0 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:07,000 Do you have Bible studies? 1 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:14,000 Actually, the phrase “Bible study” meant a lot to me in the years after I became a Christian. 2 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:23,000 I grew up in a religious movement where I went to religion classes every morning and went to church services six days a week. 3 00:00:23,000 --> 00:00:30,000 But we never read the Bible. There was some exposure to the scriptures during church services. 4 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:35,000 But all during the years of religion classes, we never opened the Bible even once. 5 00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:38,000 The teaching was strictly out of other books. 6 00:00:38,000 --> 00:00:46,000 So when I finally did give my life to Christ--deciding I wanted Him to own my life, 7 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:52,000 choosing to offer the parts of my body as instruments of righteousness rather than wickedness, 8 00:00:52,000 --> 00:00:57,000 turning my life over to Him completely, and making a covenant with Him-- 9 00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:03,000 I developed a very healthy respect, I think, for the Bible. 10 00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:06,000 I saw the word of God as being our standard, our source. 11 00:01:06,000 --> 00:01:12,000 These were words from God about our futures, our pasts, and the standard for living. 12 00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:18,000 So because of that, having Bible studies seemed very reasonable and logical to me. 13 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:26,000 My background is in engineering. In school they taught us the scientific method of analysis. 14 00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:35,000 We learned to sort the problems through, discovering all the variables, dissecting them one by one, and solving them. 15 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:46,000 So it came very naturally to me to apply my mind to the Bible systematically to try to find God’s answers. 16 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:51,000 But I realized something more and more as I looked at this thing called the Bible. 17 00:01:51,000 --> 00:01:56,000 Jesus had said that the greatest scholars of His day had studied it diligently, 18 00:01:56,000 --> 00:02:06,000 thinking that they would somehow find salvation--somehow find God--yet they refused to come to Him to find life. 19 00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:15,000 And I realized as time went on that there were certain inconsistencies in my own life and in a multitude of others. 20 00:02:15,000 --> 00:02:23,000 There were people reputed to be pillars, name-brand guys you could see on television and book jackets, 21 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:25,000 whose lives seemed to be a contradiction to what they taught. 22 00:02:25,000 --> 00:02:34,000 Their characters didn’t seem to emanate from what you would think to be a personification of Christ’s word. 23 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:45,000 I began to see that knowing the Bible (or using great communication skills to teach it or becoming a scholar) 24 00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:54,000 wasn't the same thing as knowing God - letting God read our own hearts and lives and change us from the inside - and being children. 25 00:02:54,000 --> 00:03:02,000 Reflecting on Jesus’ life, I thought: “Here’s the Master Teacher--the guy who wrote the book we call the Bible. 26 00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:10,000 Now if having Bible studies was God’s way to cure man’s ignorance of His heart and mind, 27 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:20,000 surely Jesus would have sat down every Wednesday night at 7:30 and held a study on the book of Isaiah, or on the book of Proverbs, 28 00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:25,000 or led a devotional around the book of Psalms, or something like that.” 29 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:33,000 If we’re going to handle the Word correctly, as Paul told us by the Spirit we should, 30 00:03:33,000 --> 00:03:36,500 it would be correct to handle it exactly the way Jesus did. 31 00:03:36,500 --> 00:03:40,500 I don’t know how you could get around that if Jesus was the Word Who became flesh! 32 00:03:40,500 --> 00:03:48,000 Jesus wrote the Word, and Jesus handled it in a certain way distinctly different than the Pharisees. 33 00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:54,000 The Jews in His day used to hold competitions to debate doctrines and see who could win. 34 00:03:54,000 --> 00:03:59,000 They would wrangle over ideas, try to conceptualize, and then write great volumes of books… 35 00:03:59,000 --> 00:04:05,000 explaining what the scriptures supposedly taught and how to apply them. 36 00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:09,000 Jesus stood in stark contrast to all that, frustrating the daylights out of those men. 37 00:04:09,000 --> 00:04:12,000 The religious experts and scholars ended up killing Him out of envy, 38 00:04:12,000 --> 00:04:16,000 because for one thing He didn’t handle the scriptures the same way they did. 39 00:04:16,000 --> 00:04:19,000 He wrote them. Somehow he knew them better than they did. 40 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:25,000 He amazed them at age twelve--before He was old enough to seem a threat to them, like He was at age thirty. 41 00:04:25,000 --> 00:04:31,000 The experts were perplexed by the great knowledge He demonstrated in the questions He was asking and answering. 42 00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:36,000 So obviously understanding the scriptures wasn’t a problem for Jesus. 43 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:40,000 But the way He handled the Word really didn’t have anything to do with Bible studies. 44 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:50,000 He often quoted scriptures, but he didn’t present them as something to be analyzed on a slide under a microscope. 45 00:04:50,000 --> 00:04:55,000 He didn’t handle the Bible as if it were a chemistry experiment, 46 00:04:55,000 --> 00:05:02,000 where you distill out the various components and separate them in little test tubes, doing word studies in the Hebrew and so forth. 47 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:03,000 That simply isn’t how He handled it. 48 00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:10,000 I don’t have any objection to someone finding out what the original Koine Greek or the Hebrew words meant. I enjoy that myself. 49 00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:19,000 It doesn’t bother me or in any way intimidate me. There are some great riches there in the original languages. 50 00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:24,000 But if we don’t come to HIM as the Way and the Truth and the Life - 51 00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:30,000 - if the Bible becomes a cookbook for truth and how to "do church" and how to do this religious act or that - we’re making a big mistake. 52 00:05:30,000 --> 00:05:38,000 Instead, we have to let the principles of the scriptures read our hearts and open them up to lay us bare before Him. 53 00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:42,000 That’s when we can really seek Him out and find His heart and will. 54 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:49,000 In today’s world, denomination A believes this set of dogmas. Denomination B believes a different set. 55 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:52,000 And they each have their scholars who have all done their word studies to support the party line. 56 00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:59,000 But they've made a common mistake in that they haven't made coming to Jesus the end of the road. 57 00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:08,000 He’s not the major focus. It’s “what we believe about these issues,” that is the major focus, with Jesus over on the side. 58 00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:14,000 He is the supposed Head of the "thing." The supposed reason we’re together is to celebrate what He has done for us. 59 00:06:14,000 --> 00:06:22,000 But in reality the divisions we’ve allowed between ourselves have been focused on these other issues, all with scholarship behind them. 60 00:06:22,000 --> 00:06:30,000 So I guess I would have to say that “Bible studies” in the classic sense handed down to us - 61 00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:36,000 - particularly in the western hemisphere with the Dewey Decimal system and the Henry Ford assembly line 62 00:06:36,000 --> 00:06:42,000 the scientific method and all of the things that the western mind has done with the idea of truth - 63 00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:57,000 - have led us to a place of great division and poverty in our spiritual lives because of our approach to the Word of God. 64 00:06:57,000 --> 00:07:07,000 In the ideal environment, there would be a tremendous amount of scripture overflowing from men’s hearts and applied into each other’s lives. 65 00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:16,000 But as for sitting down and analyzing the Bible as if a particular passage were a science experiment - I would say it should be a rare thing. 66 00:07:16,000 --> 00:07:27,000 The focal point of our lives shouldn't be discontinuities of Sunday morning service and Wednesday night Bible studies. 67 00:07:27,000 --> 00:07:30,000 Those things are clunky departments: 68 00:07:30,000 --> 00:07:37,000 “This isn’t prayer night, this is Bible study night. The intercession ministry meets Friday mornings.” 69 00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:47,000 To somehow think that way about meeting together is really a mistake. I think the fruit of that mentality bears out what I’m saying. 70 00:07:47,000 --> 00:07:54,000 We have to be able to let Jesus decide if it’s going to be worship, or prayer, or teaching. 71 00:07:54,000 --> 00:07:59,000 We shouldn’t come to Jesus and say, “Jesus, please don’t teach right now, we’re singing. 72 00:07:59,000 --> 00:08:08,000 This is a worship night. This is deco night. We have come to pray to You tonight - please don’t teach us.” 73 00:08:08,000 --> 00:08:14,000 Or, “This is a teaching time. No singing tonight - that’s for Sunday morning.” 74 00:08:14,000 --> 00:08:20,000 In the average "Bible class" on Sunday morning - what if the whole time was spent worshipping? 75 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:26,000 Could they even conceive of it? “Well no, this is Bible study time. Worship service is later.” 76 00:08:26,000 --> 00:08:29,000 You see, the traditions of men nullify not only the Word of God - 77 00:08:29,000 --> 00:08:32,000 - the living, active Word handled in a priesthood of believers - 78 00:08:32,000 --> 00:08:34,000 - but it also usurps Jesus’ headship. 79 00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:39,000 It’s the same wrong step Israel made with Samuel and Saul. “They have not rejected you, Samuel. They have rejected Me.” 80 00:08:39,000 --> 00:08:48,000 We put something in place that seems innocent, but in the end it takes Jesus out of the place of Lordship. 81 00:08:48,000 --> 00:08:57,000 “We can’t teach right now--this is worship time. Sharing time is later on in the service. There will be a time for that.” 82 00:08:57,000 --> 00:09:01,000 The first one is speaking, and yet the second one can’t possibly speak. 83 00:09:01,000 --> 00:09:04,000 “I haven’t got to my third point in my illustration yet.” 84 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:10,000 The second one can’t speak because the first one won't sit down since he hasn't yet finished the thing that was "prepared." 85 00:09:10,000 --> 00:09:17,000 Do you see what I mean? It usurps the Spirit of Christ's Lordship over the times when we are really together in His name. 86 00:09:17,000 --> 00:09:25,000 With Him being there, He ought to have something to say about what happens on a real time basis - not just theoretically. 87