Sermon 11
A Sermon at Wonersh
by Jeff Wattley on 2004?
Our Church Values -
God’s Word reveals God’s Heart and transforms our hearts
Today we’re looking at the fifth of our Values in our Vision and Values programme, which I hope we all have on the little card.
As we sit let’s pray:
Lord, as we think about
vision, we pray that you will be our vision.
As we think about
values, we pray that we may have the mind of Christ. Amen
The Value
this week is worded as follows: God’s
Word is Vital in revealing God’s heart and transforming ours. In fact by the time the home group study
notes were written we had abbreviated this to say: God’s Word reveals God’s heart and transforms
us.
One of the
great paradoxes of our age is that the bible has never been more available; and
yet it has hardly ever been so neglected.
For less than the cost of a meal in a restaurant it is possible to buy
every word that proceeds from the mouth of God in any of a dozen different
scholarly translations in English; not to mention hundreds of other
languages. Mary Jones in Wales saved
every penny for 5 years and walked 45 kilometers to
buy her copy of the Bible in Welsh: then
there is the account of Emanuel Christen and Elio Erriquez who were the 2 Swiss hostages in the Lebanon who
treasured the partly burned old King James Bible which was missing most of the
OT which they
found box of old books. Neither of them
spoke English but they also found a French/English dictionary that stopped at
the letter N!.
Indeed they said it changed their attitude towards their captors.
The Bible
is a book that even faithful committed Christians struggle with and get stuck
on the mechanics of study and fail to absorb the sheer beauty and power of
finding that through the Bible we can connect with God. God’s word reveals God’s heart: and it can transform ours.
The writer
of Psalm 119 clearly understood this:
his psalm (all 176 verses) is a hymn of praise and thanks for the gift
of God’s word and it is overflowing with Joy:
O how I love your
law: I meditate on it all day long.
How sweet are your words to
my taste, sweeter than honey to my taste.
My heart is set on keeping
your decrees to the very end.
Just as
prayer at it’s best is listening to the heartbeat of
God, so bible reading at it’s best is listening to the oracles: the very words
of the God who loves us. And while I
know that Bible study can be frustrating and discouraging, we need to hold on
to the expectation that as we persevere it can become a tremendous source of
joy. Again the psalmist sums it up in Ps
1 when he says ‘Blessed (or full of Joy) is the man whose delight is in the law
of the Lord’
So we
approach this value knowing that it is both a discipline to adopt and a joy to
absorb: “God’s word reveals God’s heart
and transforms ours.”
Let us
break it up into its component parts:-
God’s Word - What we mean by this phrase is the Bible but
not as a dusty unread book on a shelf.
The Bible contains everything necessary for salvation and life. There is nothing else that we need to know in
order to be saved and in order to life as god wants us to live. It contains everything we need to know about
Jesus: and Jesus himself shows us all we
need to know about God because as Hebrew 1 puts it He is the Radiance of His
Glory and the exact representation of his being. The Bible is sufficient for all our spiritual
needs.
What brings
the bible alive and makes it God’s living word is the work of the Holy Spirit
who first inspired the writers and who now helps us to interpret its
message. It comes alive as it is taught
by faithful teachers and as it is read by prayerful readers open to the Holy
Spirit.
These
characteristics of God’s word: “inspired” and “sufficient” are both captured in
2 Timothy 3 v 16 For all scripture is God breathedand is sufficient for teaching, rebuking, correcting
and training in righteousness so that the man of God may ne
thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Originally
we included the words “is vital”. God’s
word is vital in the sense of alive and essential to life. Hebrews 4 captures this vitality with its
graphic description of the Word of God as living and active, sharper than the
sharpest sword. It gets to the heart of
our deepest dilemmas: it brings us face to face with the truth about ourselves:
about heaven and hell; about the worst of things and the greatest hopes. And in all these things it speaks with the
authority of God instead of the speculation of human hearts. It is food for life: we need it to sustain our lives. In the Old Testament in Amos chapter 8 the
prophet warns of a day when a famine will come upon the land: not a famine of
food or water but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. The word of God is literally vital.
The next
word in our value is highly significant.
Reveals God’s word reveals. The key to understanding how this works is to
remember that God is a speaking God. If
he were to remain silent we would not know what he thinks: what concerns him:
what thrills him: what is on his heart.
But as Hebrews 1 makes clear: God
has chosen to speak to us and in doing so revealed himself to us in a way that
we could not know if he had remained silent.
“In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many
times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his
Son.”
The more we
are exposed to scripture the more we know God: and the more we discover of his
extraordinary, irrational, underserved, mercy and love. We discover by reading his word that we are
far more wicked than we ever imagined; but then we
find out that we are far more loved than we ever dreamed.
No wonder
the Psalmist was so full of joy with the scriptures. He had discovered that the light came on for
him and he was no longer thrashing around in the dark. Your ways O Lord are a light to my path and a
lamp to my feet. God’s word reveals God
to us and shows us the path of life.
What is it
that the word of God reveals: not just
God’s awesome power and holiness. It reveals God’s Heart to us and we find that
God loves the world so much that He gave his only Son Jesus Christ so that
anyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. The Father heart of God is exposed in the
story of the prodigal Son being welcomed home by his forgiving Father. Nothing in nature could reveal that to us:
but the story is told over and over again in different ways throughout the
scriptures.
The last
part of this Value speaks of the impact God’s Word has on us. It transforms us. It melts our hard hearts and gives us a new
heart of flesh. God’s word has always made a difference. The very first thing God is recorded as doing
is speaking: In Genesis 1 v 3 God said
“Let there be light.” His words profoundly
transformed existence: Light totally
redefined all reality as it penetrated the darkness. Go went on speaking: and the world went on
being formed and transformed. And God is
speaking still: bringing light into our darkness and order into our chaos. As he speaks we who listen to his word are
being formed and transformed.
God’s word
continues to be the most effective and the most powerful change agent in the
church and in individual lives. Churches that are
faithful to scripture in their teaching and which encourage people to read it
for themselves grow more Christ-like and grow in every other way. I think the reason for this is because of the
way the Holy Spirit and the scriptures work together. In creation the Spirit moved over the waters
and God spoke and the word and the Spirit combined and creation happened. So with us the Spirit moves in our hearts as
the word of God is spoken recreation happens: we are changed and the
So how do
we embody this value in the life of our Church?
It needs to
be embodied at 3 levels As a congregation we need a regular diet of faithful
Biblical Teaching week by week, some of it expounding passages straight from
the Bible and some focussed on different themes of life but nevertheless
deriving it’s principles from scripture.
We are very privileged to have a large team of preachers and teachers in
this parish who share this concern and who seek to be faithful to scripture in
all that they teach. And that is what
matters most about preaching. If as a
bonus they manage to be interesting, engaging and challenging that is a
bonus. But t is not all up to the
preachers. It is also about how you
listen: you need to be open and
receptive to God’s word, and to test what you hear against scripture. I would
encourage you to make a point of having the passage open before you and to do
as the Bereans did (see
Acts 17) They
received the teaching of Paul with great eagerness and they examined the
scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. One of the best ways to get into the practice
of doing this here and elsewhere is to have your own bible with you so you can
look things up and reflect on them after the service.
Of course
small groups and home groups are a great place to let the Word of God shape us
as we study it together. And remember
the task is not for us to sit in judgement over the Bible deciding what is
relevant or politically correct. It is
for the Word of God to judge the thoughts and attitudes of our hearts.
Finally
there is what we do on our own as individual Christians: personal bible reading
and mediation combined with study and memorisation: things that require regular
discipline and commitment but which bring great rewards. There are all sorts of helps available; some
are on display in the Selwyn Room, and next week Sue Wilmot of the Bible
Society will share several other creative ideas with us at the morning and
evening services.
Without the
light to our path and a lamp to our feet we really are thrashing around in the
darkness: and the darkness is dangerous and unpleasant. We are literally lost without God’s
word. But with it we can see right into
the heart of God and discover that he loves us and is calling us to himself.
God’s love
reveals God’s Heart and transforms ours.