Do you memorize Scripture? Are you able to discern subtle errors in people's teaching and theology? I hope this will encourage you to make sure you read large portions of Scripture every day in your life.

00:01: Paul warns that evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse, deceiving one another and being deceived.
00:08: The reason Paul told Timothy that was because he needed to be ready to spend the balance of his life in uninterrupted warfare for the truth.
00:28: The most dangerous people alive today are always, always, always ordained ministers.
00:35: They're the most dangerous people in the world, especially the ones that people think are Christians, who will sell you theological poison to the damnation of your soul.
00:48: Folks, I just want to warn you about something. Every heretic in the entire history of the church, without exception, has taught their heresy in the name of being faithful to Scripture.
01:10: That was, that was the day of judgment. That is the day of final salvation, brought back in time and applied to us once for all, at the moment of our effectual calling, when we repent and believe in our unity to Christ.
01:38: Welcome to the Protestant Church here in Northeast Tennessee, in Kingsport, Tennessee.
01:47: And today I wanted to do a special podcast of a sermon I preached not too long ago that I called
01:54: Sinful Neglect of Scripture. And I've been told that this was a helpful message by a number of people.
02:01: And one of the things about living in the time in which we live is that we live in the information age, and we have access to everything.
02:10: I mean, it is unbelievable how much information. I mean, just looking at my own study here, I've got, you know, hundreds and hundreds of books.
02:17: I've got thousands more electronically. I've got all sorts of resources. The internet has just untold numbers of books and videos, and there's all sorts of stuff out there.
02:30: And it can be pretty overwhelming. People ask me, you know, from time to time at church, you know, do you listen to some podcasts, and do you listen to this and that, or what do you listen to?
02:39: Well, I do listen to stuff, not as faithfully as I used to in the past, but what
02:46: I tell people that they need to be doing, though, and this is a promise I made myself when I was still in seminary, is that although I value books, and I read constantly, and, you know, there's always, you know, multiple books being read at the same time, but you need to be reading the
03:00: Bible more than all other books combined. That was something that I promised myself when
03:06: I was in seminary, because you're introduced to so many great theologians, so many great writers, whose incisiveness should not and must not be ignored, and yet there is no substitute for good old
03:20: Bible reading. Just reading the English Bible in a really good translation, and making sure that you are getting all the way through the
03:28: Bible, I've always recommended to people and encouraged them to get through the Bible three times a year. And people immediately hear that and think, are you out of your mind?
03:35: You know, I've only gotten through the Bible once in a year, like one time, 15 years ago, and, you know,
03:42: I hate to come down kind of hard, but there's no excuse for that. There is no excuse for that. I always think the church would be so much more united if people read their
03:51: Bibles, but we are not a generation of readers. The Millennials, especially, are image -based people.
03:58: That's one of the reasons that our churches often do not appeal to them, because they're used to entertainment.
04:05: They're used to sound bites. They're not used to a sustained thought on a question of truth for more than five minutes at a time, usually.
04:14: And with all of the the media outlets for entertainment, I mean, with the internet and Wi -Fi and everything, it's just unbelievable.
04:23: We do not know the meaning of quiet solitude with a Bible, and spending time in prayer and the study of God's Word is just, it's becoming more and more rare.
04:34: And yet, it is the key to Christian growth, and also Christians knowing how to pick a church, and where to go to church, and what are you looking for in a church, and that sort of thing.
04:46: But we need to be readers of the Word of God, and all the information that we have, it's a blessing, it's a great thing, but never let anything take you off of the daily intake of large sections of God's Word.
05:00: Every Christian, whether they're a full -time minister or an elder, you know, I was a computer programmer for 11 years before I was a pastor, and I had, you know, a lot of kids while I was working full -time, and serving as a ruling elder, and a
05:13: Sunday school teacher, and it's etc, etc. And you've got to stay on top of your Bible reading.
05:19: No matter what's going on, you will make time for what's important to you. You will make time for what's important to you.
05:24: Everybody does it, no matter how busy they are. So, this message that I preached on a Sunday night back in March, I hope that it's encouraging to you, convicting to you, but make sure that you are reading all the way through the whole
05:36: Bible. Yes, even the first 10 chapters of 1 Chronicles. Yes, even the book of Leviticus, and Numbers, and those passages, and sections that are often skipped over,
05:45: Zechariah, and Haggai, and Zephaniah, and the minor major prophets, etc.,
05:51: Song of Solomon. We need to be getting through the whole Bible, so that we are balanced, and so that when people say things that are wrong, when people use biblical terminology, and use subtleties of speech in trying to get across their false teaching, we are alerted to it immediately, because dozens of passages will come to mind.
06:11: So, with that, I hope that you enjoy this message called Sinful Neglect of Scripture.
06:19: Good evening. Please take your Bibles and turn to 2 Kings 22. 2
06:27: Kings 22, verses 8 through 20.
06:44: This is a dark time in the history of Israel, and a radical great discovery was made that changed everything.
06:54: 2 Kings 22, beginning of verse 8. This is
06:59: God's Word. Then Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of Leviticus, and I have found the book of the
07:06: Lord. of the law and the house of the Lord. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphon who read it.
07:13: Shaphon the scribe came to the king and brought back word to the king and said, your servants have emptied out the money that was found in the house and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of the
07:25: Lord. Moreover, Shaphon the scribe told the king saying, Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.
07:31: And Shaphon read it in the presence of the king. When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes.
07:39: And the king commanded Hilkiah the priest, Ahikam the son of Shaphon, Akbor the son of Micaiah, Shaphon the scribe and Asiah the king's servant saying, go inquire of the
07:49: Lord for me and the people and all Judah concerning the words of this book that has been found.
07:55: For great is the wrath of the Lord that burns against us because our fathers have not listened to the words of this book to do according to all that is written concerning us.
08:07: So Hilkiah the priest, Ahikam, Akbor, Shaphon and Asiah went to Huldah the prophetess, the wife of Shalom, the son of Tikva, the son of Harhas, keeper of the wardrobe.
08:18: Now she lived in Jerusalem in the second quarter and they spoke to her. She said to them, thus says the
08:23: Lord God of Israel, tell the man who sent you to me, thus says the Lord, behold,
08:29: I bring evil on this place and on its inhabitants, even all the words of the book which the king of Judah has read because they have forsaken me and I've burned incense to other gods that they might provoke me to anger with all the work of their hands.
08:44: Therefore, my wrath burns against this place and it shall not be quenched. But to the king of Judah who sent you to inquire of the
08:53: Lord, thus shall you say to him, thus says the Lord God of Israel regarding the words which you have heard, because your heart was tender and you humbled yourself before the
09:04: Lord when you heard what I spoke against this place and against its inhabitants that they should become a desolation and a curse and you have torn your clothes and wept before me.
09:14: I truly have heard you, declares the Lord. Therefore, behold,
09:20: I will gather you to your fathers and you will be gathered to your grave in peace and your eyes will not see all the evil which
09:26: I will bring on this place. So they brought back word to the king. May God bless the reading of his infallible word.
09:34: Let's pray, please. Our God and Father, we are the most blessed and the most happy people in all the world because we have in our hands and our
09:44: Bibles every word that you wanted men to know. Everything that we need to know to be happy and blessed in this life and the next.
09:53: Everything we need to know to be forgiven of all of our sins, to be accepted in your sight, to be able to live our lives in its ups and downs, in its blessings and its difficulties, in the peace and joy knowing that when we die, we will go to be with you in heaven forever because Jesus Christ, our
10:10: Redeemer, lives and has redeemed us perfectly from our sins. Lord, forgive us for our negligence of your holy word.
10:18: Its glorious treasures provide so much peace, so much comfort, so much instruction, and yet we neglect it.
10:26: Forgive us, Lord, and we pray that you would create in our hearts a fire for your word that will burn bright, that we might be a generation like that of Josiah and Hilkiah who found the book of the wall and who tore their robes and asked what have we done and what do we need to change and what else do we need to learn and understand from its sacred pages.
10:49: May we learn, Lord, as Isaiah 66 says, to tremble before your words.
10:56: And we pray you would bless us to that end this evening in Jesus' name, amen. The greatest testimony to the folly and wickedness of America in 2018 is that by and large, we are no longer a generation of Bible readers.
11:10: The Bible is ridiculed in colleges and universities by the most close -minded and uneducated bigots.
11:17: We call them professors, even though they really no longer profess to believe in anything except that one grand truth, that there is no truth at all for them to profess, that perhaps the world has ever seen.
11:27: Our nation is collapsing into misery and economic disaster. This is shown by the fact that we can no longer say with certainty what marriage is.
11:36: We can no longer say with certainty how many genders there are and what constitutes a family.
11:43: The greatest economic unit of any society is the family, but we evidently no longer understand what a family is.
11:49: Our rebellion against God has taken the form of the wholesale murder of unborn children in the name of pleasure with no strings attached and convenience along with every other form of sexual perversion known and unknown to mankind.
12:02: While these things are destroying us, the very word of God, which if read and believed would deliver us from our own certain destruction and total unhappiness, sits unread, unstudied, and openly mocked by those who need its life -giving message the most.
12:20: Humanity without God is a curiously stupid and self -destructive group. Those who cry the loudest for freedom to pursue whatever they want to do and be in life are themselves the practitioners of the lowest and most degrading forms of slavery to sin imaginable.
12:38: What could be more irrational and foolish than a man chained to a wall in a rat -infested prison who is disease -ridden, covered in his own filth, and on the brink of starvation shouting to all around him how great it is to be free?
12:55: And yet that's exactly what we are without God and without his holy word, the Bible. This nation is a nation of slaves to sin, chained in our own filth, crying out to everyone that we are free, when we are practitioners of the lowest form of slavery imaginable to sin.
13:14: The late D. James Kennedy wrote a fascinating book called What If the Bible Had Never Been Written?
13:20: And in the opening section of that book, he wrote this. To speak of the Bible is to speak in superlatives. It is the most published and most widely read book in the world.
13:29: It is the number one bestseller in the world and has been for centuries. It is the most widely translated book on the planet.
13:36: Even as you read these words, there are missionaries around the world studying various languages in order to translate the
13:42: Bible or portions of it into that tongue. Those missionaries may even be the first to put that language in writing.
13:49: Such work has gone on for centuries. Hundreds of the world's languages first appeared in writing thanks to the
13:57: Bible. In the past 500 years, since the time of Johannes Gutenberg, the Bible has been published in 2 ,123 languages and dialects.
14:07: Even in those places where the Bible has been forbidden, there is a great hunger for the word of God.
14:14: Just recently in Cuba, the communist dictatorship has allowed the sale of the Bible. The United Bible Society reports the following, since 1993, we have been allowed to put
14:23: Bibles in every library in the country of Cuba. Also under the Ministry of Culture, and this year, the year 1996, as in 1992 and 94, we were able to distribute the
14:33: Bible at the International Book Fair, where once again, it was the bestselling book. For us, it is very interesting that people who do not belong to a church buy this
14:43: Bible in the book fair. There is something like an explosion in Cuba because everybody wants to have a
14:49: Bible, end quote, says the United Bible Society. Kennedy continues, how important is the
14:55: Bible to those who don't have a copy but would like one? We in America often take the scriptures for granted.
15:01: We usually have more than one copy, and we don't realize how precious a copy of the Bible is for those who don't have one.
15:08: For example, I read recently about a remote village in Indonesia named Sikorongkong, where many
15:14: Christians had to share just one Bible among all the church members. Then they heard about free
15:20: Bibles available to them in their language. The only catch was they had to walk all the way to Safan to get them.
15:26: Yet Safan was far away, a seven -day walk. So a delegate of seven hearty souls walked all the way, picked up the 15 heavy boxes, and carried them seven days a walk all the way back to their village.
15:41: The United Bible Society reports that this loving act brought much joy to the villagers, they wrote and published in response to it.
15:48: Quote, there was great excitement in Sikorongkong when the travelers returned with 300 Indonesian Bibles, enough for everyone in the village.
15:58: No other book inspires this kind of incredible excitement and commitment. The Bible is indeed the book of books, end quote.
16:06: The Bible turned the world upside down that we live in. The enemies of God's people, who have understood
16:13: God's people the best, have made one of the grandest goals in their schemes against the word of God and against people to destroy the
16:22: Bible. Antiochus, a ruler known as the madman during the intertestamental period, launched a blood campaign against the
16:30: Hebrew people with an eye to destroying every copy of the Old Testament books on earth.
16:37: The book of First Maccabees, one of the intertestamental non -inspired apocryphal works records this in First Maccabees 1, 56.
16:45: And the officials of Antiochus rent in pieces the book of the law which they found and set them on fire.
16:51: And whosoever was found with any books of the covenant, the king's sentence delivered him to death.
16:57: Josephus, in his Jewish antiquities written shortly after the time of Christ said this, and if there were any sacred book of the law found, it was destroyed.
17:06: And those Jews with whom they were found miserably perished also, end quote. After the coming of Christ and the preaching of the gospel all over the
17:14: Roman empire, 10 successive Roman emperors persecuted Christ's followers, often killing them in the most unimaginably brutal ways.
17:24: It was the emperor Diocletian. He was the one who finally understood what had to be done to erase
17:30: Christianity from the earth in the year 303. He finally knew what was really going on and what it took to destroy it.
17:36: The Bible had to be eradicated. The historian Hearst said this, quote, all assemblies of Christians were forbidden under Diocletian and churches were ordered to be torn down.
17:48: Four different edicts were issued, each excelling the preceding in its intensity. One edict ordered the burning of every copy of the
17:57: Bible. The first instance in Christian history when the scriptures were made an object of attack, end quote.
18:06: Even at the time of the reformation and the widespread printing and distribution of the Bible, the
18:11: Bible itself, the very word of God found its way onto the Roman Catholic churches index of forbidden books.
18:19: Is that not remarkable? The council of Trent, Rome's response to the reformation stated clearly that the wide circulation and possession and reading of the
18:29: Bible would generate, quote, more harm than good, end quote. And therefore the council of Trent said that those reading or possessing the
18:37: Bible, quote, without permission may not receive absolution from their sins until they have handed copies of the scriptures over to the proper officials, end quote.
18:49: The historian Schroeder said this, quote, persistent effort was made by the Romanizers to suppress the
18:55: English Bible. In 1543, an act was passed forbidding absolutely the use of Tyndale's version and any reading of the scriptures in assemblies without royal license, end quote.
19:06: It is a terrible tragedy, at least to those of us who love the word of God. It is a terrible tragedy that it's a historical fact that between 1525 and 1528, those four years of the estimated 18 ,000 copies of the
19:21: Bible printed, only two fragments are known to exist today.
19:27: Rome and the Inquisition were that thorough in their utter contempt for and detestation of God's word.
19:34: Imagine the Bible being translated into our language for the first time. Imagine brand new, freshly printed copies of the
19:43: Bible in English being thrown into bonfires. Doesn't that make you righteously angry?
19:50: The enemies of Jesus Christ who have understood where the heart of the antithesis really lies between belief and unbelief, between believers and unbelievers have directed the hottest of their hatred primarily at God's word to attempt to destroy it from the face of the earth.
20:07: When the Bible was forgotten in Israel, they succumbed quickly to the world around them. And even the prophets themselves who were sent by God to call the people back to the words of the covenant, back to the words of the law in the written scriptures, many of them were given martyrdom as a reward for their efforts.
20:27: Why does Satan hate this book so much? Because the message it contains, which explains
20:33: God's great historical acts of redemption in the person, life, crosswork, resurrection and ascension of Christ is the means by which all of Satan's strongholds continue to be plundered by God.
20:46: That's why he and his followers detest the word of God and have sought to erase it from the world and hate those who love it, misrepresent it in public and blaspheme it constantly.
21:00: Genesis chapter six, verses five and six describes what the world was like when there was very, very little light at all given by God.
21:10: Noah and his family were the only ones that seemed to have any knowledge of God at all in the world but this is a snapshot of what the world's like without divine revelation, without the special life -giving saving words of God given to us in the pages of the sacred book.
21:27: Genesis six, five, then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
21:35: And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth and he was grieved in his heart. But you see, after the floodwaters receded and God gave a new command for a new beginning, spread out, multiply and cover the earth, men gathered together with their one language and said, no, we're gonna build a tower up to the heavens and make a name for ourselves.
21:55: And God said, no, you're not. And he confused their languages and they all spread out. And then
22:01: God spoke in Genesis 12 to Abram, you go out of your father's house and I'm gonna be with you and I'm gonna keep giving you more promises along the way.
22:10: And then the light started to shine and the church has grown and grown. And as the word of God has been written and copied and translated into more languages and then the coming of Christ, the fulfillment of all those
22:21: Old Testament prophecies and promises and then the beginning of the church and then the publication of the New Testament documents and then it's translation on piles of corpses to get it into our language.
22:33: Here it is today. And we live in a society that has been so influenced by the Bible, the very freedom that we have to sit here, the very prosperity that we enjoy is because of this book.
22:46: And it's amazing those who enjoy those blessings spend their lives attacking, mocking, misrepresenting and ridiculing that book.
22:54: The Bible is the moral miracle of the world. It's still amazing.
23:00: Every time you read Genesis one and two and you see that God created Adam and Eve and that God took one rib from Adam's side and made him a wife and a man shall leave his father, mother be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.
23:17: That was radical in the world in which that was delivered by Moses. Everybody was a polygamist back then.
23:24: And yet you see it was a creation ordinance. It's the way that God designed things to be. Monogamy is
23:29: God's design for the world. It's the moral miracle of the world the Bible is.
23:35: And we live in the shadow of all of its benefits here right now, this day. You see the vile, the erring and wicked men have devoted their lives to contradicting and destroying it only to die lonely and forgotten themselves.
23:50: Their names and stories could be told almost endlessly. In France, the deist and playwright
23:55: Voltaire produced a number of volumes brimming with hatred for the Bible. No one in Europe ever did more than that man, than that vile man
24:04: Voltaire did to try to destroy the Bible and the Christian faith. France itself as a nation, as you all know, rejected the scriptures and embraced that horrendous movement called the
24:15: Enlightenment by historians. A movement which exalted unaided human reason as the ultimate source of truth and virtue and discarded the
24:22: Bible. And eventually because of that, the greatest event in human history since the fall of the
24:28: Roman Empire took place in France, the French Revolution. It was a bath of innocent bloodshed where tens of thousands of perfectly innocent people were beheaded and massacred by a revolutionary government.
24:41: And it ultimately did not produce what it promised to produce, liberty, fraternity, equality.
24:47: Instead, it left a power vacuum that was ultimately filled by one of the most evil and ruthlessly ambitious dictators of all time,
24:54: Napoleon Bonaparte. And since France rejected the Bible and went the direction of the Enlightenment, historians have pointed out that the government of France has collapsed 35 times since they did that.
25:07: Voltaire, that French philosopher and writer and playwright, a man who enjoyed cross -dressing and other fun things like that, said that within 100 years of his death,
25:16: Christianity would no longer exist. Since Voltaire's death, he is the one that has been for the most part forgotten.
25:22: And one historian has jokingly pointed out an irony that we all need to remember. After Voltaire died, his house was turned into a publishing house for Bibles.
25:31: In America, there was Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll who gave their pens to attacking the word of God.
25:38: Thomas Paine died a bitter and lonely old man, having lost most of his friends due to his political views and his hostility to Christianity.
25:45: His trifling little book, Common Sense, is mostly ignored today. In fact, one person pointed out that in the city of Stockton, California, a city that has more than a quarter of a million people that live in it, the public library's single copy of Thomas Paine's attack on the
26:00: Bible called The Age of Reason has been checked out 16 times in the past 10 years.
26:06: What the enemies of God's truth have always noticed is quite simple. The truths that are preached in the word of God turned the very world upside down.
26:16: And of course, from our perspective, the doctrines of scripture are what turns the world right side back up. When the gospel gained a foothold in the city of Thessalonica, as recorded in Acts chapter 17, the enemies of the gospel became envious and stirred up riots and mobs to attack and kill the new
26:32: Christians. And the scriptures tell us this in Acts 17, verse six. But when they did not find them, they dragged
26:38: Jason and some brethren to the rulers of the city, crying out, these who have turned the world upside down have come here too.
26:47: Satan hates the Bible and Satan's followers hate the
26:52: Bible too. You see, it's the regenerating power of the living word of God that turns the world upside down.
26:59: It doesn't do it by force. It does it by changing people from the inside out. It breaks the power of sin and creates repentance and faith in the hearts of sinners.
27:09: Satan's most cherished and beloved strongholds shake and quiver at the word of God. The apostle
27:15: Peter understood this very, very well. First Peter chapter 122, he wrote, since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the spirit and sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again, not of corruptible seed, but incorruptible through the word of God, which lives and abides forever.
27:36: If you are a Christian, if you are born again and justified and you've repented of your sins and your hope rests in Christ alone, it was the word of God that made you born again.
27:48: Peter says, because all flesh is as grass and all the glory of man is the flower of the grass.
27:55: The grass withers and its flower falls away, but the word of the Lord endures forever.
28:02: Now this is the word which by the gospel was preached to you. You see why in our church, and I pray that this continues until the end of time, until Jesus comes back, there will always be the reading and exposition and proclamation of the
28:19: Bible. Without that, you don't have the power of God. I don't care if your church has 10 ,000 on a
28:25: Sunday, if the Bible is not being read and taught God's power to save and make people alive and sanctify them and cancel sin and break strongholds and raise up men for gospel ministry, that power is gone when the word is silent.
28:39: I want you all to consider with me what the world was like when Jesus sent his apostles into it. What was the world like when
28:46: Jesus sent out those Galilean fishermen to preach the word of God and the gospel of Christ?
28:54: The world that they stepped into was filled with superstition, cruelty, lust, and the grossest forms of paganism imaginable.
29:03: Jesus sent his followers into a world that would prove to be violently hostile to God's truth.
29:09: In fact, Jesus told his disciples, you will be beaten and many of you will be killed for my sake and for the sake of the word.
29:18: And these men, their message was simple. And it's a radical message. And it still is a radical message.
29:23: And it's just as intolerable to our culture today as it was to ancient Rome. Here was their basic message.
29:29: All of the established religions that then existed were false and useless and had to be abandoned at all costs.
29:39: Jesus' apostles told people steeped in sin that they needed new lives and that they were on the surest paths straight to hell if they did not repent and turn to Christ.
29:50: The gospel did battle against the worst of idolatry, tradition, a bigoted Jewish priesthood, sneering philosophers, ignorant and uneducated masses, and bloodthirsty
30:01: Roman emperors. And I will tell you that the odds never looked so bleak for any cause in the history of mankind.
30:09: Jesus' disciples had to do battle, had to do this with no swords, no guns, no knives, bombs, tanks, horses, or artillery.
30:18: Jesus gave them no worldly powers and no gimmicks of fake promises or entertaining silliness to try to compel belief out of people.
30:27: It is the sheer Holy Spirit driven power of truth from Scripture that compelled men to believe and that broke their idolatry and brought them to Christ.
30:41: J .C. Ryle said this, quote, "'The preacher of Christianity in the first century "'was not a man with a sword and an army to frighten people "'or a man with a license to be sensual to allure people "'like the priests of the shameful idols of the
30:55: Hindus. "'No, he was nothing more than one holy man "'with one holy book.
31:00: "'And how did these men of one book prosper?' In a few generations, they entirely changed the face of society by the doctrines of the
31:10: Bible. They emptied the temples of the heathen gods. They starved out idolatry and left it high and dry like a stranded ship.
31:19: They brought into the world a higher condition of morality between man and man. They raised the character and position of women.
31:26: They altered the standard of purity and decency. They put an end to man's cruel and bloody customs such as gladiatorial fights.
31:35: There was no stopping the change. Persecution and opposition were useless. One victory after another was won.
31:43: One bad thing after another melted away. Whether men liked it or not, they were slowly affected by the movement of the new religion and drawn within the whirlpool of its power.
31:52: The earth shook and their rotten shelters fell to the ground."
31:58: End quote. If only our confidence in God's word was greater than it is.
32:05: We would stop watching all the meaningless silliness that we do. We would remember that the time that we live is the one commodity in our existence that can never be replenished.
32:16: The time that passes you by is gone for the rest of eternity. Time is the fire in which you and I burn.
32:23: And eventually we all die. It will hunt us down and make the kill. And if you wanna be happy and productive and sleep well and live a full life of purpose and meaning and bring glory to the creator of all, you must be reconciled to him through Christ alone and get hold of a
32:38: Bible and wear down his pages with reading and studying and make it flow out of every pore in your body.
32:45: Paul said to the church at Ephesus, a church that lived in the furnace of persecution, he said to them, see then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil.
33:00: When you look at your life, look at it as a finite amount of time and the days pass you by and the hours pass you by and the things that take up our time that are not productive, that don't have anything good in them, they come and they go and the time goes by.
33:14: Remember that God speaking through his spirit and his word is telling you and I to redeem the time that we have.
33:21: Make it productive. Think with me of the incredible victories and the impact that people have had for righteousness and truth upon this world because they became zealous students of the word of God.
33:35: When God finally, by his glorious grace, cracked through my hardened heart and made me his own, it was the
33:42: Bible that became my companion and teacher and the more I read it starting at age 18, the more heartbroken
33:48: I became because of how much of my life I had wasted being a coward, chasing meaningless dreams of fame and glory and trying to be something
33:56: I was not. The answers had always been there and to see the depth of my own selfish, evil heart and desires, all the hatred and bitterness that had been lodged there for so long,
34:08: God destroyed it by the cross of Christ. To be entirely forgiven once for all to be legally declared righteous before God because of Christ alone, to know that my eternal happiness was secured and would be waiting for me when
34:22: I died, no matter what, it all became fuel to the fire. Even remembering both the wonder and the heartache of those early days is still hard and it still stirs an even deeper desire to put sin to death and to pursue holiness.
34:36: God brings us to the very dust of death when he saves our souls and justifies us once for all eternity in our justification and our salvation but he raises us back up and gives us new life and then sets us moving forward, moving in a whole new direction, armed with the power of his word, changing us, correcting us, instructing us.
34:56: Each day that goes by us now that we know Christ is the day we live for him. Now we want to know what does our
35:02: Lord and master and redeemer bid of us. Remember Peter, Peter, a man who had fallen and sinned so badly in his triple denial of our
35:11: Lord on the night he was arrested before his crucifixion. Peter was a man who understood grace.
35:17: He understood what it was to be forgiven and to be given more chances to do what was right. He wrote in his first letter, 1
35:24: Peter 4, 1 and 2. Therefore, since Christ has suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same purpose because he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin so as to live the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for the lusts of men but for the will of God.
35:45: Think of the victories God has won in your own life over sin. Think about the sins that you used to be dominated by that God has broken through the power of his word.
35:56: Think of the victory that Christ won over the punishment of your sins at the cross. Think of his justifying righteousness that has really and truly been credited to your account before God so that you have a true and righteous and just claim on eternal life.
36:12: Eternal life. Think of it. Think of the masses of people who used to be drowning in sexual filth and perversion who have been delivered from those things to the highway of holiness, the highway of happiness and joy and truth in Jesus Christ.
36:27: Think of the victories of the martyrs who sealed their testimony to Christ with their own blood and whose courage inspired so many to stand strong in their faith and who also by their courage showed the reality of Christ to the very enemies who were killing them.
36:43: Think of the Roman Catholic state church whose superstitious falsehoods had destroyed countless millions of souls in Europe for generation after generation.
36:53: And how did it all come to an end? A simple German monk opened a Bible, preached and prayed and the entire world was changed.
37:03: Entire continents were evangelized and Rome's false gospel and Rome's papacy were said it not.
37:11: One of my favorite Luther quotes of all time, Luther said this, quote, "'See how much he has been able to accomplish through me.
37:20: "'Though I did no more than preach and pray, "'the word did it all. "'Had
37:25: I wished, I might've started a war at Worms, "'but while I sat and drank beer with Philip and Amsdorf, "'God dealt the papacy a mighty blow.'"
37:33: End quote. What did I do to change the world? Just preached and pray, preach and pray.
37:39: Luther said, yeah, I could have started a war. Why do that? The word did it all. God dealt the papacy a mighty blow.
37:46: Talk about victories. And how did all these victories take place? Because God gave us this, this book.
37:54: The word of God has lost absolutely none of its power even though the darkness shrouds our nation now.
38:02: It's lost none of its power. It's the same book that's done these things in ancient Rome during the Reformation and every century since.
38:09: What's changed is us. What's changed is our zeal. What's changed is our level of distraction from it.
38:17: Think about what it has done throughout the world and throughout history. What are the victories of Alexander the
38:23: Great and Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Napoleon when compared with the victories of God's holy word?
38:29: I just named the greatest generals, the greatest conquerors in the history of the world. When Alexander died, his empire was quickly divided up between his followers and then it disappeared like that.
38:40: Hannibal eventually committed suicide. Julius Caesar was murdered. Napoleon was eventually exiled to a little island in the middle of the ocean where he died, the emperor of nothing.
38:51: What are those victories compared to the victories of God's word? Think about Europe on the eve of the Reformation.
38:57: The doctrines of the gospel and how sinners are saved and get to heaven had been buried under a dense mass of human traditions.
39:06: J .C. Ryle wrote these stirring words. Listen closely to this. Penances and pilgrimages and indulgences, relic worship and image worship and saint worship and worship of the
39:16: Virgin Mary formed the sum and substance of most people's religion. The church was made an idol.
39:22: The priests and ministers of the church usurped the place of Christ. And by what means was all this miserable darkness cleared away?
39:29: By simply bringing forth once more the Bible. It was not merely the preaching of Luther and his friends which established
39:36: Protestantism in Germany. The great weapon which overthrew the Roman Catholic Church's power in this country was
39:43: Luther's translation of the Bible into the German tongue. It was not merely the writings of English reformers which threw down Roman Catholicism in England.
39:53: The seeds of the work carried forward were first sown by Wycliffe's translation of the
39:58: Bible many years before. It was not merely the quarrel of Henry VIII and the
40:03: Pope of Rome, which loosened the Pope's hold on English minds. It was the royal permission to have the
40:09: Bible translated and set up in churches so that everyone who wanted might read it. It's a stirring memory to think of those men who were mockingly called by the papacy, the
40:20: Lollards. The followers of John Wycliffe. That's long before printing and movable type.
40:25: These men went out and preached with Bibles that they wrote out by hand. It took about a year to make a
40:32: Bible in English and they would write them by hand. Isn't it just, doesn't it just make your soul hurt to think of those guys being captured and those books being burned?
40:41: Ryle continues, yes, it was the reading and the circulation of the scripture which mainly established the cause of Protestantism in England, in Germany and Switzerland without it, the people would probably have returned to their former bondage when the first reformers died.
40:55: You hear what he's saying? He is exactly right. Why the reformation keep going forward? Because part and parcel of that reformation was getting the
41:03: Bible in the languages of common people into their hands. And that's why it's stuck.
41:08: That's why our church is here right now. It's because of the publication and distribution of this.
41:15: But by the reading of the Bible, the public mind, says Ryle, became gradually leavened with the principles of true religion.
41:22: Men's eyes became thoroughly opened. Their spiritual understandings became thoroughly enlarged.
41:28: The abominations of Roman Catholicism became distinctly visible. The excellence of the pure gospel became a rooted idea in their hearts.
41:37: It was then in vain for the popes to thunder forth excommunications. It was useless for kings and queens to attempt to stop the course of Protestantism by fire and sword.
41:49: It was all too late. The people knew too much. They had seen the light. They had heard the joyful sound.
41:56: They had tasted the truth. The sun had risen in their minds. The scales had fallen from their eyes.
42:01: The Bible had done its appointed work within them. And that work was not to be overthrown.
42:07: The people would not return to Egypt. The clock would not be pushed back again.
42:12: A mental and moral revolution had been affected and mainly affected by God's word.
42:18: Those are the true revolutions which the Bible effects. What are all the revolutions which
42:24: France and England have gone through compared to these? No revolutions are so bloodless, none so satisfactory, none so rich in lasting results as the revolutions accomplished by the
42:35: Bible. Amen. This is the book upon which the wellbeing of nations has always hinged.
42:41: And with which the best interests of everyone in Christendom at this moment are inseparably tied by the same proportion that the
42:49: Bible is honored or not. Light or darkness, morality or immorality, true religion or superstition, liberty or tyranny, good laws or bad will be found in a nation, end quote.
43:00: Why is our country the way it is right now? Because nobody reads this anymore. We have forgotten
43:07: God's word. We have forgotten what drove people to this place. It's my conviction, and there are many contemporary
43:14: Christian philosophers, theologians and thinkers today who agree that the day in which we live in terms of the health of the
43:20: Christian church in our nation is worse than the Roman Catholic religion in its darkest days in Europe before the
43:25: Reformation. You know, one of the reasons I think that's true because the conservative church really does think it's healthy.
43:34: How dare we own Bibles up to our ears and not be voracious readers of them?
43:41: Men and heads of households and all future heads of households, we dare not take the leadership
43:46: God has assigned to us lightly in our homes. The word of God thunders across 20 centuries.
43:53: Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up into discipline and instruction of the
44:00: Lord. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her.
44:06: That he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word. That he might present her to himself, the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless.
44:20: So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. What's our sacred duty if we're married men?
44:28: Is that we would sanctify our wives, having cleansed them by the washing with the word. If we preside over angry children, the fault is ours.
44:38: If our wife's walk with Christ is suffering and she is not growing in her knowledge of the word of God, we are failing in the most sacred tasks that God has given to us.
44:48: Plug your ears, I beg of you, to the siren calls of entertainment, games and gadgets. There is no end to the silliness and foolishness you can view on the internet.
44:57: And all the while, there sits that wondrous book, the very word of God, without it, we are a nation of blind people no matter how loudly we proclaim that we can see.
45:07: Without scripture, we live in total darkness and we are the blind leaders of the blind if we don't know its contents.
45:14: My dear wife sent me an email a number of years ago with a link to a podcast of what's called
45:19: Revive Our Hearts with a woman named Nancy Lee DeMoss. She is one of the very few godly reformed women out there doing such things.
45:27: And on this podcast, she had two guests in studio. They were a married couple. And the woman in studio tells a story of how her adulterous husband had devastated and destroyed her life by his numerous infidelities.
45:39: She had hung in there with him for a long time being a devout Christian as she was, but confessed that at one point, she actually prayed that God would kill him.
45:47: So great was her pain and growing hatred of this man. And then the man started to tell his story there in studio.
45:53: He was a professing Christian who had gotten on the fast track, big money, boats, cars and stuff, and sadly, other women.
45:59: An elder in his church eventually grabbed him as his marriage was falling apart and told him what he needed to hear.
46:05: Grabbed him and said, you know what? You have a very serious problem with idolatry in your life. Do you read your
46:11: Bible? And the man said, I was forced to admit, not really anymore. And this godly, wise, older man in their church who was an elder gave the man a
46:19: Bible and a blank journal and said to him, you're gonna start today. Here's the Bible, here's the journal.
46:25: You and I are gonna meet weekly and I want you to read X number of chapters every day until you read something that impacts you.
46:32: And I want you to write out by hand in this journal every verse that God uses to impress something important on you.
46:39: And this man obeyed his elder and did so. And he was sitting there in studio with a notebook of his own handwritten notes and Bible verses.
46:48: He had kept track of all the pages of the many notebooks that he had filled over the years. He was on page 1 ,467 in the 10th journal he had filled with his notes.
47:00: He and his wife had reconciled. He had repented of all his terrible sins. I couldn't help be moved to tears by this story.
47:06: But you know what, folks? What's always wrong with us? Idolatry, it's always the same thing.
47:16: When I took pastoral counseling in seminary, that's what they hammered home to us. You read Paul Tripp, you read everybody, what do they say?
47:22: Just peel the layers of the onion. What's underneath the problems? Don't just address the symptoms. What's the real problem here?
47:28: We are idol makers. John Calvin taught us that years ago, looking at the word of God, what is in our hearts by nature if we don't fill it with the word of God?
47:37: It just manufactures idol after idol after idol and we grab hold of all of them. But when we begin to fill our hearts and our lives with God's word, we then take hold of those same idols and smash them and are rid of them.
47:56: We don't drift towards holiness, folks. We don't drift toward God. If you're not responsible in your own study of the word of God and not responsible and self -directed in your pursuit of Jesus Christ, I promise you, you will not drift toward holiness and you will not drift toward God and you will not drift toward truth.
48:19: And if you don't know this yet, you must come to understand that the culture in which we live today is almost comprehensively toxic to everything good and godly that our blessed redeemer wants us to know, think and believe about everything in life.
48:34: And if we fill our hearts with toxic foolishness, then toxic fools is what we are going to be.
48:41: Just like this man who drowned himself in idols and nearly destroyed his marriage and his family with toys and with lust and with foolishness.
48:50: A godly elder kicked him in the pants and told him what he needed to do and to stop doing and what he needed to start doing.
48:56: And he filled his heart with the word of God. He did what so many immature, cowardly and infantile men in our culture refuse to do.
49:06: He took charge of himself and disciplined himself for the purpose of godliness.
49:14: And the fruit was beautiful to behold, a healed marriage, a healed family and an entire field filled with the shattered remains of the idols that have been destroying him.
49:27: Would to God that all of us availed ourselves of the unfathomable and incredible amount of light
49:33: Jesus Christ has shined upon us in this dear and wonderful book. Why do we linger in darkness when
49:40: God has shown us the lamp unto our feet and the light unto our path? Jeremiah, the weeping prophet told the disobedient, stubborn and foolish
49:52: Israelites who threw him down in a well over and over again for telling them the truth.
49:57: He told them something he knew they would not believe. He preached to them sermons he knew ahead of time they would not listen to or hear.
50:06: But he told them nonetheless in Jeremiah 23, 29, this word from the Lord. Is not my word like a fire, says the
50:14: Lord and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces. Are there idols in your life?
50:20: Is there sin that you just, it's just got me in a death grip, I just can't get rid of it. Here's the hammer.
50:26: It's a hammer that breaks idols in pieces, that breaks the rock in pieces. The reverend
50:33: David Brainerd, who died of tuberculosis, I've talked to you about him before, extraordinary man, died at the age of 29 after laboring as long as he physically could for the salvation of American Indians.
50:44: Listen to just a couple of journal entries that he wrote. Brainerd wrote this, when I really enjoy
50:49: God, I feel my desires of him the more insatiable and my thirstings after holiness, the more unquenchable.
50:55: Oh, for holiness. Oh, for more of God in my soul. Oh, this pleasing pain.
51:01: It makes my soul press after God. Oh, that I might not loiter on my heavenly journey. On April 17th, 1747,
51:09: Brainerd wrote this, oh, I long to fill the remaining moments all for God. Though my body was so feeble and wearied with preaching and much private conversation, yet I wanted to sit up all night to do something for God.
51:22: To God, the giver of these refreshments, be glory forever and ever, amen. February 21st, 1746,
51:29: Brainerd wrote this, my soul was refreshed and comforted, and I could not but bless God, who had enabled me in some good measure to be faithful in the day past.
51:37: Oh, how sweet it is to be spent and worn out for God. When this young man was just five days away from death, at the age of 29, he died on October 9th, 1747, in the home of Jonathan Edwards.
51:54: Five days before that, on October 4th, Jonathan Edwards recorded this incident. On the morning of the next day, being the
52:00: Lord's day, October 4th, this is just five days before Brainerd died, as my daughter, Jerusha, who chiefly attended him, came into the room, he looked on her very pleasantly, and said, dear
52:11: Jerusha, are you willing to part with me? I am quite willing to part with you. I am willing to part with all my friends.
52:19: I am willing to part with my dear brother, John, although I love him the best of any creature living. I have committed him and all my friends to God and can leave them with God.
52:28: Though, if I thought I should not see you and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part with you.
52:35: But we shall spend a happy eternity together, and Edwards wrote.
52:41: In the evening, as one came into the room with a Bible in her hand, picture this.
52:46: Here you have a guy, remarkable man of God, David Brainerd, just coughing up blood on the mission field, dying of tuberculosis, pulling his horse into the teeth of snowstorms, and suffering terribly from malnutrition, and just fighting and fighting to learn
53:01: Indian dialects to preach Christ and him crucified to these Indians, and he finally physically can't handle it anymore, and he's laying in the house of Jonathan Edwards, dying on his deathbed.
53:11: Five days before he dies, someone walks into that room carrying one of these, and here's what he says.
53:19: "'Oh, that dear book, that lovely book. "'I shall soon see it opened.
53:27: "'The mysteries that are in it, "'and the mysteries of God's providence "'will all be unfolded.'"
53:35: That God would speak to us directly in the sacred pages of this library of 66 books we call the
53:41: Bible is an act of such love and patience on God's part, is it not? All of us need to redeem the time that we have, for indeed the days that we live in are very evil, and I hope and pray that all of us, if someone comes near us five days before our death holding a
54:02: Bible that we can see, that like David Brainerd, we will also say, "'Oh, that dear book, that lovely book.'"
54:10: Let's pray. Oh God in heaven, we thank you that you would not allow your word to be unheard by your people, that Hilkiah the priest found it, that he read it in the presence of the king, and the king tore his robes.
54:25: Lord, there is so much that we need to read, and so little time to read it in your word.
54:31: May we redeem the time that we have so that we might tear our robes as we see more and more sin that must be put to death.
54:40: Help us to redeem the time we have to be diligent students of your word, that we might shine the light of Jesus Christ to all who are around us, that they might know that there is a