Helpful articles for bible students

Understanding Scripture correctly (II)

Understanding Scripture Correctly (I)

Truth shall set you free

The common idea is that unqualified confidence in the Bible leads to narrow-minded inhibitions and crippling restraints on what you may think and do. The truth is that such confidence produces liberated living--living, that is, which is free from uncertaintly, doubt, and despair--which otherwise is not found anywhere. The one who trusts the Bible knows what God did, does, and will do, what God commands and what God promises. With the Colossians, the Bible-believer understands "God's grace in all its truth" (Col. 1:6), for the Christ of Scripture has become his Savior, master, and friend. --J.I. Packer, Knowing Christianity

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus

We must put the evidence before us that reading, pondering, memorizing, and studying the Bible
will yield more joy in this life and the next than all the things that lure us from it.

There are many different reasons why the Bible has this joy-producing
effect. I don’t want to minimize this diversity or belittle the range of benefits that the Bible has in our lives—more than any of us realizes. But I want to stress that ultimately, in and through all its benefits, the Bible leads us to superior and lasting joy because it leads us to Christ, especially to see his glory and enjoy his fellowship. All the varied benefits are beneficial finally because they show us and bring us more of Christ to enjoy.

-- John Piper

God and words

"I sometimes marvel that God chose to risk his revelation in the ambiguities of language. If he had wanted to make sure that the truth was absolutely clear, without any possibility of misunderstanding, he should have revealed his truth by means of mathematics. Mathematics is the most precise, unambiguous language that we have. But then, of course, you can't say “I love you” in algebra."

--Eugene Peterson, in "Eat This Book", excerpts found (there's more!) here

To extend the range of our listening

The intent in reading Scripture, among people of faith, is to extend the range of our listening to the God who reveals Himself in word, to become acquainted with the ways in which He has spoken in various times and places, along the ways in which people respond when He speaks. The Xn conviction is that God speaks reality into being--creation into shape, salvation into action. It is also a Xn conviction that WE are THAT which is spoken into a creation shape and a salvation action. We are what happens when the word is spoken. So we listen in order to find out what is going on--in US. Ezra Pound's H. Selwyn Mauberly expresses the zest of this kind of reader/listener:

"Tell it to me, all of it, I guzzle with outstretched ears!"

--from Eugene Peterson's book, Working the Angles (emphasis EP's)

5 foundation principles of the knowledge about God which Christians have:

1. God has spoken to man, and the Bible is his Word, given to us to make us wise unto salvation.
2. God is Lord and King over his world; he rules all things for his own glory, displaying his perfections in all that he does, in order that men and angels may worship and adore him.
3. God is Savior, active in sovereign love through the Lord Jesus Christ to rescue believers from the guilt and power of sin, to adopt them as his children and to bless them accordingly.
   
4. God is triune; there are within the Godhead three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and the work of salvation is one in which all three act together, the Father purposing redemption, the Son securing it and the Spirit applying it.
   
5. Godliness means responding to God's revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God's Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion.

HERE is rest of chapter one of KNOWING GOD, by J.I. Packer

excerpt from Knowing God, chapter 1

On January 7, 1855, the minister of New Park Street Chapel, Southwark, England, opened his morning sermon as follows:

It has been said by someone that "the proper study of mankind is man." I will not oppose the idea, but I believe it is equally true that the proper study of God's elect is God; the proper study of a Christian is the Godhead. The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy, which can ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God whom he calls his Father.

There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity. Other subjects we can compass and grapple with; in them we feel a kind of self-content, and go our way with the thought, "Behold I am wise." But when we come to this master science, finding that our plumbline cannot sound its depth, and that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the thought that vain man would be wise, but he is like a wild ass's colt; and with solemn exclamation, "I am but of yesterday, and know nothing." No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind, than thoughts of God....

But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God, will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe.... The most excellent study for expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and Him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity.

And, whilst humbling and expanding, this subject is eminently consolatory. Oh, there is, in contemplating Christ, a balm for every wound; in musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief; and in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore. Would you lose your sorrow? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead's deepest sea; be lost in his immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead. It is to that subject that I invite you this morning.

These words, spoken over a century ago by C. H. Spurgeon (at that time, incredibly, only twenty years old) were true then, and they are true now.

--read the whole chapter here

Look through it, not AT it

This echoes Jesus' words in John 5, to me:

“The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope then he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through, to see that which is beyond, but most people only look at it; and so they see only the dead letter.”

--Phillips Brooks (author of O Little Town of Bethlehem)

Read, Mark, Learn

not a bad prayer to write in your bible and use often..

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

--1549 Book of Common Prayer

Word AND Holy Spirit; Mind AND Heart

"..let us hear no more of the fanatics who make the excuse of the Spirit to reject external teaching. For we must preserve the balance which Luke established here, that we obtain nothing from the hearing of the Word alone, without the grace of the Spirit, and that the Spirit is conferred on us not that He may produce contempt of the Word, but rather to instill confidence in it in our minds and write it on our hearts." --John Calvin, more here

Johnny is commenting on Luke's summary of what happened with Lydia in Acts 16

"The Lord opened her heart (work of Holy Spirit) to pay attention to what was said (work of her mind)

The Options in Front of Us:

When we think of learning, I think it is helpful to see where churches (and individual Christians!) can go, and go wrong, in this area:

• Dead Heterodoxy – No truth and no spirit, we mess up (big time!)
• Live Heterodoxy – All spirit and no truth, we blow up
• Dead Orthodoxy – All truth and no spirit, we dry up
• Live Orthodoxy – More truth and more spirit, we grow up

Learning Resources

Christians who neglect the Bible simply do not mature. When Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy to the effect that human beings do not live by bread only but by God’s Word, he was asserting that the Word of God is just as
necessary for spiritual health as food is for bodily health. I am not now thinking of remote Christian tribes people into whose language
the Bible has not yet been translated, nor of illiterate people... I
am thinking rather about ourselves. Our problem is not that the Bible is unavailable to us, but that we do not take advantage of its availability. We need to read and meditate on it daily, to study it in a fellowship group and to hear it expounded during Sunday Worship. Otherwise we shall not grow. Growth into maturity in Christ depends upon a close acquaintance with, and a believing response to, the Bible.

[Source: God’s Book For God’s People, John Stott, IVP p. 76]

Understanding the Bible Correctly, part 1 and part 2

A Practical Method of Bible Study for Ordinary Christians