Manuscripts, History, And Why The Bible Holds Up

If you’ve ever wondered whether the Bible can actually hold up under scrutiny, we go straight at the questions people usually whisper or argue about online. We start with a bigger issue than any single verse: the way you view Scripture decides whether you treat it like authority, inspiration, background history, or something you can edit when it gets uncomfortable.

We walk through Psalm 119 and the psalmist’s almost shocking love for God’s Word, then shift into the “can we trust the text?” conversation. We talk manuscripts, copying, and textual criticism in plain language, including why having thousands of manuscript witnesses is a strength, not a threat. The Dead Sea Scrolls come into focus too, especially the Great Isaiah Scroll, and why discoveries like that matter for Bible reliability and biblical transmission across centuries.

Then we zoom out to the historical Jesus. We look at Luke’s stated method of careful investigation and why non-Christian sources like Josephus still matter in the “was Jesus real?” debate. From there, we land the tension point: culture changes fast, but Scripture doesn’t, and if Jesus treated the Word of God as authoritative, we can’t build a faith that only works when it’s popular. If you want a clearer, steadier foundation for Christian living, listen through and then tell us what challenged you most. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation.

Transcript

Prayer And A Different Morning

SPEAKER_02 1:04

So it's um there there's someone's prayer that goes into uh this message on Sunday morning. And I don't know if you caught it, uh, but you guys weren't there, but the worship team prays together before service, and normally whoever is the one communion prays over that. We pray over the service, we pray over the message. Cody prayed over the service, prayed over the message. Uh Nick prayed over the service over the message. I prayed over, you see the thing here? Because I believe that the word of God and and and what's being professed here this morning is so important, and I want to bathe it in prayer. I even have a group of people during the week who pray over this. Specifically, I text them on Monday. They know what the message is, and they're just they're praying over preparation. This fly is gonna die. I don't know if there's a heaven for you, but we'll find out. Sorry. It's right in my face, man. Okay. But prayer is such an important thing, and so none of this is should ever be taken lightly, and we're hailing the word of God. It shouldn't be. We should pray before we read our Bible. We should pray while we're reading our Bible. We should pray after we read our Bible. We should pray when we're not reading our Bible. Like we we should bathe our interactions with God constantly. But this morning is gonna feel a little different than normal. My goal this morning is to take you to class. This is gonna seem more

How Do You View The Bible?

SPEAKER_02 2:33

like a seminary course than a sermon, but but I promise there's a valid point to this. And as we dive into the Word of God, as we dive into the scriptures, you and I have to constantly wrestle with one question. How do we view the Bible that God has given us? And that might seem like a silly question, but it's not. Because the world today has several different views. Some people see the scriptures as authoritative, which means that they're inspired by God, they're written by man, but inspired by God, that they're trustworthy, that they're used to shape our lives, and that you and I should base our life off of what Scripture teaches us. Simply put, when we encounter Scripture, if something, if something in Scripture tells us something is wrong in our lives, you and I are supposed to change what's wrong with our life to line up with the Word of God. Some people believe that. Some people, they like the Bible because it makes them feel good. They love their passages, and uh I can do all things through Christ who strengthened me as I shoot this basketball, as I kick this goal, as and listen, not necessarily wrong, but but taken way out of context. People only like to read the good stuff. But the moment scripture challenges a belief system, or it challenges the culture, or it challenges something they're doing in their own life, they change it. They modify it, they find a different version. You know, one of my least favorite things in the world is when you're trying to go through scripture and someone says, Well, so-and-so scholar says this. Cool. That's a man that has an opinion. Doesn't mean he's right. We we have to go to scripture, stay with scripture, interpret within the scriptures themselves. It's not wrong to hear other voices, but at the end of the day, we either believe scripture speaks for itself or it doesn't. And again, some people like the good stuff, but not so much the difficult things. Other people, they see the Bible as just a great historical record. It talks a lot about the history of Jesus and who he was and the time and and the culture that he lived in, but but really it's 2,000 years old. How relevant can it be? I mean, they don't know, right? I mean, there's no way that God could have known that we would be in the mess that we're in and all the things that have happened in this world. So, so so, yes, it's important, yes, it's great, but it can't speak to morality, it can't tell us what to do because it doesn't understand our culture, only the culture it was written to. And then some people flat out deny it. It was made up. It's a made-up fairy tale full of great stories, men who fail, a Jesus, who's Jesus? He didn't live. This is just something people tell our selves, and we use it for power and control and abuse and to keep people down. The sad part about that statement is there are people who use scripture for that very purpose. I don't know if you knew this or not, but one of the most uh inspiring men in the last 60, 70 years was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor, he was a martyr in Germany during the time of Hitler. He was one of the few men who spoke out as the church used Scripture to justify Hitler's reign. What a shame. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the men who opposed them greatly. He spoke in the public. He opposed Hitler, he he stood for everything that Scripture stood for and against everything that they stood for, so much so that he actually had freed himself but went back. He went back because he knew that his work wasn't done, and he died in a concentration camp. Again, people throughout history have misused scripture. But but at the end of the day, the question is not what does someone else think about the Bible that I read. The question is what do you think about it? How you answer that question affects everything. The psalmist in Psalm 119, we're gonna read verses one through sixteen, makes it very clear where he stands. Blessed

Psalm 119 And Loving God’s Word

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are those whose ways are blameless, who walk according to the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep his statutes and seek him with all their heart. They do no wrong but follow his ways. You have laid down precepts that are to be fully obeyed. Oh, that my ways were steadfast and obeying your decrees, that I would not be put to shame when I consider all of your commands. I will praise you with an upright heart as I learn your righteous laws. I will obey your decrees, do not utterly forsake me. How can a young person stay on the path of purity by living according to your word? I seek you with all of my heart, do not let me stray from your commands. I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Praise be to you, Lord. Teach me your decrees. With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth. I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches. I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways. I delight in your decrees. I will not neglect your word. He makes it clear that the word of God, and we have to understand that his would have been the Torah, the scriptures that he has. He understood how valuable they were, that he decided to base his life off of them. So that I use them to keep from sinning against you. How does a young person stay pure? He delights in your laws, your word, your decree. The psalmist is in love with the word of God. He he doesn't question it, he he embraces it. And that's where we're gonna find ourselves this morning because if you do not see scripture, I'm gonna backtrack that. Because I need you to come to your own conclusion.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

How you see scripture will affect how you read it and how it shapes your life. 100%. So the question this morning is how do we view the Bible?

Manuscripts And Textual Criticism

SPEAKER_02 10:14

One of the biggest and earliest questions that I often hear is how do we know what it was really written? I mean, think about it. Some of the text is thousands of years old. The Old Testament. It's thousands of years old. The New Testament is a little over 2,000 years old. How can we trust that the things that we read are true? And what's the common what's been translated so many times out of so many different languages? There's no way that this could be right. Someone along the way had to manipulate it. They had to control it. They had her disorder. There's no way that you and I can check to see what was actually written. And that is a hundred percent false. There's this, you guys know what a manuscript is? So when you look at how the Bible was put together and how it's been passed from generation to generation, uh, believe it or not, they didn't have Xerox copies back then. So in order to transfer one manuscript to another, you would have to write it out. So there were men, and I know there are some women who copied manuscripts, and their job was to make sure that as the manuscripts were written out, that they were done correctly. Now, there's a problem with that. And the problem is humans are fallible. Right? A missed line here or there, a missed comma, or a period. Maybe the words got twisted around. The manuscripts that we have are not a hundred percent accurate, and that's okay. That I think that's that's just shows you progress, right? For us to teach and act like it's it was all done perfectly is actually kind of an insane stance to take. Because again, people misspelled things, people wrote the wrong things. If you ever read your Bibles, you'll see some parts where it even talks about how this is only in a few manuscripts and not many. But here's why manuscripts matter. The New Testament alone, so we have over 5,800 cataloged Greek manuscripts. 5,800. Now, if you if you add in, if you get out of the Greek, if you add in Latin in the Syriac and the different other languages we have, and Hebrew, and like if you if you add that number, it's it's well over 10,000. 10,000 manuscripts that have been passed down from time. Generation to generation to generation. That would be like, let's say that I wrote a letter to a hundred of you. Okay? So I wrote the same letter to all hundred to a hundred people. And a hundred years from now, when I have passed on, unless I live to be 140, which would be crazy to even think about, sorry, you would have 100 of those letters, and even if you lost five copies, you would still have 95 of them. And you would be able to take those letters 100 years from now, and you would be able to look at them and compare them to what people say about me, or people say about them, and you would be able to either justify that that's what I said, or you could look at those manuscripts and think, that's that's not that's not what he said there. And and so that's why, so we call this textual criticism, right? So we look at the Bible, we have thousands of manuscripts that have passed down generation to generation, that when we have when we read through our Bible and as they were putting together a scripture and as they translated it into different languages, they would go back to these manuscripts and they would compare them. They wanted to make sure that the things that were written thousands of years ago were true. And so if you had a couple people who wrote this, but you had more people who wrote this. So if you had a hundred manuscripts and five of them said this and 95 said this, they would assume, and rightfully so, that the 95 were correct. And so through this, they've been able to find different variations. Like I said, when you look at all of the manuscripts that exist, the errors they have found in the manuscripts for the Bible that you and I have is less than 1%. That's the most of any historical document that we have. Think about that. We believe fantastic stories of Alexander the Great with little to no record, but the scriptures have actual physical evidence that we can go back to and compare, and they have found very little error. Because that's who God is. God has made sure that the scriptures you and I have are trustworthy. One of the oldest ones that was found in 1947, if you've ever heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, huge thing, huge discovery, not only for scripture, but really just for the world as a whole. You can actually go online and look at them, which is pretty neat. But one of the largest things that came out of the Dead Sea Scrolls is what they call the Great Isaiah Scroll. This scroll is thousands of years old, thousands of years old, and almost completely intact.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Thousands of years old.

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It was preserved, and they have been able to go back and use this thousand-year-old manuscript to look at the book of Isaiah today and realize it's 97% spot on.

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How are you not gasping at this?

SPEAKER_02 16:29

Like, this is fascinating. I am such a nerd right now. Like, I'm like excited because you don't want to like how huge that is. Like, God has given us the ability to verify that the book of Isaiah was written and it's been passed down for thousands of years, and it's consistently the same. Minor errors, yes, but the details are all there. And that's such an important conversation because for people who say there's no way to prove the Bible is true, that is a lie. Thousands of manuscripts have been poured over, and they have shown the accuracy as it's been translated from different languages, it's been passed down from generation.

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That's a beautiful thing. But maybe that's not enough.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

It's a historical document, by the way. And what do they say? I always love when people say, Well, it's in the Bible. Well, the the Bible justifies the Bible. It's called circle reasoning. It's easy to say that. I'm not saying the Bible doesn't justify itself, but that argument is circle reasoning. Right? But we have manuscripts that prove its existence and it's true. So if we believe that, then the question has to be, well, is it trustworthy?

Dead Sea Scrolls And Trustworthiness

SPEAKER_02 18:03

How do we know that that there wasn't a group of people who controlled it and manipulated and read it, wrote it in such a way that the story benefited them? How do we know that that Jesus was even a real person? You and I can't go back to the time that he was there. You and I can we can hear the story of the resurrection in his life, but but you and I don't actually know we weren't there. Luke chapter 11, or sorry, chapter 1, verses 1 through 4, uh Luke says that he um Luke tells us that he had already written an account of what had happened, that these things had been handed down by eyewitnesses, and that he himself had carefully investigated them. And he says he decided to write an orderly account so that Theophilus could have certainty concerning what he had been taught. So Luke, the the book of Luke, is incredibly detailed. Luke, when he comes to his conclusion, he captures a lot of details that were not in Scripture. But he wanted to write an orderly account. So the question is how do we know that Jesus was even a real person? How do we know he wasn't made up? Historically, the Romans were uh incredible history takers. They were note takers. They had people whose job literally was to sit around and write of daily events. That was their whole job. They just wanted to capture what was happening in the world. There's a first century Jewish historian named Josephus. He was not a Christian, he was not evangelist, he had nothing really to do or interest in what was happening, but he he refers to the brother of James. So Josephus is a Roman historian, gives the name Christ to Jesus because he recognizes that that's what people were calling him. He had no reason to do this other than to write an account. He has a much longer account of Jesus standing before Pilate. But Josephus is one of the historians that writes greatly about who Jesus was. He was interested, not a Christian, but as a historian. He wanted to know what was going on. And Jesus had made such an impact in the Roman world that they had to write about him. And Josephus, or sorry, Jesus, and Josephus had had no reason other uh to write about Jesus than just the fact that he was keeping track of what was happening. There was no benefit for him. So many historians write about Jesus and what he did, and there's so tons of evidence. Uh, there's a book by N. T. Wright called Historical Jesus, which is fascinating, but establishes that Jesus was a real person in time and place. The Bible has been used for centuries to find uh historical uh archaeology, like they've been able to pinpoint things down. They found um it's oh man, I I could go all day. I'm not going to. But there's so much evidence that he was a real person, and most people, even if they don't follow him, acknowledge that he was an historical figure. Jesus. Josephus calls him the Christ. He acknowledges this brother of James, this man who everyone saw and understood, had some impact.

SPEAKER_01 22:12

He wrote of his persecution, Josephus did, he wrote of his execution.

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Jesus was executed with a very real Roman method. He existed in time and place. He lived and breathed just like you and I. So we have thousands of manuscripts that speak to the preservation of scripture. We have a historical representation of who Jesus is. The Romans historian Josephus acknowledges him as a real person in time and place. So the next question for you and I is. If the scriptures have been proven to be accurate, and we can verify that, if Jesus was a real person who lived and breathed and died, who was known as the Christ, what does that tell us about scripture?

Jesus In History And Inspired Scripture

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Why should we believe in it? Is it actually the word of God? 2 Timothy 3.16 says, all scripture is breathed out by God. Peter writes in 2 Peter 1.21 that they spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. This idea that as the Bible was written, we call this inspiration. These men were inspired by God to write the things that they write. To give us an accurate account of the details. One of my favorite things is when you start looking at the letters that Paul wrote. So when you get past the Gospels in the book of Acts, when you look at the letters that were written to the churches and the things that they wrote about, most of them were written within 30 to 40 years after Christ had already ascended. Which means that there were still a whole lot of people around that were witness to the events that they were writing of. Think about that. In a culture that was really big on preserving its oral tradition, right, this is how the Jewish culture would tell their stories. They were incredible storytellers. That's how they got from one story to another. They would protect their stories. Because if that's the only way you can communicate your history, you're going to protect it. So as people were writing and speaking of Jesus 30 to 40 years in this crowd of people who all witnessed this, none of them corrected it.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Why? Now would be the time, right?

SPEAKER_02 25:17

But instead, you had hundreds, if not thousands, of people who heard and saw and read what was being written about Jesus as the Son of God, about his resurrection, about the eyewitnesses who saw him after his resurrection, and it stood the test of their culture that the stories continued on. That these events were seen as valid and true.

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It gives substance to the writings.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Because they were so worried about protecting their history that even the stories that didn't make them look the best I mean it doesn't. They crucified Jesus. Who wouldn't want to change that narrative? The Romans lied. Jesus was taken and resurrected from the tomb, and who'd they what'd they do? They blame the Jews. Oh, they stole the body. Jesse and I have had this conversation so many times. Like, I just want to know the conversation when they got to the tomb and like the Roman soldiers had passed out and Jesus resurrected. And I want to know who stood up and was like, we gotta tell somebody about this. We're gonna lie about it. We're gonna tell them that in the middle of the night, these these peasants, these Jews, came and pushed away this huge stone. They overpowered us, you first. They overpowered us. They stole the body of Jesus. We have no idea where it is, but but surely they took it and they hid it somewhere. Except when Paul writes that over 500 people saw his resurrected body. I would have loved to have been in that room with the Roman soldiers. But instead, the Jews allowed the story to remain because it was true. Even if it didn't paint them in the best of light, it was their history. We have eyewitnesses, people who can testify to the things we read in the New Testament. And then we have Jesus. If Jesus was a real person, a real man in time and place, his view of scripture should affect ours. Anytime he faced opposition, what did he do? He went to scripture. He used it throughout his messages, throughout his sermons, throughout his teachings. He used it when he was being tempted by Satan. He constantly went back to Scripture. He treated it as authoritative. He treated it as something to be trusted. He treated the word of God as something that was necessary for him to fulfill the mission that he was called to. I'm going to sidestep here real quick. If Jesus needed the word of God to accomplish his mission, you better believe you do too. And there's a ton of people that they don't believe in it, they go to church, they don't really read scripture, but Jesus used the word of God to answer criticism, to offer correction. He held it at such a high level. I believe that's one of the reasons why Paul was chosen by God when he changed his life, because you have to understand Paul's knowledge of scripture would have been extensive. A scholar among scholars, a Pharisee among Pharisees. He would have known the ins and out of everything that they studied. God saved him and used him. And even Paul calls back to the weight of Scripture. Thousands of manuscripts that we can go back to to make sure that the words that we have today in our Bible line up with the teachings that they had thousands of years ago. And listen, there's different translations. I understand that. I tell you, my my favorite translation, my favorite translation personally, is the English Standard Version. So that's the ESV. And I like that one because it's the closest word-for-word translation, which is great for study but hard to read. Because sometimes when you read it, it sounds like you don't know how to speak, right? Because some of the wording it doesn't sound beautiful in the English language. By the way, if you haven't learned Greek, you guys should go do it. It's fun. Not really, don't go do that. But but I understand there's different translations, but but we can compare all of the manuscripts, we can compare the Bible we have today to thousands of years of manuscripts to show that throughout the history, less than uh right around 1%, sorry, 1% errors were found. And most of those errors are grammatical. We have uh Josephus, a Roman historian who writes of Jesus as a real live, living person. The Romans documented him. At some point he was appeared to be a threat to them. But there's so many more outside of Josephus and Augustus, and I could go all day, but there are people who have written historically that Jesus was a real live person in history. Not just some fantasy fairy tale. Now, what you believe about him differs, but but he was a real, live, living person. Jesus himself establishes that scripture is important. He holds it in high esteem, that it's the word of God, that it's authoritative, that he calls back to it when he talks about marriage, when he talks about forgiveness, when he talks about grace, when he talks about being rebuked and disciplined, he calls back to the scripture to sustain himself, to defend himself against the schemes of the devil. We have thousands of people who witness what happened in letters written within their lifetime, and at any point in their culture they could have opposed it. They could have changed it, they could have challenged it, but they didn't. Because the the preservation of their history was important. So now we

Scripture Versus A Shifting Culture

SPEAKER_02 32:33

find ourselves back to Psalm 119. Psalm 119 9, the psalmist says, How can a young man keep his way pure by guarding it according to your word? Psalm 119, 11, I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Psalm 119, 15. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. And so it brings us to the final question of what do we do with that? Your view of scripture is going to change the way you understand it. It's going to change the way that it transforms you. You know, we live in a culture that, and I I know why I think everybody says this because it like we act like this stuff has never happened before, right? Like we're living in a time that, you know, other than AI, that's the only thing that's new that I can think of. But but really the world's, we went through Ecclesiastes, nothing new under the sun, right? Like Solomon was wise. But the one thing that should be constant and has been constant is scripture. The Bible through the centuries has remained the same. There's manuscripts to justify, to prove that. There's men and women that have transferred these manuscripts in a way that, like I said, 1% error, which is fascinating considering how many we have. Jesus was a real person. We believe that. History teaches us that, even if you don't like who he is. But so many people have looked at scripture and they have decided that culture should bend to scripture. And that's not how this works.

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Because culture is forever changing. Think about it.

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One year, whatever, let's pick a hot topic, vaccines. I don't know where you stand on them. I don't really care right now. But one year, everyone needs vaccinated. The next year, no one needs vaccinated. The next year we're gonna 18 of them. Now there's 15. I don't know how many exist now. But but think about it, right? Like culture is forever changing our view on marriage. What does culture say about marriage? It shifts. What does culture say about our sexuality? It shifts. It goes with the flow, right? Whatever the hot topic is, that's where culture finds itself. Whatever gets you the most likes, the most attention, and and churches are just as bad for that. They preach and they change their view of scripture because it might fill their seats. I just want to let you know that I love you with all my heart, but I am resolved in my own understanding that I will stand on the word of God. And if I preach the word of God and offends you, that's not my problem. That's yours. I'm not trying to tickle your ears. I know I could preach things that would fill this room. But it's because I love people that I don't do that. Because the word of God is eternal, it's trustworthy, it's something we can build our life on. And we can change it and mold it and make it say whatever we want it to say because it gets us a platform where it gets us people. But that's not how the word of God is supposed to work. As you read scripture, it's supposed to change you to make it more like God wants us to be. So when we take a stand on things like gay marriage, it's not because we don't love people, it's because we're standing on scripture. When we take a stand against people in transgenderism and people who struggle with, you know, they think you're this or that. Listen, God made you exactly as you were supposed to. I believe that. That's who he is. When we take those stands, it's not because we're being mean or jerks, and I know that that's how the culture paints us, but it's because I love you enough to tell you what you need to hear. And what you need to hear is that God's word is true. It's life-changing. It calls us to be different. If the word of God always makes you feel good, you're doing it wrong. That's the beauty of it. It brings conviction, it brings change. Lord willing, it makes me stop grumbling so much. Lord willing, it makes me stop complaining so much. Lord willing, it makes me love people better. It makes me speak truth. It makes me bold, it makes me stand on it. Because in a world that is constantly shifting, the only thing in my life that has ever proven to be steady was the scriptures. So you can know who Jesus is. You can know what it is to live to be a Christian. We talk about this in James. But if you don't believe that the way you live your life is based on how Scripture tells you to live, then you're doing it wrong. I believe in that. And I believe that that's what we have to teach people. But that's also the question you have to ask yourself is do I believe the word of God is enough? Do I base my decisions off of it? How my marriage works, how I raise my kids, how I handle my finances, how I treat the people of work that like me, how I treat the people of the work at work that don't like me? Do I base my life off of scripture that has shown itself again and again and again to be faithful? Or like James says, am I double-minded and I'm tossed along the waves? And I go with culture and I decide that whatever's the most popular opinion is now my opinion. Because I'm telling you, and I'm just it's from my own experience, if you choose to truly commit your life to the Word of God and to live it out to the best of your ability by the grace of the Holy Spirit, there's a whole lot of people that might not like you.

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Because culture just wants to hear what they want to hear.

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And I've said this so many times in my life, and I stand on it. Jesus loves us enough to meet us where we are, but he loves us way too much to leave us there.

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The word of God should

Will You Let The Word Change You?

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be pushing us and drawing us closer to be more like him.

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So that's the question you have to answer for yourself.

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Is God's word your source of life? Is it everything you need? Are you ready to read it and be transformed by it? Are you ready for it to challenge you? You know, the beauty, the beautiful thing about it is it it comforts and it offers grace and it offers mercy, and it's all of it. But it brings conviction, it brings change. But if I really believe that that if we could be a people who get back to the word of God to truly make it part of our lives, and listen, I'm I'm not just I don't want to say this to be rude, but I'm not just talking like a five-minute devotional in the morning. I mean like really diving in and consuming it and reading it and studying and and living it out. If we can be a people who invest, who love the word of God the same way the psalmist does.

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This whole church will change.

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We'll change. We'll become more like Jesus in every way. We've gotta be in the text. It's reliable. We can show how how significant it is.

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So, what are you gonna do with it? That's right.