Sermons

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Take and Read
May 12, 2002
Pastor Dan Baumgartner

This is a good morning, a really good morning. Beautiful day, Mother’s Day, and we get the privilege of standing on holy ground before God in worship, with a family in baptism and some other folks at the next service as well, as two adults come for baptism and two of our high school kids to publicly profess their faith in Christ. It’s a good morning.

It’s always so exciting for me to hear the stories behind these events, to be reminded that God’s Spirit is present and active… that our faith is not some dusty old religion, not some particular set of beliefs, but a relationship with the living God…and the Word of that God blows around us, swirls around a family, and individual people, and we stand on holy ground together. The Isaiah scripture Dianne read, “My word goes out from my mouth, and it shall not return empty,” and so we celebrate lives that are changed.

“My word goes out…” We want to think this morning about the most consistent way we experience that Word…in the scriptures. Read with me, if you will, from the gospel of John 5… The background for this passage is that Jesus is doing battle with opponents who resent his talk of intense unity with God, of His being involved in the things of eternity…of his identity as Messiah. And Jesus responds by talking about various things that witness to his identity as THE one sent from God.

John 5:36-46

Each Sunday morning, we come to the scripture text for the day, we pause, we light a candle to mark the moment, we stop for a moment as we prepare to hear God’s Word…We read, we listen, we ask the Holy Spirit to speak through the scriptures…Then I start to talk. Hopefully what I say (or Lynne, or Jeff) is connected to these scriptures, guided by them, inspired by them. It better be.

One of my questions in leaving business and becoming a pastor was the whole area of preaching. Would I run out of things to talk about?! They say that every person only has one or two really good ideas in their lifetime. What happens after I’ve already told you mine?! What would I talk about? Fortunately, I had a very wise friend who said, “Just preach the scripture, it never runs dry.” He was right. This Bible is the primary way God’s Word comes to us…and when the Word goes out…it does not return empty.

There are good illustrations of this in the Bible itself. The very first chapter of Genesis, in fact…God SPEAKS. The world, the universe is a result of the WORD of God going out. God opens his mouth, “And God said, 'Let there be light.' ” And there was. God speaks, and things happen…the day, the night, the planets, the animals.

Then a bit further in the Old Testament prophets, we see it again. “The Word of God” came…to Nathan, or Isaiah or Jeremiah. They would SPEAK God’s Word, God’s Truth, God’s Heart into a situation…and things would happen. “Thus says the Lord,” meant “You’d darned well better listen up, the Word is coming forth.” And things happened. It wasn’t always instantaneous or immediate…but things happened.

And undergirding all of that Old Testament, the WORD seeps through thousands of years, pointing, always pointing to something God would do…for an insecure, uncertain, sinful, ordinary people who couldn’t help themselves from themselves…HE would save them, in the appearance of a Messiah.

By the time we get all the way to the New Testament, to the gospel of John, this Messiah is identified in a Person, Jesus, the Incarnate WORD OF GOD. “And the Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth.”

This is what we have written down for us, in the Bible, the story of the Living Word in the Written Word of God. It is the most consistent way we experience God’s Word. But what is it, this Bible? Isn’t it just a book, filled with historical documents, at least 66 different books written over a thousand years? Isn’t it written by at least some unknown authors, isn’t it full of the bias of cultures and conventions of years long, long since passed? YES. But Dan, didn’t you just say scripture is the most consistent vehicle we have NOW for us receiving the Word of God? YES.

Some have called scripture “The Word of God through the words of people.” Just as we talk about Jesus Christ being fully human AND fully God, the Bible seems to have both a human AND a God-breathed quality. Scripture did not float down from heaven on a cloud. It’s not a book of magic. It’s not an encyclopedia or a science book or an instruction manual. It is full of history, of poetry, of parables, of stories. In some ways it’s not even the story of people, it’s the story of God. It is the story of the Living God who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. 1600 years ago, the Church finally ACKNOWLEDGED what God had provided for it in these 66 books. The Church leaders didn’t set out to explain God, or to write a history or a biography. They just RECOGNIZED, they acknowledged what God had been using, that God had given them His Word in human words…That God had used the scriptures, illuminated by His Holy Spirit, to reveal Himself to more and more people. And the thread of the revelation of scripture is what Jesus himself calls out here in our reading from John 5.

As Jesus debates those who oppose Him, the Bible Teachers, the scripture experts of his day…he points to the scripture (the Old Testament) and says, “You want evidence that my claims are true, of my messiahship, of my intimate connection to God? READ THE SCRIPTURES, SEARCH them, they testify on my behalf!” The Scriptures Jesus was talking about were the Old Testament, of course, but in the New Testament it becomes even clearer: The Scriptures point us to Jesus, and in doing so become a channel of God’s grace. The Bible is not just words about God, but the words of apostles and prophets, all witnessing to God’s Revelation FOR US: Jesus Christ. And so it is the Living Word of God for us: surprising, shocking, joyous, sad, painful… “sharper than a two-edged sword,” the book of Hebrews says.

So…isn’t there a big mystery in exactly how God uses the Bible? Isn’t there a paradox, that something could be so earth- and time-bound AND so eternal and timeless. YES. Is the Bible INERRANT? INSPIRED? INFALLIBLE? Or some other IN word?

We could talk for days about these words, and the theological arguments and shades of meaning of each. But when I’m pushed to the wall with only five seconds to choose I usually grab hold of “infallible”….because for me, the longer I follow Christ, the more I see what Isaiah’s words meant: The Word of God goes out, and does not return empty. It has results, it succeeds in bringing about what God wants: a people for Himself. It points us to Jesus Christ.

In the 4th century there lived a young man named Aurelius Augustinus, whom we know as St. Augustine. He was exceedingly bright, and searched for God for many years, wading through a number of philosophical and intellectual movements. Eventually he began to examine the Christian faith. He described himself at the same time as “panting after honors, profits and marriage.” He was consumed with desires of the flesh, sexual and others. He felt an increasing anxiety over the inconsistency between wrestling with ideas about a living God, and being overabsorbed with worldly things…in fact, it was tearing him apart.

One day as he sat weeping in frustration in a garden, he heard a child’s singsong voice shout, “Take and read, take and read.” He tried to think of a children’s game that would use these words, but couldn’t…and there were no children around. He felt inside himself that this was God’s call to go and READ the Scripture…and so he went and flipped open his Bible. The page fell open to Romans 13, and he read, “…not in reveling and drunkenness, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” It changed the entire direction of his life. God used Augustine to greatly impact the young church, as he became a community founder, a leader, teacher and writer who emphasized very early on the grace of God shown in Christ. The Word of God goes out…and does not return empty.

You may have had an experience like this as well. In 1995 I was in school, still wrestling, as I told you, with this idea of preaching. In fact, as my opportunity came up to preach in the chapel at my school, I was absolutely petrified over the idea of standing up in front of my classmates and staff and professors. The day before I was to preach, I picked up my little daily devotional book, and it gave me the reading for the day: Isaiah 40. Imagine you are me, scared to go up the steps of a pulpit to preach, and being directed to this text: “Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!”

How does this happen?! How does it work? How do we explain it? An uneducated, elderly woman in North Carolina gets up at the crack of dawn, makes the coffee and sits down to read her Bible as the sun comes up…and God speaks through the scriptures. A seminary professor in large city pores over the original Greek manuscript, critiquing and arguing with the text. With all his diplomas staring down from the wall, he tries to understand first what the text meant to its original readers, and then how it is the Word of God today…and God speaks through the scriptures.

I was reading back through a journal of mine this weekend, and I was astounded to see how many times I had written something about a passage of scripture that God had used to speak to me in different situations.

If we will read the scriptures, God will speak through them to us. We need to read. We bring our faith, our hearts, our minds and say, “Lord, will you speak to me today through this word of yours?” We read, God speaks…Jesus says, “Search the scriptures, they point to me.” If we want to know Christ, we read the Bible.

Nearly every time our staff at Bethany meets, we open this book together. Each time our elders gather, we read this book. When the women go on a fall retreat, they study the Bible. When the men go on retreat, they dig into some piece of scripture. When Alpha meets, when children go to Sunday School, when small groups gather, when we worship, when we pray…we open this book. We want to know Jesus Christ, the Word of God…and we find Him here, in the written Word.

Are there problems, issues, challenges to the Bible? Of course there are. We read in fear and trembling…or we should. We read with great humility, acknowledging how much we don’t know. I love the story, though, that a New Testament professor tells. Each year, he was inevitably accosted on campus by one or two students who were searching for answers. They would try their hardest to pin him to the wall and get him to try and defend their attack on the Bible. At some point in the conversation, he would propose a deal. He would say, "I’ll tell you what. Let’s agree to read the Gospel of Matthew…TOGETHER. I promise that I will be open to the tensions and problems we encounter in the text. You promise that you’ll be open to whatever God might be saying through the scripture to you.” If the student agreed, the professor was thrilled. Why? Because he had come to know that as they read together…they would encounter Christ. It’s the Word of God.

We read the scriptures, we pray them. There’s a hundred different techniques to study them. We memorize them, we sing them. “Let the Word of Christ rule in your hearts,” the Apostle Paul writes. We try to obey what we hear. But the bottom line for us, the place to start or to start again…is no different than it was for St. Augustine 1600 years ago: “Take it and read. Take it and read.” And as we do so, we will meet Christ. Amen.