TXT #3
[video, Craig preaching] And in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. This is the word of God …
[Chris] All right. So, my name is Chris Spradlin. I am a campus pastor and a teen teacher here at LifeChurch.TV. I want to welcome all of our campuses this weekend. Those of you guys that are in network churches, it’s an honor to partner with you guys each and every weekend. All right, so here we go. We are actually wrapping up a series called Text. We are in week number three, and we have learned a ton of things during this series, right? It’s been a great series, and some of the things that we have learned and we have been challenged with is, we’ve learned that the Old and New Testament has a total of forty authors. Right? And so, as they began to sit down and began to write the words of God, if you will take all of these books and you’ll cross reference them, what you’re going to find is absolute one hundred percent congruity. There’s nothing that conflicts, which is really interesting when you think about the fact that they all come from different backgrounds, different walks, they wrote them at different times, different seasons and different audiences. It’s all-congruent. We also learned that there are multiple prophecies in God’s word, that when He began to speak to these authors and they sat down to write the actual words of God and what it is that He was breathing into them, what they did was, they sat down to write it, and they were predicting future events that were going to happen. One hundred percent accuracy. It doesn’t happen, unless God is involved and driving the process.
We’ve also learned that there, out of all of these authors and the people that have taken this test and they’ve reproduced it, that people have sacrificed their time. They’ve sacrificed their families. Literally, at points in time, had sacrificed their lives. Why? So that we could have this [Bible] put in our hands. This is a gift. And so my question to all of the campuses this weekend, as we have God’s word readily available to us, what are you going to do with this gift? Some of you guys may be hanging out at campus this weekend, and you’re not real sure what you think about the whole God thing. You’re still trying to figure it out. Matthew 24:35 says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” Now, what this verse is saying is that we spend a significant amount of time on things that are going to pass away. I would say, “Yeah, that’s probably pretty accurate.” We spend time reading magazines like People Magazine, right? And maybe National Enquirer, although we would never admit to actually reading that. Right? We’ve seen it, though. Spend a lot of time watching television? Maybe you watch Gray’s Anatomy. Maybe it’s Heroes For You. Maybe you’re still watching Saved by the Rail, Saved by the Bell reruns, or Joni and Chachi. I don’t know what it is that you might be watching right now. Maybe you spend time exercising the buns of steel, but here’s the thing. The reality is, is much of what we spend our time on, it says they’re going to pass away. The only thing that is going to remain with us from now unto eternity is God’s word.
So, my question is, “What are you going to do with this gift that God has given us?” Psalms 119:11, King David, he says, “I have hidden your word in my heart.” It’s what King David challenges us to do with a skip, is to take it and literally download it, and to hide it, and to conceal it deep into the core of who we are and what we are going to begin to see is transformation in our lives. I know that many of you guys throughout this series have stepped up to the plate, and you’ve made a decision. You’ve said, “You know what? I want to become a student of God’s word. I’m going to read more. I’m going to study more.” Matter of fact, on the back of your TalkNotes, you are going to see a section that says additional study resources. I encourage you guys this weekend, take it out. Pull it out. It’s going to help. Some of you guys really begin to launch your time in God’s word.
But this weekend, I want us to become more than readers. I want us to intentionally take God’s word and download it. Allow it to transform us and change us. We know this is what God wants us to do, what He calls us to do. I remember hearing it as a little kid. Right? Growing up. I went to Sunday School. It’s a small church, and they always made me sing this song called the B-I-B-L-E. Yes, that’s the book for me. I stand upon the word of God, the B-I-B-L-E, Bible! I think that’s how it goes. I don’t remember. How many of you guys remember singing that song? Anybody at all? Absolutely. So, we are trained from a young age to take God’s word and put it in our lives. And as I look at my journey as a Christ Follower, let me tell you what I see. I see moments of absolute consistency. Right? You can look back in that time when you were hungry, and you were reading God’s word, and it was changing you, and it was making you new. And it was transforming you, and things were rich and you were growing. Many times, we have seasons of inconsistency, times when we’re not downloading God’s word, times when we’re not setting time aside in our day to take God’s word and to study it. Many times when we do that, it leads us to a place of being in a spiritual desert. Some of you guys may be there this weekend. Say, “Chris, I am in a desert right now. It’s been a long time since I’ve connected to God, since I’ve really dove into His word and let it change me.” And here’s what blows me away is, we know this. Right? We know what God does in our life when we dive into His word. He changes us. He transforms us. He makes us new. Our thinking becomes straightened out. He picks us up above our circumstances, up above our challenges, so we know on this hand what it is God does in our lives when we are really diving in with Him. So, my question is, “Knowing that, why do we continue to neglect God’s word?”
[video] So, I think if a lot of us are honest about our lives and how we’ve been living, I think the reality is, is a lot of our lives are marked by struggle. I think many of us are searching for purpose, why we were created, what it is that God has called us to do. We struggle with addictions, the same addictions week after week, year after year after year after year, and the truth is, we finally just sit down and we make a commitment, and we would take God’s word and we would deposit it into our soul. We would meditate on His words, and we would allow them to transform us and to change us, then we are going to be who God has called us to be. Then, we are going to live in purpose. Then, we are going to break free from the struggle and the challenges and the addictions, if we would just begin to deposit God’s word into our hearts.
Some of the things He’s going to begin to do if you will make a commitment and set aside some time and really dive into God’s word, become intimate with Him, you are going to see that God’s word brings power. Hebrews 4:12 says, “For the word of God is alive and powerful,” and what I think that we have to understand about this verse is that God’s word is not only alive, but it brings power. So many of us struggle in the world that we live in today. We walk around without confidence, without knowing that it’s Jesus Christ that lives deep inside of who we are. It deposits in us the ability to overcome, the ability to become who it is that God has made us to be. And I know right now that all of our campuses this weekend, that we have a ton of people that are crying out, and you are in desperate need for God’s power, the supernatural overcoming power of God in your life. God’s work also brings healing. Psalms 107:20, King David is crying out. It says, “He sent forth his word and he healed them.” You see, all throughout God’s word, they refer to God as Jehovah Raphe, which means the healer. He is the one that wants to come to you. He is running to you with His arms open wide, and He has His bandages of healing, and He desperately wants to wrap them around the wounds in your life. He is the healer, and I know that there are many of you guys this weekend, and you are in desperate need for healing. It may be physical healing. You continue to get sick, and you continue to struggle, and you just can’t get past it. There’s others of you that are here that need relational healing. You had a relationship at one time that was really, really close, and it’s fragmented, and it’s broken, and it’s splintered apart. God’s word can bring healing. Maybe you need healing from your past. You’ve been abused. Maybe it was sexual, maybe it was verbal, maybe it was mental abuse. Healing comes from God’s word.
God’s word also brings direction. Proverbs 16:9, it says, “A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.” So many times I can look at my own life, and many of the times when I cried out to God and when I re-connected to Him and said, “God, I need You,” it was a time in my life when I was searching for direction. We go through life asking ourselves questions. What should I be doing for a living? What has God called me to do? What is my real purpose? Should we have three kids? Should we have six kids? Should we have eight kids? Should we have docked? Should I take the kids roller skating tonight? Should I not? Should I still be rocking them all, and wearing parachute pants? These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves every single day of our life. I know that’s ridiculous, but seriously, what I want you to know, what I want you to understand, that God’s word brings direction into our life. And God’s word brings freedom. Luke 4:18 says, “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, for recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed.” What you see when you look in this verse is the exact reason why Jesus Christ came to this earth. Why’d He come? He came to set you free. He came to set me free. He came to set us free from addictions. He came to set us free from pain in our life. He came to set us free from the guilt of poor decisions that we have made in the past. Some of you guys are still listening to your Manudo A track, and I believe that through God’s word, He can set you free.
Do you want to be set free? So far, we’ve seen what it is that happens in our lives whenever we really make a commitment and say, “God, I’m going to honor You. I’m going to hide Your word in my heart.” We see that God brings transformation, and He brings life change into our lives, but what I really want us to understand, what I really want us to walk away with this weekend is, I want us to understand this very first thing is that God calls us to master the text.
Proverbs 7:1-3, it says, “Follow my advice, my son, always treasure my commands. Obey my commands and live. Guard my instructions as you guard your own eyes. Tie them on your fingers as a reminder. Write them deep within your hearts.” I think what we have to understand in this verse, is that we have to take a second. We need to understand the Jewish tradition and the Jewish background to really help us understand what it is this verse is saying. They literally dedicated their entire lives to mastering the text. Matter of fact, if you had a young boy, at a very young age, he would enter a certain school. Right? And by the age of ten, each boy will have memorized the entire Book of the Law. By the age of ten … that’s the book of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. I don’t know about you, but my kids definitely have all the songs of Hannah Montana memorized and every episode of Zach and Cody, but how many of our children and how many of us, for that matter, have really dove in and began to study the Books of the Law? So, when they graduate from that level of school, from ages to ten to thirteen, they go to another school, and in that school, what they do again is, they really begin to dive deeper and become masters of the text. Matter of fact, by the time that they graduate, by the age of thirteen years of age, they have the entire Hebrew scriptures memorized.
And so what we see in the Book of Proverbs is, we see that we are commanded to take God’s words and use them to literally guard our eyes. You see a section in there that talks about taking God’s word and tieing them to your fingertips, and writing them on the walls of your heart. And if you look back into Jewish history, what you are going to begin to see is, they took this very, very serious and very, very literal. They would write God’s word, Jehovah Nisse, Jehovah Rophe, “Love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, and mind.” They would write the words of God on the walls of their home. They would even take parchment paper, write God’s word and His laws on this parchment paper, and they would tie them to their wrists, so that everywhere they would go, they literally had God’s word with them. They also had phylacteries. You’re like, “Okay, what in the world is that?” It’s this little leather box. It had a strap on it, and they would tie it to their head. They would put God’s word inside of those boxes so that it literally would protect their minds and their thoughts, but here’s what you have to know and understand is, why did they do these things? Because, literally, they wanted to take God’s word with them everywhere that they went. They talked about it at home. They talked about it at work. They talked about it with their kids when they were taking them to school, on the way home, literally, as they went about life every single day, they were mastering the text.
So, what we are going to talk about right now are some practical tips on helping you study the text. Okay? And this is for anybody. Maybe you’re the study-the-word-on-the-john, guy. Or maybe you’re the New Year’s resolution’s guy and you’re done by January 13. Irregardless, whoever you are, whatever your method is of studying the Bible, I want to show you a couple of things. Okay? So, what I want to help you do right now is, I want to help you actually choose a Bible. There are so many different versions and they come in different shapes, and they come in different sizes. One that you guys might be interested in, I don’t know if it fits you right or not, it’s a New Living translation, and I mean, I love just in my personal study time, I use this version. It really speaks to me. I’ve got great friends that are really involved in The Daily Walk Bible. And so, the way they have this set up is that, if you literally like read every single day, at the end of a year, 365 days, you will have read from Genesis all the way to Revelation, and so, this is kind of a high commitment deal, but some of you guys might be interested in it. And then there’s the New International Version, and that’s actually a version that Craig and I teach from. Okay, and so on top of that, one thing that I think is really important for all of us to consider, is to study like extra material, right? And I think like the official seminary word for that is called commentaries, you know, like you’re getting really spiritual if you’re reading commentaries and stuff like that, but one that I’ve had for years is called the Bible Exposition Commentary. See, now doesn’t that sound official? But it’s written by a guy by the name of Warren Wiersbe. He uses everyday language. Really easy to understand, really practical, and man, there is absolutely amazing stuff in here, and this particular one I actually dropped in the bathtub about a month and a half a go, and so I would appreciate it right now if you wouldn’t ask me right now why I was reading this in the bathtub, because that’s none of your business.
I think my all-time favorite commentary/extra material that I like is the New Living Translation. I talked about that a minute ago, but it is the Life Application Bible, and it’s awesome. Here is mine right here and you can see it’s been torn up. It’s been through a lot. That makes me look more holy and spiritual. I actually pulled the cover off before the shoot, so you’d think I followed God more closely. But, here’s what I want you to see is that on this page it has God’s word and underneath it has an explanation of every single verse that’s in it, so it’s all in the same page. It’s concise. It’s together, and man it’s a great, great way to use it. Okay, so no matter what extra material you choose to read – maybe it’s Wiersby Commentary, maybe it’s this Life Application Bible. Mine has a commentary in it. The thing that you really need to focus in on is the who, the when, and the why. What was going on in that culture? What was their struggles. What was their pain? What was their hurt? What was the sin in their lives? And when you really begin to understand the who, the when, and the why, it’s going to make God’s word really jump out of the pages and jump into your life, and you’re going to see God really begin to reveal a lot of things to you. And so, another great resource is, I want to encourage you guys to go to the web. I mean, there are a ton of resources out there. I personally use websites like studylight.org, there’s Bible Gateway, ESPN. Man it’s great, there’s a lot of good stuff on there. Seriously, YouVersion, you know it’s a good website that we’ve just launched, and it’s just to help you guys begin to study and to know God’s word more intimately. So maybe you’re at a place in your life right now where you’re not spending enough time with God, and maybe you’re reading, it just doesn’t make sense and it’s not connecting. Maybe it’s time for you guys to really consider picking up some new tools.