Why I Trust the Bible and You Can Too! (Part 3)

A barefoot teenager in rural Wales saves for six years and then walks twenty miles to buy a Bible in her own language. That story isn’t sentimental filler, it’s a mirror. If we say we believe the Word of God, do we actually trust it enough to treat it like treasure?

We follow the thread from Mary Jones to the early church, where Peter is accused of selling “cleverly devised myths” about Jesus. Peter answers with eyewitness truth from the Transfiguration and then makes an even bigger claim: the strongest foundation for Christian faith is not someone’s spiritual experience but the written Word we can read. From 2 Peter 1 to 2 Timothy 3:16, we talk about Bible inspiration, what it means that Scripture is God-breathed, and why Christians have confidence that the Bible is not a man-made religious project.

Then we get practical and direct. Scripture doesn’t just inform, it forms. It teaches what is right, reproves what is wrong, corrects what is crooked, and trains us to keep walking straight. We also address why that authority puts believers out of step with cultural trends that elevate personal experience as the highest judge. To help you put this into practice, we share a simple Bible study method (observation, interpretation, application) plus concrete tools like study Bibles, commentaries, and expository teaching, along with a challenge to treat the Bible as more than an app.

If this strengthened your confidence in Scripture, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find it. What’s one habit that would help you treasure God’s Word more this week?

Transcript

Mary Jones And A Costly Bible

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Mary Jones was a ten-year-old girl living in Wales or Great Britain. The daughter of a poor farmer. She heard the gospel and became a Christian. And having learned to read, she wanted to own her own copy of the Bible in her native Welsh language. But in 1801, Bibles were rare, hard to come by on that island, especially in the Welsh language. A relative had a copy and she would go over there often and read it. That was as close as she could get to it. So she decided to save up money. And so for six years, if you can imagine it, she saved up every little bit of money she could until she finally had enough money to buy a Bible for her own. And at the age of 16, she was told that an evangelical Methodist pastor was the distributor, the closest one, to where she lived. His name was Thomas Charles. Even though he was twenty miles away, Mary Jones, barefoot, alone, walked the distance, arriving at this little village of Bala, a small market town at the northern edge of the Bala Lake. She found Pastor Charles, showed him the money that she'd saved for six years, and why she'd walked some twenty miles. He was so moved by her dedication that he wanted to give her a Bible. And she refused, some sources say, and insisted on paying for her copy with the money she'd saved. And with that, she walked back home, holding closely her treasure. It occurs to me, beloved, that you will never treasure something that you do not trust. I think that's why from the very beginning of human history, Satan caused doubt to rise in the mind of Eve. Could the word of God be trusted? To this day, that old serpent hadn't changed his strategy. He knows that one of the most significant things that he can try to take away from us as believers is trust in the Word of God. If you can't trust it, you're not going to read it. You're not going to really care about it. You're not going to memorize it. You're not going to obey it. And you certainly will never treasure it. The New Testament church is barely 30 years old, and the enemy is on the attack. He's like a prosecuting attorney. He goes after the credibility of the witness. Never mind the evidence, he's going to go after the witness. And that's exactly what the Apostle Peter has been facing as we've been studying this text. He's been charged with making up the gospel. It's a myth, they have said of Peter. It's a fairy tale. You've made it up. It's nonsense that Jesus is the Son of God and he's coming back. Well, that's just a make-believe. So Peter has mounted his defense. We're going to take one last look at that defense. So take your Bible and turn to 2 Peter chapter 1. If you've been with us in this series, Peter took us up the mountain where the Lord transfigured, the Lord literally pulled back the curtain of his humanity, revealed the glory of his deity, and bathed that hillside with brilliant, dazzling light. Well, Peter refers to that as his defense. Verse 16. We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. But we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. We didn't make up the deity of Christ. We saw it. We saw a demonstration of it with our own eyes. We were eyewitnesses, but we were also ear witnesses, also an important testimony in court. We heard something, verse 17. We heard a voice. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this very voice, born from heaven, came out of heaven. We were with him on the holy mountain. So this is what we saw. This is what we heard. But now we have an even greater testimony to present to you, more significant evidence beyond what we saw and heard. Peter writes next, we have something to read. He says in verse 19, we have the word of God more fully confirmed. You could translate this. What do we get? Which is why, by the way, Peter, James, and John went up the mountain, and I mentioned this last Lord's day, they don't want our faith based on their experience. They want our faith based on their inspiration. And so they only refer, Peter only refers to this one time, that mountaintop experience. John only refers to it once. James never does. The stability of our faith isn't in what we see or what we hear, but what we can read. The very word of God. Now, Peter anticipates the enemy saying, well, you know, the Word of God is just another man-made collection of stories. You know, you guys and the prophets, you know, you wanted to have a little religious movement and you needed something you could call a sacred writing to support your movement, your religion. You just made it up. Peter then moves then to that. Why we can trust the Bible, verse 21, for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along, ferried, we learned, carried along by the Holy Spirit. In other words, the prophets and the apostles weren't making it up. They were moved by the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God superintended, supervised, directed, led the apostles to write what they wrote in order that every word would be accurate. This is inspiration. This is from God. Well, I want to go to another verse here. Go back a few pages to 2 Timothy. It's a key verse that describes inspiration. 2 Timothy chapter 3, Paul is rehearsing the testimony of young Timothy, who's pastoring the church in Ephesus. Paul writes here in chapter 3 and verse 15, that how from childhood, he reminds Timothy, you have been acquainted with the sacred writings. Stop for a moment. Webster defines sacred as pertaining to God. The sacred writings are writings that came from God. So these are truly sacred writings. By the way, other religions claim to have sacred writings. We've addressed that to some degree. This is genuinely a sacred writing because it comes from God. And by the way, it tells you how to belong to God. Sacred writings tell you how to get right with God. So what does Paul say? Well, he's effectively saying these sacred writings, they're able to make you wise for salvation. This is how you get saved. This is the gospel. This is how you can be forgiven and brought into a right relationship with God. These can make you wise for salvation. How do you get that? Through faith in Christ Jesus. Let me stop for a moment and help change our vocabulary. There are not many faiths in the world. You hear that all the time. Well, it's one of many faiths. There are many faiths. No, there's one faith. Everything else is speculation. Everything else is deception. Everything else will not lead you to faith in Jesus Christ, which brings salvation. It's made up. This is not. This is from God. There are not many faiths. That's why Paul will write in Ephesians 4, verse 5, there is one spirit. Capital S. Not many, one. There is one Lord. Not many, but one. There is one faith. Not many, but one. Now, let's take a closer look at verse 15. He says, you know, from childhood now you've been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Now with that, he immediately changes the title for sacred writings and refers to them as scripture. He says in the very next phrase, all scripture, referring to the sacred writings, that now encompasses everything, Old and New Testament. All scripture is breathed out by God. Your translation might read, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. Both translations are correct. The word inspiration, the nustos, is a compound word in the Greek language. Thao is the word for God. Nustos is the word for breath. The Latin vulgade in the Middle Ages translated theapnustos, inspirata, which gave us our word inspiration. So all scripture is inspired. It is more woodenly translated, it is the breath of God. Peter described back in 2 Peter, and we looked at it, that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. He used the language of the sea. He referred to the apostles and prophets as sailboats, and the sails were filled with the wind that moved the boat, the messenger along. Well, Paul here gives us this great insight that the wind in their sails was the breath of God. Great imagery. I want you to follow this closely. One author put it so well, I'm just going to read it. I'll put it on the screen. The scriptures are not human literature into which God breathed something divine. Rather, they owe their very existence to the outbreathing of the Holy Spirit. Now, God used the writers' vocabularies, their experiences, their minds. They weren't dictating, but it was the breath of God filling the sail as they obeyed. And they, impressed by the Spirit, guided by the Spirit, wrote every word accurately. Now the apostles knew that, by the way. You might wonder if they did. They did, no, to some degree. Paul would write to the Corinthian church, we've not received the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit, capital S, who is from God, the things freely given to us by God. Now notice, and we, a reference to the apostles, impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit. This is why the apostles will write their letters, and they will not be suggestions, they will be ultimatums. It isn't for us to discard it and say, well, that doesn't fit me. Or I'm going to take an eraser and I'm going to take that one out. I don't like that one. I'll follow this one. Paul writes later to the Corinthian church, was it from you that the Word of God came? That's a rhetorical question, expecting the audience to answer. No, the word of God didn't come from us. He goes on. If anyone thinks that he's a prophet or spiritual, then he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. And Paul's not getting too big for his britches. He's not getting proud here. He understands that he's writing. What he's writing is sacred scripture. It is the very word, the outbreathing of God. And that's why, beloved, I can trust the Bible and you can too. It is sourced from God through his messengers. Now, with that, what Paul does next is give Timothy and us some information on what the Bible will do for us, what it will produce. And by the way, how it's going to get us into trouble in our world today. And that's because God's word doesn't change with our movements of culture, our definitions of right and wrong. God doesn't change his beliefs based on approval ratings or poll numbers. Now Paul gives us four ways that God's word can guide us. Verse 16 again. All scripture is given, breathed out by God. It's profitable for first teaching. This tells you what's right. This tells you what to believe. Some people try to behave right, but they don't believe correctly. This tells you what to believe, what's right. The Bible tells you the truth. Now, this doesn't mean that the Bible tells us everything that's true. There are a lot of things the Bible doesn't mention, never refers to. What this means is that whatever the Bible does tell us is the truth. Whether it's something about creation or marriage or morals or sin or salvation or heaven or hell. Whatever the Bible does speak about something, it is telling us the truth. Now, be careful. Everything the Bible records is not something we're supposed to repeat. The Bible tells us that Judas went out and hung himself. They're not recommending that for you and me this afternoon. The Bible reports on the polygamy of David. Records it. Doesn't give any commentary, just says, and he took Abigail to be his wife. But that's not God's design for marriage. That was sin on David's part. I remember a man came up to me after church one Sunday morning, and I just preached a little bit on the life of David. And he was adamant that the Bible, I'd missed it, I should have recommended a polygamy because the Bible was very clear. That, you know, it said that David had more than one wife, and we ought to be able to have more than one, and he said I ought to be able to have a second wife myself. Well, I never met the man, but I immediately felt sorry for his wife. I suspected she'd like another husband, frankly. Well, I asked him if you knew the rest of the biography of David, because it would be polygamy, is one of the key things. It would blow his family apart. Destroy it. His sinful example will be used by his son to justify his son just going off the reservation. 700 wives. And 300 concubines. One little boy got to mix up 300 cucumber vines. I always like that. And it tangled them up, too, by the way. A thousand women. Whose lives he ruined. At the end of his life, Solomon is going to write, I had everything. But he says it was madness. It was emptiness. Now, as an old man, before he puts his quill down for the last time, he says at the very end of Ecclesiastes, I've realized the only thing that matters is that you obey the commandment, the word of God. Now, secondly, Paul writes that all scriptures breathed out by God, profitable for teaching. This tells you what's right. Secondly, for reproof. This tells you what's wrong. This tells you where you're wrong. The word for reproof is used for refuting error, rebuking sinful behavior. The Bible is the standard for what's right and wrong. Which is why it's turned upside down and turned around and stood on its head in order to defend anything. Who has the authority in your life to tell you you're wrong? Besides your four-year-old. Who has the authority to blow a whistle like a referee and tell you you're out of bounds? You can't do that. That's wrong. Let me tell you, if you believe the Bible has the right to define right and wrong, you're going to be in trouble with your culture. You're going to be so out of step they consider you a fossil. I tell people who are in our greenhouse class who are thinking about joining this church, I tell them right up front, if you're joining this church, you've got to understand you're joining a dinosaur. We are so out of touch. Do you really want to be associated with us? This past Shepherd's 360 conference, we dealt with an issue that has been embroiling our culture now for the last 30 years. Rosaria Butterfield was invited to share testimony, a former tenured professor at the University of Syracuse, a committed lesbian today. She is married to Pastor Kent Butterfield, the mother of four children. After her conversion to Christ, she describes an encounter that she had with another colleague at the university. And in a conversation, the colleague wanted Dr. Butterfield to bend her message about homosexuality. Rosaria writes, she made this simple request. Rosaria, I want you to change your message. Well, I asked her what I ought to change in my message, and she said, tell people that is that it is only in your opinion that homosexual practice is. Sinful. I responded by letting her know that I was not smart enough to have this opinion. But that this is the position of the inspired inerrant word of God. Changing my message, she writes, would involve denying the plain meaning of Scripture. And let me tell you, beloved, no matter what somebody says, I have been invited by pastors and church leaders to conferences to explain that it really isn't sinful. Well, let me read you. Well, before I get to that, I want to tell you that the Bible does produce the standard for morality and not just homosexuality. The Bible refers to fornication. That is sexual activity relations between people who are not married. That's sinful. The Bible refers to adultery, being sexually involved with someone who is married to somebody else as sin. The Bible refers to homosexuality, having sexual relations with the same sex as sin. Passage after passage after passage. In fact, Paul wrote to the Corinthian church that was morally compromised. They were allowing a member of their church to be involved in incest, a man with his stepmother. Paul challenged them to remove that individual by discipline. Unless they repented. And that's the point. We can be guilty of these sins, but are we repentant? Obedient, attempting to follow the word of God. If not, here is a warning from Paul who writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, where he says that those who refuse to repent of fornication, adultery, and homosexuality, he says they will not inherit the kingdom of God. The Bible tells us what's right and wrong. Let me read something that didn't make our culture very happy because one of their own who supports same-sex marriage, a scholar by the name of Luke Timothy Johnson, he served as the dean of Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Well versed in theology, knows the languages of Greek and Hebrew, church history. And here's what he wrote. I have little patience with efforts to make Scripture say something other than what it says. Through appeals to linguistic or cultural subtleties, we know what the text says. In other words, he's saying we know the Bible calls it sin. But I think it's important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience. At least he's honest. The Bible is not clouded, but he's saying we have a higher authority, and it will be how we feel. Our experience defines what's right and wrong. Never mind what the Word of God says. Our experience drowns out the referee's whistle. No, Paul writes, the Bible tells you what's right. It rebukes sin in all our lives. Now, thirdly, all scriptures breathed out by God, profitable for teaching, tells you what's right, reproof, tells you what's wrong. Correction, this tells you how to straighten up. My mother used that word often with my brothers. And she'd say, young man, you'd better what? Straighten up. Oh, you had the same mother, didn't you? Well, absolutely. Or, you know, when your father comes home, he's gonna straighten you out. That was not a nice thing to hear in my troubled childhood. Maybe you understand the use of the word in something like wearing braces on your teeth. How many of you wore braces before the invention of Invisalign that made it so much easier? Raise your hand. You warm the old-fashioned way. Yeah, metal strips around each tooth, wires, band-aid, uh-uh, uh, uh, um, yeah, you put band-aids inside your mouth, but it rubber bands, that's it. Rubber bands. I can learn to shoot that thing right in the middle of class. You you got those uh nicknames like you know, Metal Mouth, uh, you know, Rin Tin Tin. Yeah, got all those. Those braces were painful, but they were correcting something crooked. And the and and the end product was what you wanted. So you endured the pain. The Bible might be painful, it might make you change your life this afternoon if you will obey it. It's gonna be painful. But God wants to correct us, and the positive product is worth it as we obey him. God created us, he knows what fulfills us, he knows how we can come to the end of our lives and look over our shoulder and not say it was madness, it was emptiness. Finally, number four, Paul writes, it tells you how to straighten up and then training in righteousness. Number four, this tells you how to stay that way. It equips you for every good work, he goes on to say. It equips you for life. So, in reverse, without the Bible, we don't have God telling us what's right. We don't have God telling us what's wrong. It's gonna be left up to how we feel, what we experience. We don't know how to straighten the path. We might think we're moving north and we're heading west. We get lost, as we've said before, in the swamp of life without the lamp of God's word. So again, the question is not do you have to take the Bible so seriously? The question is how in the world can you afford not to with what it does, how God has designed it. Now, let me let me give you some, let me give you three key words as you study the Bible. Let me just pull over here and give you some principles of application. This is this is basically the outline that I follow as I study and prepare to teach you. Three key words. The first word is observation. Go to the Bible and look at it like you've never seen it before. Don't say, oh, I know that passage. No, go go look at it. Ask questions of it. Who? What? When? Where? Who's involved? Where did this happen? What do you know about it? Um did this take place? Peter fell, denied Jesus when, after the night before, when he refused to pray, decided to sleep. Ask the question: what does the Bible say? That's observation. Don't start with, what does the Bible mean to me? We don't know what it means yet, so don't go there. What does the Bible say? Look at the words, circle repeated verbs, underlined phrases. Go look things up of where it took place. Second, observation leads to interpretation. What does the Bible mean? And let me just warn you, it needs to be stated, what does it mean to them? That's where you go first. Before you ask, what does it mean to me? This brings in things like context. This brings in issues like culture. To whom is God writing this? We're not applying as a church what God wrote to Israel. Well, we're not trying to fulfill the Abrahamic covenant in our lives by becoming wealthy and healthy, and the misapplication of that covenant has led to all sorts of error. Observation, interpretation, and then finally, application. That asks and answers the question: what difference does it make in my life? What does the Bible say? Observation. What does the Bible mean? Interpretation. What does the Bible then mean to me? How is it going to change my life? That's application. Let me give you some practical helps in your life as you trust and treasure the Word. First, let me recommend that you buy a study Bible. I was asked this question by a church member just this last week. Buy a study Bible. You'll have a comment on just about every passage of Scripture. Just remember that the notes underneath the text, the notes are not inspired. They're usually produced by denomination, so they'll be slanted at times. So be careful. But buy a study Bible. Second, plan time during your day to be immersed in the exposition of Scripture. It might be simply hearing the Bible read while you're getting ready, or driving to work, listening to a podcast where somebody's taking you through the Bible verse by verse. We call that expository preaching, expository teaching. You are expounding on the word. It gives us our word expository. Like a lady who went up to her pastor one day and she said after a sermon, I love your suppository preaching. We're not talking about suppository, we're talking about expository. Third, purchase a commentary. You know, I've recommended that instead of reading the Bible through in a year, maybe one book of the Bible for a year and dig deeper by a little commentary and read along with it. Study one book of the Bible for an entire year. I'm not necessarily recommending you start with the book of Leviticus, although that's a great book. A lot of insight in any book you study. Fourth, take a seminary class on the life of Christ or systematic theology or New Testament survey. You know, find a seminary nearby where you can do that. I know of one. Down the hallway, man. You can live synchronous from your home, zoom in, take a class in the evening. Finally, and this is where you're gonna say, Davey, you're really off, you know, off track here. You're gonna sound like my grandfather. But I'm gonna say it because as you can tell this morning, I don't I guess I'm offending everybody, but I'm gonna say this. Um resist the convenience of having a Bible on your phone instead of in your hand. I told you, I'm a dinosaur, I'm a I'm a fossil, okay? Don't make the Bible just another app. Treasure it. Make it a memorial. You know, I came across yesterday in my study, I was looking for a book, and I came across the Bible that I preached from when we started our church 40 years ago. That's a memorial. I held it, I looked at it, I looked at pages that were underlined. You're gonna toss your phone and get a new one. Don't make it an app. Do you know a dedicated Muslim will not place the Quran on the floor? He will not carry it under his arm. He considers that disrespectful. He'll always have it on a shelf higher than wherever he is. A dedicated Sikh in the land of India will not open their religious book until they wash their hands and completely changed their clothes. I think of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago, the Protestant churches changed the entire look of their sanctuary. They placed the Bible in the middle and the pulpit, which was off to the side. It emphasized the centrality of preaching the word of God, the authority of Scripture. The pulpit was referred to as a sacred desk. That emphasized the importance of the studying and the expounding of the Word of God, not the opinion of the preacher. Pulpits, in fact, were designed, if you've ever seen them, to be heavy, somewhat ornate. That communicated it wasn't trite. It wasn't easily replaceable. I had a lady in our church just this last week email me with a question. She's a young mom and she's been watching podcasts of other pastors, evangelical pastors, and she wondered if she was being too negative over uh the fact that the pastors that she might watch on a podcast uh didn't have a Bible with them when they preached. They had an iPad or a notebook. No, no Bible in sight. And she thought am I being too critical. I told her I agreed with her observation. It's troubled me. Preachers have gone from a Bible and a sacred desk to a bistro table and an iPad. That is going in the wrong direction. And again, I know I sound like a fossil, but it doesn't speak well of the church at large. No wonder people are encouraged to have a Bible on their smartphone instead of on their lap. Now you didn't know I was going to mention this point. So if you're holding a smartphone, maybe you've already slipped it away. I don't know. Don't be discouraged. Don't be discouraged. But go buy a Bible. Go buy one. Then carry it to your desk at work. Carry it to your travels on that airplane. And nobody's going to look at you looking at your phone and think, oh, they're reading the Bible. Oh, but they're going to see you reading a Bible and they're going to look over and say, hey, what are you reading? Oh, well, let me tell you about it. Make it a memorial to your life. I remember having lunch with a member of the Gideons. That's a wonderful ministry. We have men in our church who are part of that ministry. They give Bibles away, they witness to everybody, ready at all times with a pocket New Testament. I remember going to a meeting with one of the Gideons, and we were having lunch. We were eating at Waffle House. It's my definition of fine dining, by the way. After lunch, he gave a pocket New Testament to the waitress. And I was so convinced because I remember thinking, oh man, she's too busy. She's tired. I mean, look at her. She's harried. She didn't want to stop and take a Bible. That's what I thought. She took that and she said, Oh, I don't have one of these. She clutched it to herself and she said, Thank you. I'm going to read this when I get off work. He gave her something she could cherish. What might it do to our world, beloved, if we were so determined that we would walk 20 miles barefoot to have a copy? The truth is we don't have to spend six years saving up. And we probably have more than one copy. Do we treasure it? What difference could it make in the lives of people who know us? Our children, our grandchildren, our colleagues who see us with our nose in the book. Let me give you the last chapter of something I began with in 1802. A year after he met Mary, Pastor Charles told a group of church leaders at a meeting in London about this 16-year-old girl who walked 20 miles barefoot to get a Bible. And he talked about the need for Bibles in Wales and in the Welsh language. He said they cannot be rare, they must be available. Another pastor suggested that they form a society of believers dedicated to that. And another church leader said, you know what, if it's good for Wales, what about the rest of Great Britain? So they solicited the help of others, and including other believers in their world, including William Wilberforce, who lent his name to it, and they formed the British Foreign Bible Society, which now has an international network. And last year I looked it up. They gave away, in several languages, they gave away 80 million Bibles. It all started with a 16-year-old girl who said, I must have one to guide my life. Let's communicate, beloved, to our families, our culture, our world today. Let's make sure that we we're telling them that this is the word of God. I trust. And you can too. Pray with me, Father, thank you for taking such care to give us your word. Thank you for allowing us to grow and learn, to change, to adapt. We thank you for this word that told us how to get right with you. How to be saved, forgiven. By faith in your Son. Thank you for the lamp that it is. I pray that you will impress on all our hearts today that it is. Never to be trivialized. It must be treasured. And we can. Because we can trust it. It's your word. So in every one of our lives, Father, I know that when a message like this is preached, every one of us has something to change. Every one of us have something of which we ought to repent. Every one of us have something to believe, to pursue. So Spirit of God, do that. Make us uncomfortable unless we do. And for those here today, Father, who don't know you, they're not right with you yet, might this be the first step to asking the question, what must I do to be saved? And if that's you, by the way, I'd love to meet you in this reception here after the service. Let's begin that conversation. Thank you, Father, for the privilege of gathering around your word. We've sung it, we've prayed it, we've studied it. It's the basis of fellowship. Now we leave. I pray, we're pressed to obey it. Thank you to Jesus.