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A Hot Take on the Bible | Hot Takes
How can we be sure the Bible is real, reliable, and God-breathed? 📖 In part one of this 2-part message from our Hot Takes series, we explore the surprising evidence that backs up the story of Scripture — from consistent translations to aligned archaeology. Whether you’re skeptical or searching, this sermon is for anyone asking: “Can I really trust the Bible?”
📌 In this message:
– Why Bible translations actually strengthen its trustworthiness
– How the original manuscripts were preserved
– Archeological finds that confirm the people and places of the Bible
– What it means that Scripture is “God-breathed”
I want to talk to you today. We're back in the Hot Take series and when we talk about Hot Take, we're saying, hey, here is God's possibly controversial but very convinced perspective on a particular topic. Today and next week we're talking about a Hot Take on the Bible. A Hot Take on why really today, why you should trust the Bible, and I think it's going to be helpful to you. I think it's going to stir up your faith. I think, if you can remain open to it, it's going to be helpful to you. I think it's going to stir up your faith. I think, if you can remain open to it, it's going to be really exciting. That said, I need you to give me a lot of loud amens, if it's in you at all, because it's a little bit more of a teachy sermon and okay, yeah, so yeah, thank you, dan. Sometimes you know it's very preachy and people like that. They might get a little more razzed. I need you to get razzed on the teachy part too, because there's some stuff that's just conceptual, but it's still going to be full of goodness and gooey and rich and yummy. Good God's word.
Speaker 1:I love the internet, dude, like I love pieces of it. I love being able to watch whatever I want to watch, whenever I want to watch it. I love that I have access to do kind of different things. I can remember the time when I had to use a phone to try to transfer money from one bank account to another. I remember all kinds of what seemed archaic things now that you can do simply really quick on the internet or on your app. So many great things about the internet for me. However, I recognize as well that there's some things that showed up when the internet showed up that just maybe didn't even exist as a bad thing, or it made a bad thing already get worse. So some examples of negative things. Despite all the positive things that maybe an online life can bring into our lives, there seems to be, especially in the past 10 years there's even more and more of an obsession with self. Maybe it was since the dawn of social media. We're trying to curate what you look like to the rest of the world and it just it becomes a little bit narcissistic. You're just staring at yourself all the time and thinking about way more how people are perceiving you and what they think. I think that's probably, you know, a net loss for humankind If we're all just thinking about ourselves a whole lot more.
Speaker 1:I think the the quickness with which people can be exposed to and slip into lust is just way not. It's not only way easier to do, it's way more normalized. So in other words, you can just have innocent, seeming 14 year old girls putting highly sexualized TikTok videos on and they're tricking themselves into thinking this is just totally right and good, and they don't know how much necessarily that is causing several hundred thousand other people to get that kind of thinking in their hearts. And there's nothing wrong with cute little dances and there's nothing wrong with people celebrating stuff. But there's a river of lust that has slipped into some of the thinking and it's become normalized. I think there's even there's funny videos now that are also normalizing evil. Like they're so crass that it's just a constant exposure and we get used to it. And what we begin to get used to, we eventually end up not only embracing but reenacting. I think there's also. I think this is cool Like there's a way to be. There's a way to be famous now that there just wasn't when I was younger, like, like only famous people could be famous from kind of back in the day. Now you can become an influencer and, like you can start nobody and you can do amazing things online. You can become a personality and anybody can do it. That's got a phone. What I think is not so good about that is it tends to exalt someone's beauty or someone's personality or whatever it is above. Often their character, in fact, even character itself is thrown out the window in some cases, just for the sake of this God, of being important to people. So you've got this great resource, but it's also got some bad stuff in it.
Speaker 1:The Apostle Paul was talking to the church of Ephesus. He was specifically talking to their pastor, timothy, and he wanted them to know. You guys have got false teachers among you and they're teaching you stuff that sounds a little right but it's mixed with a whole bunch of bad, and it's bad that you don't always know is going to hurt you, because it sounds kind of right at first but then ultimately it's going to be detrimental to your soul. He called them false teachers and here's some of the things that they were doing. He said that they were on one level they talked about like God's stuff a lot, but he says that they were conceited and understand nothing. This is 1 Timothy, chapter six. He said that they were filled with envy and strife and malicious talk and evil suspicions. This sounds like online life sometimes and constant friction between people of a corrupt mind and they rob of truth for the sake of financial gain. And he even says in chapter 4 that they're empowered or they're energized by deceiving spirits. Are some of these folks that are allowing leakage, evil leakage, into what seems like a normal everyday thing for these people of Ephesus? And Paul says I got to warn you guys. Instead, what I want you to do, he's telling Pastor Timothy here's what you need to do and here's how you need to impact the people around you.
Speaker 1:Verse 14 of 2 Timothy, 3. But as for you, continue in what you've learned and become convinced of because you know those, from who you learned it and how. From infancy, you've known the Holy Scriptures, somebody say, scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Here it is All scripture is God breathed, all scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, training in righteousness. That's gonna be next week. That's what it's for. That's what it does. It reroutes, it rearranges, it fixes things so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Speaker 1:This God breathed. It's not inspired by, like human creativity, no, it means it's out of the mouth and the mind and the heart of God. The same way a wind comes along and fills the sail of a ship, god comes and he fills the inspired writers of scripture and they're writing down his actual desires, what he wants to communicate. That's why God's word is pure. That's why God's word is perfect. That's why God's word, it's absolutely sufficient for everything that we need for it to do. And it's absolutely true. And that can be hard to buy sometimes, and so that's why we're going to talk about that today.
Speaker 1:God's word comes with power and it comes with authority. And really, the truth is to neglect God's word is to neglect God himself. It's God breathing. He breathes it into us. Why? What did it say? So that we can be thoroughly equipped. And that thoroughly equipped that's not like, hey, man, make sure you bring like a ladder or bring like a hammer where you're going today. No, it's a thoroughly equipped soldier. It's putting everything in the pack, everything that they need. Imagine a fully equipped ship that is ready to go to battle. That's the kind of equipping that is necessary and what God's word does. And so another way to think about this is we're not even really equipped spiritually, morally, until we're equipped by God's word, day in and day out. It's God breathed. To make sure, oh, the man or the woman of God, they're ready. I'm ready. What you got, what you got, devil? I'm ready for anything that life brings along, because I'm thoroughly equipped by the spirit of God through his word, not just the spirit through his word. That's how it gets to us.
Speaker 1:God's word can be trusted to be all that we need to believe and do, because it is God breathed, because it's from God himself. There's a Christian philosopher named William Lane Craig. He talks about it this way he says it's true. The Bible itself does declare that we should believe it because the Bible says it. But that's not really the only reason. You shouldn't just tell people well, believe the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of other forms of evidence that we can use to help us, give us more convincing, if necessary, to add weight to the idea that, no, this thing actually is from God. There's all kinds of historical evidence that we can look at. There's all kinds of textual, literary evidence that we can look at. There's prophetic evidence that we can look at and there is archaeological evidence that we can look at. We's prophetic evidence that we can look at and there is archaeological evidence that we can look at. We're going to look at some of those today, and so the question becomes is the Bible really from God? Here's the first form of evidence that we'll use.
Speaker 1:Yes, and one way you can tell is the unity in diversity. The unity in diversity it's one thing made out of many things, but it doesn't make sense how it can be one thing, given how spread out all these many things were. Okay, so it's 66 books written by over 40 authors over a period of 1,500 years. Now can you imagine if we just randomly select people in different centuries and say write what you think, write what you think, and we're going to take random people from different centuries, stitch it together? Is there going to be one united story that is being told? Are they going to have the same opinions about things? Are they going to seem like they're talking about the same person? If it's the main character? Probably not. That's one of the ways that we can know that God's word is from God. It's the unity amidst the world. It's just unlikely that this would all be one cohesive story.
Speaker 1:But Jesus says the whole story is about Jesus. He explains this. He says Luke 24, 27,. When he was walking with some disciples on the road to Emmaus, jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the scriptures the things concerning himself. He goes all the way back and says guys, the whole story is about me. He rebukes the religious leaders of the time. He says you search the scriptures because you think they give you eternal life, but the scriptures point to me.
Speaker 1:It's one story written over all of these centuries. It's all about me. It's not about rules. It's about a people that were lost. They were so lost. The planet they found themselves on was corrupted and messed up by sin. And it wasn't just the planet, it was them. And there was nothing they could do. They couldn't religify their way out of it. They couldn't just do enough good works or good anything. They needed the God that loved them to say you did this, but you can't get out of it. I've got to come and get you out of it, I've got to rescue you. And that's the entire story of the Bible. It's the fall, and then God's pursuit of winning his people back, and he wins them through by grace, through faith, through the merciful sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:The whole story is God-centric, and that God-centric story cuts across time. It cuts across culture, and that's one of the ways that we can say, wow, if it really were God, it would do that. It would cut across time and it would cut across culture, because God cares about all the times and cultures and he's constantly communicating. It's me, it's me, it's me. I preserved my word for you because I wanted you to hear it, I wanted you to have it, I wanted you to know that you could, too, be empowered, you could have God breath in you so that you're fully equipped for every good work. Yeah, you can have it too. That's what God wanted. So there's unity. There's amazing consistency in the midst of this one thing that was written from many people over a long period of time. So there's unity and diversity. And here's number two trustworthy transmission. Trustworthy transmission.
Speaker 1:Tim Keller says it this way the New Testament accounts were written way too early to become legends. They were written too close to the actual events. He says this Paul could not possibly have written in a public document that 500 people saw Jesus at once, most of them still alive, unless it was really the case, why? Because those people that were still alive would be like that's not what happened. What are you talking? There's 500 of us. That's not what happened. How can you sit there and claim that We'll just call you out? It was too early for this to have become legend by now. That's how close the texts that we have are to the time of Jesus.
Speaker 1:Cs Lewis many of you know of Narnia fame and many other things. You may know that CS Lewis was a specialist in fantasy and Renaissance literature and this is what he says. He says the New Testament does not read like artful myth. It reads like it's a reportage of what is seen and heard. It's not written like a fantastical story. It's written like people are describing events and people and things that are happening around them. So it doesn't work to just call it a myth.
Speaker 1:There is a YouTube channel called A Christian Guy and he's got this fantastic video that summarizes how the Bible is transmitted. How do we get the Bible that we have now? From where the various letters and books that were written when they started? What happened to get them to here. I put it on my personal Facebook page, our fierce Facebook page, and, I think, the community group or something. I tried to put it other places and I couldn't do it, so maybe Caitlin will send everybody in the email today, I don't know, but it's a great video. You should go check it out. I want to give him credit because it's really helpful and exciting. But I want to take you through what his description of is how this works.
Speaker 1:See, most of us we've been told you know, the problem with scripture is it's kind of like the telephone game. You played the telephone game when you were a kid, right? You tell somebody something and then it goes to the next one and then it goes to the next one and then slowly and it's kind of the part of the fun it changes a little bit and by the time it gets to the end it's like this isn't at all like what it started out as and people have said that's why you can't trust the Bible, because the Bible does that. Here's the problem with that thinking. The telephone game let's see that first slide, andrew requires a single line of transmission and a linear line of transmission. That means number one. It's just going from one person to one person to one person and you can't go back and check, right, so like the fifth person in line can't go back to the first person and be like what was it again? It just keeps on going. That's really not the way it worked in the Bible. In fact, people that criticize the Bible for that, what they make clear is I'm not trying to offend anybody. You don't understand how the Bible was transmitted, because that's not even close. That's not how it works. That's not the telephone game, that's not what was happening. So let's go to the next one. And then, yeah, the next one, bro, looks like semicircles. We'll get there. Let's go to the next one. Yeah, that's it. Here's the way it was really depicted, okay, or here's the way it really happened in a depiction.
Speaker 1:So let's say you have someone like the Apostle John, he writes the book of John, he has that, and then he's going to send out copies to different churches and so those different churches have a copy of what John had. Okay, great. So now, even just right here, people can. They can check their copy against somebody else's copy if they wanted to. They could even just go back and ask John, because John was still alive. For the first few decades this happened, john, is this what you said? Is this what you meant? Or they could ask one of his disciples is this what he meant? Is that what he meant? Let's go to the next one, andrew, sorry. And then, yeah, that's the one, as that continues to happen. So then they make copies of those to send those to other places. This is all still happening.
Speaker 1:In the first few decades. You have a lot of folks, even where there are slight discrepancies, like, oh, that sentence didn't really finish with that exact word at the end of that line, it was a little bit different. Even so, when that happens, you now have so many copies that you can check against one another that, guys, it's easy to see where that misspelling was. It's easy to see where. No, that's not. I've got all of these copies that tell me they're all the same and they're all over the place. As that continues to pass down through the generations, you have more and more and more. It's a non-linear line of transmission. So let's keep going. Let's go to the next one, bro.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing. People don't understand Modern translations of the Bible. People think they think okay, the most they think maybe your translation. We just picked it up from the people in the sixties. We're like what do they got? Okay, let's just, let's do that. No, dude, we go all the way back.
Speaker 1:The translation can get better as time goes by. Why? Because for some reason, mankind likes to dig in the dirt and they find old stuff and they keep finding older and older manuscripts and so like, oh my gosh, but they don't even just find the original Greek ones, they find all these different languages that they were copied into. And so now they're comparing not only all of these different fragments and letters that they're finding, they're comparing them to one another, but they've got other languages that they're comparing. And then all of these, over time, were collected into little libraries and they were sent to major libraries in the ancient world.
Speaker 1:Guys, we've got so many copies, but you've got so many that it's easy to find. Okay, what was the strange thing? Were there errors? There were little errors here and there, but you've got so many it's easy to find them. This really isn't that hard. Let's go to that last slide, bro, with all the green circles. Yeah, so say that those yellow circles are places. Something went wrong For sure. Yeah, humans are going to make mistakes.
Speaker 1:No one is claiming that the people that translated the Bible or copied the Bible were inspired by God. What we're saying is when John wrote it, it was inspired by God. So we're not claiming anything about the copyists, but we are saying we have so many copies, they go so far back in time that, guys, it's not hard, it's not hard to see. Yeah, there's an area I've got all of these other ones that say the exact same thing from the exact same time in the exact same area. Are we hearing that? So, just to give you a little bit of perspective, if you think about something other ancient literature, okay. So say, like Homer's Iliad, or you've got things like Aristotle or Plato. These are ancient texts. The guys, at most we have like between 10 and 20 copies of those things written a thousand years after that person. Okay.
Speaker 1:And if you go to any like university, they're going to say and you say, hey, I don't think. I think this is probably corrupt. We don't have the right one here of Aristotle. They're like what are you psycho? We got the right one, this is the right one, everyone knows this is the right one. But if you say I'm confident we've got the right New Testament. But like what, are you psycho? You can't have the right New Testament, even though, okay, you've got 10 to 20 copies. We've got, in terms of fragments, in terms of manuscripts, we've got 24,000. 24,000 going back into the ancient world. Do you think we have a little bit of evidence that this is all right? We do.
Speaker 1:Why, then, do people give so much pushback? Well, one of the reasons is I'm just going to tell you the truth about it. One of the reasons is is because of the sinful heart of man that represses the truth of God and unrighteousness. Okay, I mean, that's why. Because they're like, well, if, if it's true, I have to, like, I'm probably accountable to it, I might have to obey it. So I don't. And guys, this is real, like people, I don't want to hear that. So I'm going to start with the conclusion it can't be. God couldn't have loved us enough to preserve it for us. So I'm just going to say it's all corrupt. Ah, you can never know. You can never know. So let's just forget about it. Here's another reason it's because there's an active enemy of every soul named the devil, in all of his minions, and he's real, and he's actively trying to blind the mind of people far from God, so that they'll never hear the truth. He's trying to convince people. That's not true, don't pay attention. Hey, hey, look over here. Look over this thing in YouTube. Look over here. He's trying to get them to look at anything other than God's word, because God's word is God breathed and God's breathed. God's word will get in people's hearts and it will change. Somebody say change. It will change them.
Speaker 1:By the way, these folks that copy the integrity of the copyists. Let me give you one example. Some of you know that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947. Okay, what they found was these whole bunch of documents that were preserved over a long period of time. This copy of Isaiah from 200 BC was preserved, found in 1947. They compared it to the Middle Ages copies of Isaiah that were translated into Hebrew and, guys, it was almost word for word the exact same after a thousand years. If you don't know about that, that's mind-blowing. For a thousand years they got it pretty much mostly right, except for a little. You know word here or there. It's still. You can still recognize it's obviously this is what it's saying, and especially Isaiah 53 about Jesus Christ. It's all there precious, it's all there.
Speaker 1:Ff Bruce he'sa scholar. He says if the New Testament were a secular work, its authenticity would be beyond question. But because it's opposed by human flesh and by our enemy, yeah, it gets a bum rap, but if you just pay attention, man, there's no reason for it to have a bum rap. Unity and diversity. Second one was trustworthy transmission.
Speaker 1:Here's another one aligned archaeology you guys are doing good on the amens. Okay, I want to own. When you do it good, you're doing it good. So good job, some good amens so far for this teachy kind of teaching. Because men and women like to dig in the dirt. They keep finding stuff. Aligned archaeology they keep finding stuff and when they find stuff it tends to put to rest a lot of the doubters from previous eras.
Speaker 1:Okay, so for a long time people were like there's these Hittites in the Bible? That's not a real thing. We don't know anything about these Hittites Until the Hittite capital and all kinds of archives about their entire nation were found Like oh, never mind, they are here. Here they are. We found them. Guys. Archaeology is kind of like new on some levels within the human history. Okay, so how much more are we going to keep finding over the next 100, 200 years. We're just going to keep digging and we're going to keep finding stuff.
Speaker 1:Here's another cool thing that was found. People before 1993, people doubted that King David was real. They're like we don't have any extra biblical evidence that this king ever existed until 1993. Then they found the Tel Dan Stele, which is a big old rock looking thing. There it is that talks about David and his house, and oh, nevermind, here's something that has nothing to do with the Bible. It's a what we call us. It's a non-biblical source, a record of someone saying King David and the house of David were absolutely real. It's absolutely legit. It's absolutely true. People doubted until 1961. Pontius Pilate? They're like we don't have any prefect Pontius Pilate walking around back there. We have no record of it until they found the Pilate stone, and there he is, named Pilate the prefect. He's there, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Here's what archaeology does. Here's what it doesn't. Let me start over. If it were a fiction, archaeology would quickly start to prove things wrong, because it'd be like guys, we found this and this isn't supposed to be here according to this story. Like that doesn't work.
Speaker 1:What archeology does, though, is it keeps affirming the story that is written in the Bible, all the different characters, all the different places that we couldn't find. Oh my gosh, now there they are. It's almost as if you had a map. Okay, let's say, we've got, let's go 300 years into the future, we've got a dystopian map of America. Let's see that map.
Speaker 1:Now, this was AI produced so it looks a little janky, but okay, you have like there must have been something happening because Atlanta landed in Texas somehow. Anyway, things went south, things went bad. Now you are from our time, so you know where things really are and you know how things really work. But maybe there's somebody in that future that says I don't believe there was ever anything like an amusement park. But then they travel to where Gurney used to be and they dig in the ground and they find roller coasters, and they find a place called Six Flags, great America. And now suddenly there's a lot of weight added to. Oh, they told us that this would be here and it is here. It adds weight, it adds credit to the story that it wasn't always like this. It was very different. The entire landscape was different.
Speaker 1:Now, the more things they find, the more cities they find, the more documents they find that talk about this person or that person, the more it's convincing and weighty. Oh, this is actually here. Just because we didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't real. It was real, baby, just believe and dig a little longer. Somebody say dig a little longer, dig a little longer.
Speaker 1:Unity and diversity, trustworthy transmission, aligned archaeology here's a fun one. Fulfilled prophecy fulfilled prophecy. Now, jesus liked prophecy. He gave it a thumbs up. He said I've told you these things before, before they happen, so that when they do happen you will believe. Prophecy has the power to give a boost to our faith. Now there's a lot of over 300 messianic prophecies that illustrate to us God planned the whole thing in the beginning. Dude, right, like no one guessed all these things. And well, let's turn it into a story. No, it keeps unfolding that these events happened just like God talked about it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's give some other Old Testament prophecies about Jesus. Micah 5.2 predicted he would be born in Bethlehem Isaiah 53, that he'd be a suffering servant that was pierced for our transgressions and crucified on a cross Psalm 22, he's a righteous sufferer, pierced in hands and feet. His garments were divided by casting lots. It's almost as if somebody could already see what was happening in the future and directed somebody to write it down. That's exactly what did happen. But it's not even just about Jesus. There's other historical events. Okay, so 150 years before Cyrus was born, isaiah prophesied there would be a person born named Cyrus, who would free the captive Jews from their captivity and send them back home. Now you've got to know when Isaiah said that they weren't even in captivity yet, they weren't even in captivity yet. They weren't even in captivity yet. Okay, so that's like somebody prophesying about the civil war before there is an America. Okay, like he's talking about something that's not even the thing yet. But you're saying this is going to happen and it happened exactly, and it was even the right name.
Speaker 1:What is God doing? He's, he already knows history in advance. He directs people to write it down. In fact, we even have secular proof. The Cyrus cylinder was discovered and on the Cyrus cylinder it describes how Cyrus let go the people of Jerusalem so they could return and rebuild their temple and all the jazz that they did. Guys, it's all here. It's all backed up by things that we find. Are we seeing this? So we've got prophetic evidence, we've got transmission evidence, we've got archeological evidence. We've got just the unity in diversity.
Speaker 1:And then there's personal encounter and impact. I mean, just think about the quality of the message it should be. If it is God's, it probably should have a pretty therapeutic or medicinal effect on planet Earth, shouldn't it? I mean, if he's the guy he says he is and he wants to fix things, that would make sense. It's not just facts, it's the Bible's life-changing power that tends to legitimize the truth of God's word. Okay, so in this Bible, god speaks over the centuries and every place he speaks, literacy pops up, justice pops up, education pops up, healthcare pops up because it's medicinal. The planet earth, slavery gets abolished because Christians are reading the Bible and like wait a minute, wait a minute, this doesn't know, this doesn't make sense and it takes a long time. And they push, and they push and they push. But that medicine is dripping into the planet via the word of God. That's why it's happening, that's why it's working.
Speaker 1:You've got people like so it's not only the impact, it's skeptics that are searching. Okay, cs Lewis was a skeptic, lee Strobel, guys like that, st Augustine skeptic. They look for proof, they go I'm going to go disprove the Bible. And as they get into it, something happens. Spirit of God, the God breather, breathes into them and they're like oh my gosh turns out I was opposing this and I'm absolutely convinced that God is who he says he is. And my friends, that's where we come up to.
Speaker 1:Can you prove this to your friend? I don't think you can and I think that's on purpose. There has to be a self-authenticating meaning. As you read the word of God, with an open heart, seeking God, I'm going to seek you with all my heart. God will be found by you. He promises he will. He will reveal himself to you. You'll have that same feeling that people have had over the centuries. Somebody is talking to me through this and they know more about me than I know about me. You'll have that experience.
Speaker 1:Why can't you prove it to your friend? I think the Lord has left it unprovable so that your friend has to explore and seek and maybe find and reach out and tap and finally found him, because God wants to be sought, and it's still by faith. If you really had like a proof, then it's no longer by faith, but the entire relationship that God is setting up is by faith. I want you to just trust me. Even though you don't see, I want you to trust that I'm good, even though you don't always know how it's going to work out. I want you to trust that I'm going to take care of you, even though it seems like I'm super not going to take care of you. That's the nature of the relationship and, and so, god, you can't prove it to them, but you can prove it to you.
Speaker 1:Jesus even said this in two places. One, the very disciples who were talking to him on the road to Emmaus. Didn't our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road and explained the scriptures to us? That's what the Bible does. If you read with an open heart, flame on baby, it just keeps on burning in you. It makes you hungry and hungry and hungry and burning.
Speaker 1:Some people are like why aren't I on fire anymore, carter? And honestly, dude, my question is how's your word life and is it dead? And sometimes you have a word life. It's just dead because you don't ever do anything different. It's like I'm just going to do the same thing I did the past three weeks and see if anything changes. Probably won't. Got to mix it up, dude.
Speaker 1:Okay, go somewhere else, read a different translation. I can give you plenty of tips. Come see me right after. I'll give you plenty of tips of how to fire that thing up. But you were made to be on fire. But the fire only comes from God's word. You can't manufacture it, you can't get anywhere else. Why? Because it's God breathed and you don't have God breath in and of yourself. You got to get it from God's word yourself. You got to get it from God's word. What does he say? John 7, 17.
Speaker 1:Anyone who wants to do the will of God will know whether my teaching is from God or is merely my own. So this is why it doesn't work for skeptics to say all right, prove it, god, let's see it. Let's see if you're real, and then I'll believe. Jesus says start the other way around. Start with want to do the will of God and say I so want to do. Of the will of God, I'm going to start trying to obey, I'm going to seek it with all my heart. I'm going to draw near to God. So he draws near to me. I want to find out. And Jesus says I promise you, if you do that, he's going to show himself. Oh yeah, he wants to be found. He just needs you to decide first. I just want you and you don't have to prove anything to me. I just want to do your will because it's maybe you. So it's 100% self-authenticating, and when you explore God's word, you begin to find that he speaks about you in a way that is beyond comprehension. And that's the exact way you would expect it to be, if he's the creator of you and knows everything about you, top to bottom, and knows what you need to hear and what you don't need to hear. Knows how to direct you here and not over there. Knows what your soul needs to hear about the God who made and love you.
Speaker 1:I'm going to invite the worship team to come on back up as we close out this message, because my question today is as we close out this message, because my question today is do you want a move of God, do you? Do you want a move of God? Okay, here's one thing that we've got to do as a church if we want a move of God. First we need to give ourselves to the scriptures. That's where a move of God comes from. Like there's nothing, I just want to shoot straight, dude.
Speaker 1:There's nothing different about F, about fierce, than a whole bunch of other churches. There's nothing unique to this place, other than we're hungry for God's word, like that's what it's got to be. That's the only way fire is going to happen. That's the only way there's going to be a special move of God. So don't like, oh, I'm going to go to fierce. So there's a move of God. No, there's no power in fears. There's power in God's word. And if we have any power, it's because we're exalting God's word and saying get in this book. And so if we're going to exalt God's God breath word, here's two other things we're going to do. We're going to make it our life's mission.
Speaker 1:God, okay, you've transmitted your word to me. It's perfect. I've got the best copy there's ever been in the history of the planet so far. We've got so many copies, we know so much about it. But because I've got this super valuable thing, I'm gonna spend the rest of my days seeking to understand. How does God want me to think? What does he want me to think about? X, y and Z?
Speaker 1:I'm going to interpret the world. I see not. I'm going to interpret the world I see, not through the screen. I'm going to interpret it through the book. I'm going to interpret through. What does God say about all of these things. Okay, I'm going to have my mind be curated right along to match God's word and I'm also going to protect it.
Speaker 1:I'm going to say I will not add any words to God's word. I will seek to listen to God, I will seek to have personal interactions and what we might call prophetic words that are personalized to us, but those are not the same thing as the scriptures, the God-breathed word of God that you have in your Bible. I'm going to spend the rest of my life saying, no, there were no additions, there's nothing else. Revelation makes a very clear warning Do not add to the words of this book. There's nothing else, there's nothing more unique, there's nothing more powerful. There's nothing more, my friends, than we need, other than God's word.
Speaker 1:If you want to move of God, my sweet, precious, fierce church, then we've got to exalt the word of God. Let's bow our heads. Lord, we're feeling it, we're tasting it a little bit, but we want to taste more. Lord, fire comes from you, hunger comes from you. The text coming alive comes from you, not from us.
Speaker 1:God, I pray that you would mix it up for people, different ones maybe, that have never explored the Bible. I pray you'd lead them into it and guide their actions, guide their thinking, guide their movements. And for those who've been in the Bible for decades, lord, I pray for fresh fire, a fresh wind. I pray for a fresh download. I pray for a fresh seek, a fresh hunger, a fresh quest, a fresh priority and focus on God's awesome, beautiful, powerful word. God, we trust your word, we declare it is true, it is unique, and we're asking, lord, would you just inject us right into our bloodstream to cause our brain to think along the lines of what your word says, to make us wise for salvation through Jesus Christ and to make us, just like your word, medicinal to the rest of this planet. In Jesus' name amen, check out our podcasts and check out our blog at fiercechurchblog. If you haven't already, please consider sharing this to help people you know take their next step. We'll see you next time.