I mean, most of you here this morning know that I rarely if ever preach about money. You have never heard me tell you that you are required to “plant the seed of faith.” You have never heard me say that “someone out there this morning has a $1000 seed that they can give. God is putting it on your heart right now to give $1000. Plant that seed. Step out on faith. God will bless you in return.” In fact, I preach quite the opposite when it comes to giving. I preach, “God has already blessed you. What you give is your thanksgiving for what God has done.” Most of you here this morning would not fall for those preachers who do that $1000 seed thing. But there are a whole lot of people who do. There are a whole lot of people who dig into their wallets and give those huge chunks of money thinking these pastors are trustworthy and true. How do you know they are lying? Is it because I said so? How do you know that I am right? I mean, if I am right, why isn’t our giving through the stratosphere because it’s based on grace and generosity and why do these folks have television networks, gigantic facilities that are full of people every week, and book deals out the wazoo? By that measure, they are very, very successful. So, why is it if I started doing that, you would probably run me out of here faster than anything?
You could answer, “Well, you are actually preaching from the Bible.” Guess what, those preachers would argue that they are too. And here’s how they do it. They would say, “The Bible says in Luke 6:38, “38give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” You gotta start by giving God something to work with. When you give, God starts working to give you something back. And it says again in Matthew chapter 17 “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there”, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. When you plant your seed of faith, when you give your offerings, God is going to move mountains for you. How much is God going to move for you? How much is God going to give you? Well, in Mark chapter 10, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, 30who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age.” You may be out $1000 today, but God’s going to bring it back to you a hundredfold! Do you trust God? Do you believe in what he says? Plant that seed. God’s gonna give it back to you. Don’t you want God’s blessing? Don’t you want God to bring a miracle to you? Send in your money, and God’s gonna do great things for you.”
There you have it in a nutshell. It’s all based in the Bible with quotes from Jesus and everything. So, how do you know that what they are teaching is false? How do you know that when I say that these folks are false preachers leading people astray that I am right and that they are wrong?
And let’s now add a complicating factor. You know that I have repeatedly said over and over and over, quoting from St. Paul in the book of Romans, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” I have said over and over again that everyone is a sinner. That includes the guy sitting in this chair talking to you right now. I am a sinner. This means, I get things wrong. Not just every once in a while. I get things wrong daily. Does that mean that I can and do misinterpret Scripture? Does that mean that I’ve preached things that are wrong? Does that mean that I go astray when I am trying to preach to you about the Word of God? Yes. To all accounts.
This week as I was listening to a sermon about studying the Bible, the pastor said, “You know, every so often I ask a group of Christians: have you had your understanding of a Bible story or passage radically changed in the past year?” The pastor continued, “You’d be surprised how difficult a question that is for the majority of people. And that’s a problem. You may wonder why that’s a problem, and so I’ll ask you this question: if you haven’t changed your understanding about any biblical text in the past year, does that mean you understand the Bible and its teachings fully?”
That question stopped me flat footed. No, not because I haven’t changed my understanding of a particular biblical text in the past year. My mind was blown repeatedly multiple times just from preaching the sermon series on the gifts of the Spirit. However, I was forced to admit to myself that for the first twelve or thirteen years that I served as a pastor, I would have told you that I hadn’t changed my understanding of just about any biblical text. Now, I wouldn’t have admitted it out loud, but honestly, I thought I understood the Bible. I thought I understood the stories that Jesus told. I thought that I had a pretty good grasp of things and didn’t need to delve into them much further. Oh how wrong I was. And when I stop to think about it, I could almost kick myself.
Because here is the thing that helped me understand just how much I needed to study the Bible. Here’s the thing that helped me grasp my need to dig into its depths and go as deep as I possibly could. This book is God’s revelation of Himself to the world. In this book, God is telling us who He is; how He acts; and what He desires of us as His creation. Word of warning: some people do not view the Bible this way. Some people do not have that high a view of the Scriptures, but the classic view of the Bible is what I have laid out for you. This why Martin Luther once said, “Let the man who would hear God speak, read Holy Scriptures.”
And when I understood what Martin Luther understood; when I realized that this was God’s revelation of Himself to the world, I knew unequivocally that I could never, ever fully understand this book. I knew that I could never, ever grasp fully what God was telling me in these pages. For to understand the Bible fully would mean that I understood God fully, and there is no way I can possibly do that. There is no way that I can fully probe the depths of who God is and then say, “I know God inside and out.” No. Quite the opposite. He knows me inside and out. He created me and called me, just as He created and called you. And the question becomes: do we want to know the one who created us? Do we want to strive to understand Him? Do we want to see Him as He has revealed Himself to us?
I think when you ask that question in church, you generally get a resounding, “YES!!” I think it’s because we know that’s the right answer and the answer we should say. It’s the answer that a lot of people say because to this day, the Bible is still one of the best selling books every single year. People buy the Bible right and left. Then they start reading it and studying it. Then they put it on the book shelf or the night stand and it starts collecting dust. Why?
Well, for one reason, the Bible is not an easy read. The Bible becomes very, very difficult to read. When you start trying to wade through all the ancient laws and rituals described in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, it taxes your brain. To this day, I still don’t like reading most of those books of the Bible. Then, you end up with some teachings that make you scratch your head in wonder. Like the book of Proverbs chapter 26. These two verses are back to back, please listen to them carefully. Verse 4 Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself. But then verse 5 reads: Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes. So, which is it? Don’t answer fools according to their folly or answer them according to their folly? How do you make heads or tails of this kind of seeming contradiction? And then, there are the parts of the Bible that we simply don’t like. There are those teachings and sayings throughout that make us exceedingly uncomfortable–that call us to the carpet–that show us that we aren’t as good as we think we are. Surely Jesus didn’t mean it when he said that we had to give up all of our possessions to follow Him, did he? Lump all of that stuff together, and it’s easier just to put the Bible down. It’s too taxing on the brain. It’s too taxing on our beliefs.
But it needs to be. Yes, you heard me right. Studying the Bible needs to be taxing on our brains and taxing on our beliefs. I know that’s not necessarily the best push for encouraging Bible study. I mean, it’s a lot easier to say, “Come join us for Bible study. We promise not to shake you to your foundation and simply offer confirmation of all your beliefs and thoughts.” That’s easy, but here is the question: if you are simply being affirmed in your beliefs all the time, are you growing? If you never have to wrestle with who God is and what he has taught, is your faith stagnant? Is your relationship stagnant? Is faith and trust in God simply about being affirmed in what we believe and feeling good about ourselves or is there something more to it? Does our faith mean that we are challenged–that our weakness as sinners is addressed and that we are pushed beyond our brokenness into a new way of being and looking at the world?
I watched an interesting video that showed up in my Facebook feed this week.
It was a scene from a movie or television show–I don’t know which one because it wasn’t labeled. But the video was very, very powerful. A football coach calls out one of his players to do something called “the death crawl.” We find out very quickly what that is. You get down in a crawling position, except your knees do not touch the ground. A team mate lays down on your back, and you crawl as far as you can down the football field. The coach looks at his player and says, “I want your best.”
The kid says, “What, you want me to go to the 30.”
The coach replies and says, “I think you can go to the 50.”
The kid says, “I can go to the 50 with nobody on my back.”
The coach tells him he can do it with someone on his back and then gets in his face and says, “I want you to promise me you will do your best.”
The kid says, “I will.”
And then they go back and forth for several seconds as the coach demands his very best. Then, the coach does something unexpected. He blindfolds his player. “Why” the kid asks.
“Because I don’t want you giving up when you could go further.”
A teammate climbs on the kid’s back, and the death crawl begins.
What takes place next is sheer torture for the kid. He begins crawling and crawling and crawling. After a bit he asks, “Am I at the 20?” The coach tells him to stop thinking about that and to give his best. Over and over again, the coach yells at him to keep moving. The kid wants to quit multiple times. “It hurts.” “Don’t give into the pain. Make your mind overcome it. Keep moving. Give me your best.” The kid continues moving stopping to catch his breath as the coach still yells. “It burns.” “Don’t you stop, give me your best, your very best!” The kid’s legs and arms are shaking. The coach keeps yelling, “30 more steps. Don’t you quit on me. 20 more steps. Give me your very best. Don’t you stop. 10 more steps.” “I can’t!” “Yes you can. Don’t quit on me. Don’t you dare quit. Give me your best. Your very best. One more, one more step.” The kid collapses, and the he says, “It’s got to be the 50. It’s got to be the 50. I don’t have any more.”
The coach says, “Look up, Brock, you’re in the end zone.”
How many times do we stop at the 20 yard line? How many times do we stop at the 30 yard line? How many times do we get frustrated by the pain of having to think through the Scriptures? How many times do we want to give up because God keeps throwing curve balls at us not allowing us to get comfortable in our beliefs? How many times do we want to stay right where we are at because we think this is as far as we can go? And we fall far short of what we are capable of? And we fall far short of where God wants us to be?
If we love God and have been touched by the sheer grace of God given through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we long to be what He wants us to be. We long to do what He wants us to do. We long to grow in our relationship with Him. We are willing to do the tough work–to dig as deeply into the Bible as we possibly can so that we can understand Him and his will for our lives. If that means rethinking a whole host of things, we do it. If it means discarding what we once thought a particular text meant, we do it. If it means rejecting what culture tells us is in vogue, we do it. We are not interested in quick fixes. We are not interested in what others tell us is right. We are not interested in our own comfort and satisfaction. In fact, we are uncomfortable unless we are learning more about God and learning more about Him and His nature.
Ah, and once we do that. Once we really dig into who God is; once we read His revelation of Himself, we begin to put things in their proper place. We begin to discover the truth. We learn to discover what is false. Take a look at the insert that was handed out to you this morning with the pictures on it.
On one side, you will see part of a meme that is passed around on Facebook.
It tries to indicate that one’s perspective is indicative of truth. Just because you think you are right doesn’t mean that you are right. That’s just your perspective. Ah, but if you flip the page, you will see quite another thing.
You will see that the number that the two guys are arguing about is in a series of numbers. You will see that there is a context. You will see that someone had put that number there to be read in a certain fashion. You can’t take things out based upon your perspective. There is a larger perspective at play.
Now, let’s wrap this thing all together, and hopefully, you will understand why the church is here to study the Bible. When I gave you the argument for “planting the seed of faith,” like a lot of preachers do, I gave you three different Bible verses. Each of those Bible verses were removed from their context and cobbled together to get a certain point of view across. If I place those Bible verses back into their original context the “seed” message falls apart.
I’ll just deal with one of those texts and put it before you to show this. I’ll read to you Mark chapter 10:23-31: Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, ‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ 24And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ 26They were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’ 27Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’28 Peter began to say to him, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ 29Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, 30who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. 31But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’
In the midst of that context, does it sound like Jesus is telling you to plant a seed so that you will receive money in return? Does it sound like Jesus is trying to get you to give $1000 to step out in faith so that God will work with that money to give you a return on your investment? No. Not by a long shot.
We need to be equipped to handle such things. We need to be able to respond to false doctrine and teaching. We must be able to understand who God is and what God asks of us. We must test one another so that we might not be led astray by our own agendas and own sinful natures. Yes, that means you must study the Bible to challenge me as well. Only by deeply studying the Bible can you tell whether or not I am telling you the truth. For the Bible is God’s truth. It is His revelation, and that’s one of the reasons we are here: to study the Bible. Amen.
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