"Is That In The Bible?" Pt. I
SERMONS | Developing a New Series
As a long-planned follow-up to the Preaching in Birmingham article, I will develop a string of articles based on recent sermons I’ve had the honor of preaching in our local context. Moving forward, the “SERMON” subtitle will mark out a mixture and variety of past and present messages converted to long or short-form content. This will provide ample opportunity to share what may not have shown up in a sermon, as well as further elucidate and develop points that were made. I will continue to release installments until I am up-to-date.
I’m grateful to God for being part of a team of passionate and gifted communicators—preachers and teachers alike. We all take the task of proclaiming the Gospel quite seriously (James 3:1) and, with the proper due diligence and reverence, knowing full well that to be entrusted to bring God’s word is a significant responsibility. This is neither a trivial task nor is it merely an exercise of human skill, accumulated background, and education.
You may have heard it said that preparing a sermon has much in common with preparing a meal. After all, God’s Word is:
Our nourishing Spiritual food
Reveals the God who loves, cares, and saves us
Produces faith in our hearts
Is vital for our spiritual growth—and our ongoing maturation
When you come to a decision to follow Christ, you become reborn. As infants in the faith, we must learn to lift our heads, roll over, sit up, crawl, stand, and walk. It doesn’t matter how old you are when you first profess faith in the Lord; your spiritual growth is dependent on continually feeding on God’s Word.
“16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. 17 God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work.”
2 Timothy 3:16-17 NLT
Perhaps some people don’t see a necessity in growing or increasing faith. They instead settle for an arbitrary belief in God that has no application for their life apart from ideological virtue signaling, and any semblance of faith becomes susceptible to stagnation, misappropriation, deconstruction, and eventually death. Paul seems to take this into account in one of his letters to the Corinthian church (1 Corin 3:2) when he speaks of God’s instruction through his ministry as a matter of their receptiveness and lack of readiness for more than milk and honey—a progression to more solid foods.
INTRODUCTION
Christ Church Birmingham’s main diet of spiritual food would be to teach through a book of the Bible. Take, for instance, our recent series in Ezra called Build The House, where we went from chapter to chapter. Another example would be taking select passages from the same book, like our series in the Gospel according to John, which we called Foreshadowing Easter.
I had the honor of both crafting and starting our new series called Is That In The Bible?
Our society and culture have a myriad of clichés—stereotypical expressions that appear often in our day-to-day lives. Clichés are common, overused sayings that also tend to lose their meaning over time. This series will allow us to investigate and, in certain instances, critique eight different expressions to test for truth and error, origins, and appropriations. I did some additional digging to see if these expressions were more Western sayings but found that many are widely used cross-culturally.
We’ll be asking, Is that really what God said?
This harkens back to the Creation Account in Genesis, where the Lord left specific instructions for the first humans, Adam and Eve, about how they were to live in relationship with Him. Some time afterward, a deceptive Serpent interjected and spoke to Adam and Eve, asking them, “Did God really say ________?”
Did God really say…
Follow Your Heart
Heaven helps those who help themselves
God won’t give you more than you can handle
Everything happens for a reason
Money is the root of all evil
Do not judge others
Heaven gained another angel
There are many paths to God
We’ll find that many of these sayings have some merit or a biblical basis, while others are diluted, misappropriated, misquoted, misrepresented, and, therefore, taken out of context. A few are entirely foreign to God’s Word and have been falsely attributed.
Later on in the Biblical narrative, Satan comes again to tempt the “second Adam”—Jesus, in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11), and what does he do? He quotes Scripture! Like our Savior, we must aim to be certain to shore up our answer to these expressions and respond with grace whenever we hear these clichés.
Ultimately, I hope our church will grow in Biblical literacy through expositional and topical teaching series.
“Around 30 percent of [British] parents don’t know that Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, or the Good Samaritan are in the Bible. To make matters worse, 27 percent think Superman is or might be a biblical story. More than 1 in 3 believe the same about Harry Potter. And more than half (54 percent) believe The Hunger Games is or might be a story from the Bible.” –Christianity Today
“Only six percent of British adults read or listen to the Bible, while 55 percent of Christians in this country never do so, according to a new poll commissioned for the Archbishops' Council Evangelism Task Force.” –Christian Today
How familiar is the Bible to you? What would you say about your own biblical knowledge?
I don’t want anyone in our church (or any of our readers, for that matter) to feel intimidated when it comes to the Bible. Yes, it is quite a robust library of 66 books. I recall the day I made a decision to follow Christ—sitting in the pews of a large mega-church during an evening gathering. After the service, I made a beeline to the church’s bookstore and picked out what I thought was an entire Bible (Old and New Testament), only to find out that I managed to purchase a version that consisted of the New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs. When I turned up at a Bible Study, to my chagrin, I was bemused to find that they were in the middle of a study through an Old Testament book.
What I love about those who are new to the Bible is that there is a clean slate, a fresh start. I believe fostering Biblical literacy is of the utmost importance, especially in the British context. There should be an increasing sensitivity to the Lord in one’s personal devotion and a growing familiarity with His word. Otherwise, what you end up with is a Sunday-to-Sunday segmented faith and an overreliance on a preacher to serve up a balanced meal to spiritually starving congregants. I’m sure many of us remember the panic and trepidation of the pandemic when many were more glued to the telly than they were to the pages of the Bible. It’s no wonder why so many felt hopeless and fearful upon seeing the horrific news updates of the latest death tolls and infection rates.
I’m not trying to appeal to some legalistic standard for Biblical literacy as if our right standing before God depended on our Bible reading and meditation. If you’ve put your faith in Christ, your right standing is secured by Christ alone. You now have His perfect record of Bible reading, studying, memorization, meditation, etc.
If you’re new to the Bible, I’d like for us to consider it in the following ways.
Spending time in the Bible is like…
A Journal - Imagine coming across your great-grandad’s journal. Before it was discovered, all you had to remember him by were old sepia-tone photos in a dusty album. You knew he was a war hero who had fought in World War II. As you turned each page, you read about his experiences and an inner dialogue that gave insight into the way he saw the world. The things that he witnessed! The timeless wisdom that he shared invites you into a special kinship. There’s a reason why we undergo DNA tests to look into our ancestry. In some ways, our identities are informed by our heritage and family lineage.
A Mobile Phone - Our church intentionally makes time for prayer, and we do well seeking the Lord in those quiet places. Before planning and strategizing, we pray—we ask the Lord in our petitions and intercessions. But sometimes in the Christian life, we pray so much that God never gets a word in. The missing part of the phone conversation, if you will, is the Bible. How do we know when a feeling, a thought, a prophetic vision, or a dream is from the Lord if we don’t test it by the Scriptures? How can we test it if we’re not familiar with the Bible?
A Doctor’s Chart - Steph has been dealing with a severe impingement in her knee. It’s gotten so bad that we had to seek out a Physiotherapist to see if there was anything seriously wrong, such as structural damage or ligament tear(s). I was looking after our three kids during a scheduled appointment, so I couldn’t witness the exam or hear the diagnosis. When I inquired of Steph, she repeated everything verbatim! I was impressed at how much she could recall, and it then occurred to me—of course, she’s dealing with a literal pain point in her life. Seeking out relief mattered so much to her that she could have written out the “Doctor’s Chart” herself.
Do we want to be familiar with God’s Word?
Is it important to you? Is it important to us?