All About the Bible
13 - Obeying the Bible
During the earlier talks in this series we saw that the Bible is inspired by God. It is His special revelation to us. We read in 2 Timothy 3:16, "All Scripture is God-breathed". Since the Bible is from God, it is no ordinary book. It requires a response. This is because the Bible tells us what God requires from us. It reveals His will for His people. We must give the response of obedience. God has spoken. His will is revealed. Our responsibility is to do what He asks. This is vital for our spiritual growth, the welfare of the church and the evangelism of the lost. The problem is that often we read God's word and we hear it preached, yet are slow to do what God has said. This is a great weakness. Be careful of being a hearer of God's word, but not a doer of God's word. The word of God mustn’t be treated lightly, or with a glib carefree attitude. It must be treated seriously.
There are many exhortations about hearing and doing God's word in scripture. Probably the best known is found at the end of Jesus` Sermon on the Mount. This is found in Matthews’s gospel chapters 5 to 7. Jesus covers all sorts of things in this sermon. The famous beatitudes are there, telling us how we can live happy lives as citizens of God's kingdom. There’s practical teaching on living in a way that ensures our light shines in a dark world, and how to be salt in society. Jesus gives teaching on murder, adultery, divorce, loving our enemies, giving to the needy, prayer, and how to avoid worry. There’s plenty of practical application. But knowing how fickle we can be Jesus finishes His sermon with a story about two men. One builds his house on sand and the other on rock. When the storm comes the house on the sand falls down, and the house on the rock stands firm. Who is the man or woman who has clearly built their house on the rock? Jesus said in Matthew 7:24, "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like the wise man who built his house on the rock". The rock is Jesus Christ and His word. The house is our life. The wise man and woman build their life on Jesus Christ and put into practice what He says.
Another well known passage of scripture dealing with hearing and doing God's word is James chapter 1:22-27. In verse 22 James says, "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says". The highest form of self-deception is to think you have done all that needs to be done by listening to a sermon. Listening is half the job. We must put God's word into shoe leather! We must put it into practice. James uses the illustration of someone who looks into a mirror and sees his face, and he says in verse 24, "after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like".
The purpose of the Bible is to show us what we’re like, "warts and all"! Scripture exposes our sins. It reveals our shortcomings. It tells us what to do about it. The problem is we are often like the man James mentions. We hear God's word; it speaks to our hearts. But we go away and do not give it another thought, when we should be responding to its challenge and applying it to the way we live. The American preacher Warren Wiersbe once said, "Too many Christians mark their Bibles, but their Bibles never mark them". God's word is meant to change us for the better and impact our lifestyle. In Luke 8:18 Jesus said, "Therefore consider carefully how you listen".
Notice Jesus said it is not just listening that’s important but how we listen. We can hear but not listen. The words fall on our eardrums, but do not reach our minds and hearts and affect our behaviour. James tells us the type of listening that brings blessing. He says in James 1:25, "But the man who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it, he will be blessed in what he does". Blessing is in the doing. The key is to look intently into God's word and to continue doing this. We must allow God's word to do its work. When you hear from God in the Bible, think about what He has said. The way to a Christlike life of fruitfulness is to study the Bible, meditate upon it, and listen to it being explained by the preacher. Then examine your own heart and put into place what God has said to you through His word. Too often we examine the preacher. We give marks out of ten for content and presentation. We sit at home analyzing the sermon presentation rather than letting the sermon analyze us. Worst of all we forget what the sermon was about because once we leave the church the message leaves our minds. This is tragic. A woman came home from Church earlier than usual. A neighbour who met her on the way said, "Is the service finished already?" ", The woman replied, "the church service has finished, but my service has just begun!" You see the point? She would listened to the sermon, now it was time to live it out as she obediently served the Lord.
The whole point of James` letter is to encourage practical Christianity. The evidence of hearing God's word well is seeing it lived out on a daily basis. He highlights three areas of our lives that should be affected by the Word of God. First is the way we speak. He says in James 1:27, "If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless". Second is sympathy. He says, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress". If you see someone in need and you are able to do something to help then do it. Third is separation. James says, "And to keep oneself from being polluted by the world". We will live in daily obedience to the Bible and avoid those polluting influences that it warns us about. The Bible exhorts us to speak in a way that glorifies God, to serve people in a way that glorifies God, and to live our daily lives in a way that glorifies God. This lifestyle proves we are not just hearers of the word, but doers of the word.
There is a day coming when we will give an account to God about how we lived our lives. On that day He won’t ask us, "what did you read?", He will ask, "what did you do?".