Grace Church-Burlington

  “A Bible in the hand is worth two in the bookcase.”

                Did you know that actor-comedian David Atkins, better known as Sinbad, died of a heart attack in March of 2007? At least that’s what his Wikipedia entry announced on March 17th of that year. Rumors began circulating on March 17th, according to Sinbad, who first got a telephone call from his daughter. The gossip quieted but a few days later the then 50-year-old entertainer said the phone calls, text messages and e-mails started pouring in by the hundreds. He said, “Saturday I rose from the dead and then died again.” Apparently, someone had posted on the site that Sinbad had died of a heart attack. By the time the error was caught, e-mail links of the erroneous page had been forwarded to hundreds of people.

In 1st John the Apostle John says, “There is no mistake with what we are sharing...This is the message we have heard from Him and declare to you…” John was dealing with the same problem that we deal with today in the Church. There were those who said that they were getting new messages from the Holy Spirit, (2:18-26). There’s an old saying about Biblical truth that is so accurate. “If it’s new it’s not true, if it’s true, it’s not new.”
                One of the most important issues facing the church today is the matter of authority. Who or what has the right, the authority, to determine what we believe and how we are to live? The answer to that question, not so very long ago, was quite uncomplicated – at least for evangelical Christians. The Word of God was the final authority over all areas of faith and practice. One of the battle cries of the Reformation was Sola Scriptura – Scripture alone. This simply meant that the ultimate basis of authority and truth was Scripture. The Bible had the final say over all we believed and how we lived those beliefs. More than that, the Bible was seen as sufficient, that is, what the Word had to say was adequate to equip us for every good work (2 Tim. 3:17). The fact is that if you take away the Bible, you’ve taken away the entire Christian message.
                Now no one claimed that Scripture exhausted every subject or even addressed some, like mathematics, but where the Bible did not give direct teaching, it gave principles by which we could examine and evaluate all things "pertaining to life and godliness" (2 Peter 1:3). That’s exactly what John is saying. It’s the “message from God” that has authority. Scripture is sufficient. The reason that we are so spiritually impotent and often so frustrated with life because we are not in the Book and worse, the Book is not in us.
                Let’s be honest, we think nothing of spending two hours watching a silly movie but can’t give ten minutes for the Word. We’ll sit on the edge of our seats watching some athletic event, often in adverse and uncomfortable weather conditions but somehow we don’t have time to study the Word. And then we plead for God to speak to us.
                I read recently of an evangelical student fellowship where for two hours the students sang and prayed earnestly and pleadingly that God would speak to them, all the while with their Bibles lying there closed on their seats. This is the problem that "God told me" experientialism brings for the sufficiency of Scripture. While we don’t want to put God in a box, we need to be very careful when we or someone else says something like “God showed me” or “God has been teaching me.” God’s Word is the yardstick for “what God has shown me.” Scripture is our foundation. Our experience never trumps God’s revealed truth of His Word.
                It’s a bit like this, someone said, “If God made man in his own image, then man has returned the compliment.” That’s the root of most of our problems, even in the Church. All sin is in essence an attack upon the character of God and we are not willing to believe that the living God really is as the Scriptures reveal him to us. We have a vested interest in resisting the claims of the “transcendental interferer,” as C. S. Lewis once called God. So we reject God's revelation and construct a substitute more in accordance with our likes and needs. That’s the heart of human rebellion; we will not let God be God in our own lives. And you see the symptoms every time someone says, “But I like to think of God as…” What usually follows is a picture of some benevolent, grandfather type, whose main purpose is to satisfy the whims of his creatures; or some other distortion of the God revealed to us in the Scriptures. If our view of God is distorted, everything else is bound to be out of joint. John says, To walk with God, we must base our walk on what God has revealed about Himself. It’s for that reason John begins his letter properly by launching us into one of the greatest theological statements in all of Scripture, “God is light” (v. 5).
                But light does not do us any good, if we do not use it. At Grace Church we encourage you to be in the Book at home and in our worship services. A troubling trend in many churches today is though the Bible is our guidebook for both faith and practice, in many churches one can go through an entire service without opening the Bible. Not at Grace! The Bible is our map. And we encourage everyone in our congregation to bring their Bible with them every week. We need to be wise and make sure that even what is said from the pulpit submits to the authority of God’s Word (Acts 17:22). History clearly records that Bibleless congregations are fertile ground for error and heresy. Let’s commit to being people of the Book!