Matthew 4:3-4
What if there were just a couple of things you could do over the next twelve months that would truly change your life...would you be interested in knowing what they are? What if those couple of things were fairly simple, but required a little bit of discipline and commitment? Would you still be interested in knowing about them? What if doing these two things had the promise of making your life better? What if doing them would cause some of the problems you face to begin to correct themselves on their own? What if these two things could increase joy and peace in your life? What if they could be the catalyst for greater understanding, discernment and wisdom for living your life...wouldn’t you be interested? What if they would improve your marriage and help you know how to raise your kids? Wouldn’t that pique your desire to know and do these two things? What if these two things would make you a better person and help you face the obstacles of life with greater faith? Surely, that would interest you!
Questions of this nature could go on ad infinitum, but I wanted to get your attention by asking just a few of them. The reason is because what I want to talk about is important and has the potential to transform your life in ways you may never have imagined possible.
Probably, you’ve already figured out what these two things are that we’re going to talk about, but if not, let me tell you...I’m talking about reading your Bible and praying every day. Too many people think these things are too simplistic to make much of a difference. But, they can and they do change the lives of those that practice them. And, that’s why we must develop them as disciplines in our lives.
Dr. Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an agnostic and doesn’t believe the Bible is God’s Word. He thinks the deity of Jesus was an invention of the early church and passed down through the centuries with continuing embellishment. In his religion class where he teaches, he starts each semester in an unusual way. Listen to how he describes what he does.
“The first day of class, with over three hundred students present, I ask: ‘How many of you would agree with the proposition that the Bible is the inspired Word of God?’ Whoosh! Virtually everyone in the auditorium raises their hand. I then ask, ‘How many of you have one or more of the Harry Potter books?’ Whoosh! The whole auditorium. Then I ask, ‘And how many of you have read the entire Bible?’ Scattered hands, a few students here and there. I always laugh and say, ‘Okay, look. I’m not saying that I think God wrote the Bible. You’re telling me that you think God wrote the Bible. I can see why you might want to read a book by J. K. Rowling. But if God wrote a book . . . wouldn’t you want to see what he has to say?’” (Andreas J. Köstenberger, Darrell Bock & Josh Chatraw. “Truth Matters.” B&H Publishing Group, 2014-01-11. iBooks.)
Isn’t it interesting that someone that doesn’t believe you can know God...understands that the Bible is vitally important to the followers of Jesus?
Throughout our nation’s history some of our national leaders have known the significance of scripture in guiding and changing our lives.
John Adams, the second president of the United States, read the entire Bible every year. He studied the Scriptures every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings. It was regular reading of the Bible that shaped his character, and his character shaped our country.
Andrew Jackson, our seventh president, referred to the Bible as, “the rock on which our Republic rests.” He read three to five chapters each day.
Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, called the Bible, “the best gift God has ever given to man...But for it we could not know right from wrong.”
Woodrow Wilson, our 28th president, said, “The Bible is the Word of life. I beg that you will read it and find this out for yourself. When you have read the Bible you will know it is the Word of God, because you will have found in it the key to your own heart, your own happiness, and your own duty.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, our 34th president, and his family used the Bible each day during family devotions, with each family member taking his or her turn in reading a passage.
Ronald Reagan, the 40th president, wrote, “Inside the Bible’s pages lie all the answers to all the problems man has ever known. I hope Americans will read and study the Bible...It is my firm belief that the enduring values presented in its pages have a great meaning for each of us and for our nation. The Bible can touch our hearts, order our minds, and refresh our souls.”
These men apparently understood the value of the Bible. Do we understand its worth?
Did you know that there is no book of antiquity that is more attested than the Bible? There can be no other explanation for this fact than that God has sovereignly preserved His Word for us. Just consider the overwhelming statistical evidence corroborating the Bible's value.
The manuscript copies of most Greek and Latin authors can usually be counted on both hands, with some rising into the hundreds. Homer’s writings are the second-most popular with less than 2500 copies of his Iliad and Odyssey combined. But Homer pales in comparison with the New Testament.
The number of New Testament manuscripts in Greek alone now stands at 5824. Add another 10,000+ for Latin copies (which the NT began to be translated into in the second century), and several thousand more for Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, Arabic, Hebrew, and many other languages. Conservative estimates are that the New Testament weighs in at 20,000 to 25,000 manuscripts in these various languages.
That’s approximately ten times the amount of manuscripts for Homer! And the average New Testament manuscript is not some small scrap; the average is more than 450 pages long. In terms of sheer quantity of manuscripts, nothing in the ancient world comes close to the New Testament.
And that doesn't include scripture quotes in sermons and letters from the early church fathers, including more than 38,000 quotations from the New Testament. From their writings alone we are told that we can reconstruct almost the entire New Testament.
Even the skeptical professor, Bart Ehrman agrees “...if all of these secondhand quotes were compiled and cataloged in biblical order, laid from end to end, they would be ‘sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.’” (Excerpt From: Andreas J. Köstenberger, Darrell Bock & Josh Chatraw. “Truth Matters.” B&H Publishing Group, 2014-01-11. iBooks.)
What I want you to see is that you can trust the Bible you have in your hand and that it is the Word of God...worthy of our reading daily. It’s far more important than any other book you may own, including the Harry Potter series.
Did you also know that it is still the best selling book each year and of all time? “Remember, we’re talking about people buying a book that most [people] already own. (The average American household has four.) Yet even the most conservative estimates on annual Bible sales in the U.S. would place the figure in the neighborhood of twenty-five million copies...Add international sales, add giveaways, add ministry purchases, add missionary usage. If God didn’t already own the cattle on a thousand hills, think of the royalties.” (Excerpt From: Andreas J. Köstenberger, Darrell Bock & Josh Chatraw. “Truth Matters.” B&H Publishing Group, 2014-01-11. iBooks.)
It should be obvious from history that no book has had a greater impact on our world. No book reveals more about God. No book gives a better understanding of Jesus. Many of the expressions we use every day come from the scriptures. No matter how many times you read it, you constantly find new things. It speaks to you differently every time you open its pages. It gives you an understanding of what it means to be created in God’s image, as well as help you find your life’s purpose on earth.
It’s the Bible that inspired the founding of some of our finest universities and hospitals. It’s the chief narrative of more than two billion people that profess to be Christians. It is the most sustained and vital value system in history. It’s a mirror that develops our consciences and helps us arrange our priorities. When we heed what it says, it develops compassion and good judgment within us. It helps us become better parents, spouses, neighbors, Christians, employees, citizens and human beings. And, most importantly, it prepares us for eternity by pointing us to the Christ in Whom we must believe!
Our problem today isn’t that we have too many versions of the Bible. Our problem is that we don’t read the versions we have. Dr. Dan Wallace is professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He is also the founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. He is an eminent scholar that has written about the errors of Bart Ehrman’s agnostic reasoning and has debated him on several occasions. Dr. Wallace makes a startling statement in a four-part article about the History of the English Bible.
He writes, “Even with the proliferation of Bibles today, Christians are reading their Bibles less and less. I believe the evangelical church has only 50 years of life left. 50 years left of evangelicalism because of marginalization of the Word of God. We need another Reformation! The enemy of the gospel now is not religious hierarchy but moral anarchy, not tradition but entertainment. The enemy of the gospel is Protestantism run amock; it is an anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge, feel-good faith that has no content and no convictions. Part of the communal repentance that is needed is a repentance about the text. And even more importantly, there must be a repentance with regard to Christ our Lord. Just as the Bible has been marginalized, Jesus Christ has been ‘buddy-ized.’ His transcendence and majesty are only winked at, as we turn him into the genie in the bottle, beseeching God for more conveniences, more luxury, less hassle, and a life without worries or lack of comfort. He no longer wears the face that the apostles recognized. Or, as Erasmus remarked, ‘When you read the Greek New Testament, you can see the face of Jesus more clearly than if you were one of his disciples’! A bit of hyperbole, but the point is worth underscoring: The God we worship today no longer resembles the God of the Bible. Unless we return to him through a reading and digesting of the scriptures—through a commitment to the text, the evangelical church will become irrelevant, useless, dead." - Professor Dan Wallace, “The History of the English Bible, Part IV: Why So Many Versions?” (2001)
And that is what has happened in many of our denominational churches today that no longer hold the Bible as the inerrant, infallible and inspired Word of God. Once the “book” you hold in your hands no longer has the divine authority to command your life, then you no longer need the church that was born out of the life-changing message of that “book.”
How important does Jesus say the scripture is? Just remember what He said when He was tempted at the beginning of His ministry, “And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, ‘If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.’ But He answered and said, ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:3-4)
More than we need daily physical food, we need daily spiritual food...the Word of God! Part of being spiritually fit is consuming the right kind of “food” for our spiritual souls.
Added to this simple step of reading our Bibles each day is the importance of praying every day, as well. We too often underestimate the value of prayer and overestimate the value of our own abilities. Prayer is certainly an acknowledgment of our dependence on God, but it is more than that, too. It is about a relationship with God wherein we fellowship with Him by listening to Him and talking with Him.
Prayer brings us into the presence of God to commune with the holy One of Heaven. Prayer opens the way for us to walk with God in a living relationship. Prayer is less about methods, postures, programs, guides and formulas. It is mostly about closeness and intimacy with the God of our salvation. Every true believer feels the need for prayer, but not every true believer humbles himself to connect with God in prayer.
- Prayer is our opportunity to share with God all the things in our lives, whether good or bad, knowing that He will draw near to us as we draw near to Him (James 4:8).
- Prayer is our opportunity to express gratefulness and thanks to Him for all He has done for us, as well as for Who He is as God.
- Prayer is the means by which we confess our sins and seek the restoration of our broken fellowship with Him (1 John 1:9).
- Prayer is our opportunity to make requests of the One Who can do the impossible.
- Prayer allows us to cast ourselves and our burdens on Him and learn the greatness of His care for us.
- Prayer is the way to peace in the midst of storms in our lives.
- Prayer is so much more than any of us ever imagined!!
Anything that is mentioned more than 250 times (as is prayer) in scripture has got to be important.
For some, the greatest struggle in life is making time to read the scripture. For others, it is making time to spend with God in prayer. But, both of these disciplines must be incorporated into our daily lives in order for us to become spiritually fit.
Practical Considerations:
- Determine the optimal time for you to spend listening and talking to God. (some are morning people and others are night people)
- Put your time with God on your calendar and consider it an appointment more important than any other appointment you have.
- Minimize the distractions that can interrupt your focus on God.
- Read the scripture for quality, not just quantity.
- Keep a journal and write down one thought (or verse) each day that comes from the text you are reading to ponder (meditate on) throughout the day.
- Periodically, share with others what God is teaching you from your daily time with Him.
- Set a goal to memorize one scripture a week or month so it becomes a part of you.
- Listen to what the scripture is saying and pray the text back to God as your own.
- When you are praying, learn to listen for the voice of God through the scripture you’ve been reading and in your spirit.
- If you miss your time with God, don’t condemn yourself...pick up where you left off and get going again as quickly as possible.
