Tag: Bible

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Bible

Bound to the Word of God. (Tied, Restricted, and Restrained.)

Bound means tied up. Binding restraints and restricts. It means we can’t do certain things because we are tied to something else. If you physically tie me — bind me — to my chair, I can’t go for a walk. I can’t drive my car. I can’t go to work. Physically binding me would keep me in one fixed location.photo of a ship tied to the dock - bound

But we can also be bound in other ways. I am bound by my vows to my wife, and therefore I am emotionally, mentally, and physically united to her. She and I chose this binding to each other. We willingly restricted ourselves to each other. I am not able to be tied to another woman nor even to be tempted toward another, unless I loosen the bonds that I chose when I said “I do” to Paige.

So… what are you bound to? The Old Testament prophet Ezra bound himself to God’s Word. And we are also to be bound by God’s Word.

When we become a Christian, we say that the Bible will be the standard by which we are bound. Which means we will be restricted from certain thoughts and actions because of choosing to be tied to the commands within this Book. If you think all this binding sounds restrictive… It is, but it is restrictive for our good.

We have a good Heavenly Father, who has defined what should bind us. He indicates that the binding in marriage of one man to one woman for life is for our good. Paige and I believed that to be true because God said it, but now we have also lived it. This May, we will have experienced the truth of the goodness of this binding for 25 years. We have discovered that God’s Word about binding is definitely true in this area of life.

And God indicates that the binding of ourselves to His Word is always for our good. I want you to believe it because God said it is true. But I also want you to experience it.picture of a Bible - to which we are bound as Christians

At a Pastor’s Conference, Seminary President Al Mohler said:

We are bound by God’s Word.

We are in the midst of a culture that is embracing and accelerating sexual immorality and the whole general environment of immorality. It is becoming institutionalized, and it is celebrating rebellion against the Word of God.

And yet here we are, bound by the Word of God.

Does your congregation know that you as a pastor are bound by Scripture? Do they understand that there are things you must preach simply because God has revealed these things in His Word?

Does your congregation feel bound by Scripture? Do your church members understand that when Scripture speaks, God speaks? And that when God speaks, it is the voice of God? And that they are bound by it?

The Bible is the very Word of God, and it binds me for my benefit.

And as a believer you are also restricted and restrained by Scripture – tied to think, speak, and act in ways that God commands in it.

I hope that you will set your heart to love being bound by God’s Word – because it is a binding that is for your good.

Is there any command(s) from God’s Word that was hard for you to obey at the moment, but now you realize that obeying it was good for you?

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Categories
Ramblings

The Value of Writing Down What God Is Teaching You (No. Not Journaling.)

Not Journaling. Certainly Not Keeping a Diary.

Simply Writing Down What God is Teaching You on Occasion.

I don’t remember when I started doing it or even who it was that encouraged me to start. It seems that maybe it was around the time I started seminary that I started writing down a few of the things God was teaching me. Maybe it was a professor who encouraged us to start doing so? Maybe it was in one of the books I had to read for class? I had heard of the value of journaling, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about occasionally writing down valuable things God is pointing out.

man taking notes in front of his computer - a form of journaling

I’ve been doing this now for more than 25 years. I don’t write something down every day, but as I read God’s Word each morning, if something strikes me in a way that I think is important or challenging or points out something I hadn’t noticed before, I write it down. And if I hear something really helpful in a sermon, I write it down. And if I read something of great value in a book, I write it down. (Again… this is not the same as journaling.)

You can do that in the margins of your Bible, or in the front or back pages of your Bible. You can do this on scrap pieces of paper. You could even use a notebook. I have done all of that at various times. But I then keep all of that info in one place. And occasionally I go back through my scribblings and scratchings to see what God might point out to me from what I had previously thought was valuable. It is always interesting to see what God was pointing out to me at different times of my life.

And as I have been doing so, I have come across a few ideas that I thought might also interest you. And so when that happens, I’ll share those ideas for us to consider together. Here’s one I ran across from a few years ago when I was reading through Genesis:

In Genesis 15, God establishes his covenant with Abram by having Abram take sacrificial animals, cut them in half and lay the halves apart from each other, creating a path down the middle between the split animal halves. (Seems a bit odd, right?)

The Study Bible I was using that year provided a helpful explanation:

This type of ceremony was not uncommon in that day and age. An agreement is being made between the superior party and the inferior party. The superior typically promised protection and the inferior promised service. And typically the inferior was the one who walked through the halves as an indicator that he realized this would happen to him if he did not keep his end of the bargain.

But here are the two big differences between the typical covenant and this one that God made with Abram.

1) Typically, the inferior’s list of duties were longer than the superior’s. But that isn’t the case here. God had much more listed: protection, blessing, descendants, land, care for future generations, wealth, & peaceful death. Abram’s list of duties were minimal – they are not even mentioned, but we assume it is simply to believe in the Lord’s promises (15:6). The focus is on what the Lord promised Abram, not what Abram promised the Lord.

2) The inferior party is also the one who typically would have walked through the pieces to indicate his death if he broke covenant, yet here we have a symbol of God passing through the pieces, indicating that He would die before He would allow His covenant with Abram to fail.

And that is exactly what happened! Jesus did die to fulfill His covenant with Abraham. And through Jesus’s death, Abraham became a father of many, and Abraham’s descendant (Jesus) became a blessing to all nations. What an amazing story of God’s faithfulness to His promises!

So this is just one of the types of things I would jot down as something helpful to me when reading the Bible during my quiet time. And now, with new technology, it’s even easier. I can simply open up a note-taking app on my phone and type in the thought, whether at home or when listening to a sermon. coffee cup and notebook to point toward the value of journalingI want to encourage you to begin occasionally writing down what God is telling you. Whether you do it in the margin of your Bible, in a notebook, or in a note-taking app on your phone – keep up with the ideas that God points out to you as you engage with His Word. And go back on occasion to see how God has worked in your life over time!

(And as I’ve pointed out several times now. This is not journaling.)

Wait… is this journaling? Well, if it is, just don’t tell anyone. Because I’ve found that word turns some of us off.

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Categories
Christian Living

Good Books versus Great Books. What Else Should I Read?

There are many books out there. Some of them are worthless and just plain bad. But others are good. And some can even be classified as great books. The first one you need to know about is the Most Important Book ever written. You can read about it in my post from earlier this week. But After reading the Most Important Book, what else should you read?

A photo of a wall of books, symbolizing the need for us to read great books
And I thought I had a lot of books!

There is plenty of junk out there to fill your time. If you are going to read, shouldn’t you want to read great books that can have an enormous impact on your thinking and on your life?

Charlie Jones: “You will be the same person you are today in five years but for two things:
1) the people you meet and
2) the books you read.”

So, follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau:
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

There are bad books,
decent books,
good books, and
great books.

However, even if we throw out the bad and decent books, there are still so many good books that we can’t get to them all. Life is too short for me to spend it reading only good books. I want to read the great ones.
So what would those be?

Some great resources from Christianity Today for finding Great Books to consider:
The 100 Christian Books of the Century
The Top 50 Books that Have Shaped Evangelicals
CT’s Yearly Book Award List
These are some great places to start.

I have been going through those first two lists the past few years and have enjoyed reading many of them. Some of my favorites have been:

Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline
A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Rosalind Rinker, Prayer: Conversing With God
J. I. Packer, Knowing God
Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger
Catherine Marshall, Christy
Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place
Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial
Rebecca Pippert, Out of the Saltshaker and into the World

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” –Haruki Murakami

“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don’t just read good books (and certainly don’t read bad or decent books).
Go for the great ones.

Read great books, because:
“The things you read will fashion you by slowly conditioning your mind.” –A. W. Tozer

What books have you read would you consider putting into the “great books” category?

Categories
Bible

The Most Important Book You Could Ever Read

The Most Important Book you could ever read is one that has influenced more people over more time than any other book in existence. It has influenced more literature, more morals, and more life-changes than any other book ever written. And of course, you know I am talking about the Bible.

The Bible is the most widely-read book. It is the best-selling book of all time. It remains the best-selling book every year. It has influenced literature, history, and lives. I won’t go into all the reasons for trusting the reliability of the Bible, but many skeptics have done so and have discovered the Bible to be the reliable document that Christianity has claimed it to be for 2000 years. There are many good apologetics websites (and people) that can help guide someone who wants to study more in this area. The ministries of Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, and Ravi Zacharias are all great places to start.
picture of the Bible - the Most Important Book ever written
I’m going to assume that you believe that the Bible is God’s Word to humanity to reveal Himself to us. That makes the Bible the Most Important Book you could ever read. The question is, “Are you spending any time reading this Most Important Book?”

I continue talking about the importance of reading the Bible to people around me, including my church family. But for some people, the idea of delving into the Bible seems a bit daunting.

I’m not quite sure why we have this feeling of inadequacy. Certainly, many of us read multiple novels, autobiographies, and history books over the course of a year. Adding up all the pages for most people will probably exceed the number of pages in the Bible. But perhaps you want a bit more hard data on what it takes to read the Most Important Book …

Well, most of us read at about the same rate that it takes to read out loud. So an audio Bible program that tells us how many hours it lasts will give us the amount of time it takes to speak the entire Bible out loud. The ESV audio Bible is just under 75 hours. An NIV one I saw was just over 79 hours. If we divide these out by 365 days, then that is between 12.3 and 13 minutes per day to read through the whole Bible.

Do you have 13 minutes a day this next year to learn what God has to say to you from His Word?
Do you have 13 minutes a day to read from the Most Important Book ever written?

Or if you haven’t read the New Testament through before, then how about making that your plan for this year? If you would give 5.5 minutes a day, you’d read through the entire New Testament in 6 months!

Isn’t that remarkable? That if you’d commit to six minutes a day, you could read through the entire New Testament twice in a year!

If you have never read the New Testament, it is time to do it. Start today!
And if you have already read the complete New Testament but you haven’t yet completed the whole Bible, then make the commitment to give 13 minutes a day to hear directly from God as you read His Inspired Word!

You won’t be sorry that you spent time studying the Most Important Book ever written.

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Categories
Bible

The Minimum Requirements of Being a Christian (Another Examination of the Nine Essentials)

So in my last post, I indicated that there are 9 Essentials of Christianity. These are the minimum requirements one must believe to be a Christian. Here is the list again:

1. Our Bible as Inspired
2. Monotheism (There is only One God)
3. the Trinity
4. the Deity of Christ (Jesus is God)
5. the Virgin Birth (Jesus is Man)
6. the Death of Christ for the payment of sins
7. the Resurrection of Christ
8. Salvation by Grace thru faith (Not by works)
9. Salvation is only thru Jesus

Non-Christian religions deny one or more of these essential doctrines. And because these are Essentials, then if a group or a person holds to all but one, then they are not Christian. Really? Just missing one knocks them out? That seems so exclusive.

True, but let’s think about something else to make the point. This isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think it will make the point about minimum requirements …
      What makes a fish a fish? A fish is defined by a number of essentials: cold-blooded, vertebrates (having an inner skeletal system), aquatic respiration (extracting oxygen from water), that primarily live in water. We can’t reduce it further (and we might even have to add a few more). But if an animal is missing just 1 of these essentials, then that animal is not a fish.

An animal might live in the water, but if it is warm-blooded, it is a mammal such as a dolphin or a whale. An animal might breath through gills, but if it does not have a vertebrate inner skeleton, it will be something such as a snail or a crab. For an animal to be a fish, they must meet some minimum number of essentials – which dolphins, crabs, and turtles do not meet. They live like fish in some ways, but they are not fish.

In the same way, there are people who have some of the beliefs of Christians, but who reject one or more essentials. But to be a Christian requires that you meet some minimum number of essentials. I have listed nine.

a photo of a boy reading the Holy Bible as a reminder that there is a minimum number of essential requirements to be a ChristianSomeone asked me about the necessity of the “Bible as Inspired” as an Essential of Christianity. The reason I provide this one as the first essential doctrine of Christianity is that if we do not believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, then any “essentials” that we draw from the Bible cannot be held to as absolutely essential, because we wouldn’t be able to know if they are God’s Word or just fabricated by man. Therefore, the first essential is to declare our standard, our guide. A Christian holds to the essential standard that the Scriptures we hold as “The Holy Bible” are God’s revelation of Himself to man, written down by divinely-inspired men. Otherwise, I do not think we can logically have any discussion about the other essentials.

Certainly there are other important doctrines that teach us what to believe and how to live, but these are the ones that are indicated by Scripture to be essential requirements. Non-Christian religions and cults will deny one or more of these essential doctrines. If we can hold these 9 essentials in our minds, then we will be able to test other belief systems to find out if they are Christian or not.

And if you would like to look up some Bible verses that relate to the different essential requirements, here are a few to get you started:
1. Our Bible as Inspired (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:19-21)
2. Monotheism (Gen. 1:1; Deut. 4:35; Isa. 43:10-11)
3. the Trinity (Gen. 1:26; Gal. 4:4-6; Matt. 28:19; 2 Cor. 13:14)
4. the Deity of Christ (Isa. 7:14; Matt. 1:23; John 1:1-36, 8:58, 10:30-38)
5. the Virgin Birth (Matt. 1:18-25; Phil. 2:5-8; 1 Cor. 15:21-22; Heb 2:16-17)
6. the Death of Christ for the payment of sins (Rom. 5:12-21; Heb. 10:4; Ps. 51:5; Rom. 3:23, 6:23)
7. the Resurrection of Christ (1 Cor. 15:1-19; Rom. 10:9; Matt. 28:1-10)
8. Salvation by Grace thru faith (Eph. 2:1-10; Luke 18:26-27)
9. Salvation is only thru Jesus (John 14:4-6; Acts 4:1-12)

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