Why Study the Bible?

Going to deal a little bit this morning with, I think, the same theme that our discipleship group facilitators will be dealing with, and that is the word of God, the importance of the Bible for us. When I was young, one of my earliest memories that I can try and vaguely recall is the children's Bible, the big children's Bible that my mum and dad would read to us after dinner every night. Maybe you have a similar memory, a similar story of that when you grew up. I remember the drawings of David and Goliath, of Moses and the Israelites, the great parting of the Red Sea. I remember Jesus and His disciples, His Sermon on the Mount, and I remember those very detailed drawings, colourful, big, bold drawings with the story written next to it.

These stories were entertaining and engaging, and they must have been because they somehow managed to keep three little boys quiet for ten minutes. And I remember the sadness of that day when Mum and Dad decided that we needed to upgrade to the better Bible. We needed to upgrade to the real Bible, the proper one. And I realised, gone were the pictures. Gone were the stories that were vibrant and entertaining.

Gone were simply those stories of Moses and the Ten Commandments or Paul being lowered down in the basket down the city wall. And instead of simply reading stories now, we started reading instructions on how to live. We read difficult passages that would spark discussion and debate between my parents and us. Instead of asking what the stories said, we were asking questions like, why would the Bible say that? Admittedly, some of those discussions were more fruitful than others, but something had changed.

And as uncomfortable as that transition was, there came a point where I realised there's something deep about what we're studying and looking at here. Can you remember that moment where you started reading the Bible, perhaps for the first time? Can you remember how that felt? Was it easy to grasp? Was it difficult to understand?

Did you find it stimulating? Did you find it interesting? Did you find it boring? Can you think back on moments where the word of God soothed your troubled heart? Can you think back on the moments where it reprimanded your actions after a disastrous fight?

As Christians, we are simply assumed to be Bible readers. It comes with the territory. If you're a Christian, you read the Bible. We would have been reminded of this task, we would have been reminded of this discipline from the words of, say, Joshua 1:8: "This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you must meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success."

Or perhaps this one, this motivation that you may have heard or sung even in a hymn before, Psalm 119:105: "Your word, O God, is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." We've been told from the beginning, as Christians, that the Bible and our faith go hand in hand. Did you ask the question ever, why? Why? Why should I study the Bible?

Why is it assumed to be such a good thing? Especially if it can be so difficult to understand sometimes. If we are sometimes left thinking that the massive list of names and the genealogies that I've read, is that really worthwhile? Is that really relevant? Or is it pointless?

If you've ever wrestled with things like that that you found emotionally or intellectually unstimulating, why should I study the Bible? Well, like I mentioned, today marks the launch of our discipleship program at church where we have covenanted, where we have promised to create groups of three or so people to meet together regularly, weekly hopefully, and to spend at least one hour a week reading the Bible together and discussing it, talking about it. The question is, why would we do something like that? Why would we take time out of our busy lives? Why would we, despite all the difficult time constraints that we have, despite kids having to be dropped off at school, despite work commitments, despite our favourite television shows, why would we meet for one hour a week?

We're going to investigate the question of why by looking at a fundamental foundational part of Scripture that talks about the importance of God's word. And I'm sure as well as Joshua 1:8 and Psalm 119, you may have heard this verse before as well. So let's turn and if it's okay with you, we're going to study the Bible about studying the Bible. So let's turn to 2 Timothy 3 and we're going to start from verse 10. 2 Timothy 3:10.

Paul writes this to the young man, Timothy: "You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions and sufferings. What kind of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and what you have become convinced of because you know those from whom you learnt it and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." In our text this morning, "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." If you are ever needing to understand the reason to the question, why should I read my Bible? 2 Timothy 3:16 would be your answer. If we can chuck our PowerPoint on for me, please.

Go to any theology book and listen to any preachers, great preachers or teachers of the Christian faith, and you would have read about this text as a foundational text to what it means or why we believe in the Bible. When you come to the passage, Paul has reminded Timothy, his young protégé, about what the Scriptures mean, the ones that he grew up with. Timothy had grown up in a Christian household with a Christian mother and grandmother, and he had, from infancy almost, from a young age, learnt the ways of God through His word. And Paul says to him in our passage that these things in Scriptures will make you wise for salvation. Paul drives it deeper, however, and he doesn't say it's simply the point that brings you to a saving faith.

It does make you wise for this salvation in the gospel of Christ, but he drives it deeper and he says that the God-breathed Scriptures have further usefulness. The Greek word used here, ophelimos, is a word that is only found in these pastoral epistles, the ones that he wrote to Timothy and Titus. And it speaks of anything that is beneficial, anything that is profitable or valuable or helpful. And so he says, what makes Scriptures so useful or beneficial to us as believers is spelt out in four values. Paul says, four values that we read in verse 16. And they are laid out in this chiastic structure.

Sorry, my clicker is not on. And now, you may have heard this word again, chiastic. It's a Hebrew form of poetry that steps in, like you see in the bottom there. And what Paul does is he says there are four values of Scripture: teaching, rebuking, correcting and training. Teaching is paralleled or is almost mirrored with rebuking.

Teaching is the positive aspect of God's truth being communicated. Rebuking is the negative reinforcement: do not do these things. Correcting and training are in regards to a life of righteousness. And so they stand in a structure like that known as a chiastic structure. Scripture as a whole, Paul says, is profitable for making us wise regarding these things as well.

The NIV uses the word useful, but it doesn't necessarily mean that every aspect of Scripture is always going to be giving rise to all these four things. Paul is saying that Scripture in general will at least touch on one of these things. As interpreters of God's word, which we are, believing in the priesthood of all believers, believing in the fundamental theology or doctrine that all of us should have access, free access to the word of God, should be able to read it by the help of the Holy Spirit. As interpreters of the word of God, we should be interested in its value and its usefulness for our life. This is very important when we come together to study the Bible.

Scripture is, in particular, profitable for these things, four things in life. And the man of God, Paul says in verse 17, will be encouraged and developed and strengthened for every good work because of it. Timothy's chief tool that Paul says in his preaching ministry, Timothy's chief tool in his ministry is the word of God, and it comes to him with power. Paul says that it is God-breathed. The same Spirit that breathed life into Adam, the same breath that spoke and exhaled and created the entire universe, this same breath is found in the words and the lines of our Bible.

Paul says, don't be stressed about ministry because you have this authority to go with. He says that this is a universal truth as well, that all people of God will find the Bible profitable for their lives because it does these four things. It teaches, it rebukes, it corrects and it trains. In this way, the word of God tests not only our minds, but our hearts. Not only does it teach our minds, but it trains and it corrects the will, the heart, the emotions, the passions.

When we study the word of God as Christians, when we do that in our small groups, in our cell groups, when we will do that in our discipleship groups, the word of God searches and exposes us, Paul is saying. It searches and exposes us. It judges our hearts' attitudes, our motives, and it is as sharp as a double-edged sword, the book of Hebrews 4:12 says. It penetrates through every excuse, every rationalisation, every decision to walk away or to run from God. It penetrates right down to the soul. It is the means by which the all-seeing eye of God searches us out and His Spirit brings conviction in us.

In fact, in 2 Timothy 3:16, the word translated as rebuking that we find here could as well be translated as convicting. Preacher and author Jay Adams says that the Holy Spirit does not merely make charges against us in this process of conviction. He doesn't simply make a conviction as in the court, because this is a legal word being used here. The idea here is that He brings a charge or presses a charge, but He so pursues that case against us that the one who is charged is instantly convicted of the crime of which he is accused at the same time. Not only does the Spirit bring a charge, but He substantiates it fully through the word of God. That is the testing of God's word.

But this function of God's word is not confined to simply exposing or convicting us of sin. It has the other positive side of testing and approving of our faith. You might remember the situation of the Epistle of 1 John where the church there was absolutely hounded by false teachers who were saying all kinds of confusing and misleading things. And the Apostle John writes to this church comforting them and saying, test your faith. Know your faith by these principles.

And he outlines a few of them. He says, this is how you know that you truly do belong to God. Don't fall into this temptation to doubt your faith. He says, if you love your brothers and your sisters, if you love the Christian church, if you walk in obedience to God, and if you believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God in the flesh, then you may be assured of your faith, your saving faith in God. And so it does not simply rebuke, but it approves and attests faith.

So what we're going to do this morning is we're going to look at these four elements of the word of God and see how it applies to us when we study it. Firstly, come to the dual effect or the dual function of God's word which is the teaching and the rebuking purpose of the word. This aspect focuses on the doctrine or the truth contained in the Bible. In some instances, and perhaps in our Reformed traditions, there have been a focus on teaching that has been purely academic or intellectual. Sometimes the preaching or the study of God's word is thought to be purely for learning and that might be a temptation when we come and study it together or when we study it by ourselves.

Purely for imparting information of God or of the context or the history or whatever. And then sometimes we may throw a little application at the bottom. But the teaching of God's word, the teaching element of God's word may in fact be the application itself. The teaching aspect of God's word may be the application itself. In other words, the truth learnt is truth lived.

Take for example the Thessalonian church. The Apostle Paul thought that they needed a better doctrinal understanding of the end times. Remember the church there, they had decided to start selling up shop to go and sit on the porch and wait for the Lord to return. They expected Jesus' imminent return and so they decided, well, life's not worth living. We don't invest in anything.

We just wait for it to come. Paul goes about writing this letter, this part of Scripture to inform them that their doctrine is incorrect. He informs them of how the signs of the end will come. And then he says in 1 Thessalonians 4:18, after this thorough doctrinal explanation of eschatology, he says, "Now encourage each other with these words." After all of this teaching, encourage one another with these words.

This is how we approach the study of God's word. When we learn the word of God, when we study it, we do it with a loaded gun. We come with a bias to get something out of it. We study the Bible not only so that we may have our theology right, we study it so that we will live right theology. Without right doctrine, the Bible says right living is impossible.

In the pastoral epistles to Timothy and Titus, Paul often speaks about this need for sound doctrine. The word means healthy. That word sound. It means healthy. And only when the teaching is healthy can the life of faith be healthy.

So the first element of God's word teaches our hearts and our minds. The flip side of this teaching is rebuke, and rebuke is also necessary in how God works through His word. If good doctrine leads to healthy living, then false doctrine leads to wrong behaviour and unhealthy living. The false teachers lurking in the background of 1 John that I referred to before were damaging the faith and the assurance of God's people. The people must have received the true doctrine of what their faith was, of what the gospel was in order for them to live well-adjusted, healthy, joyful lives away from the fear that these false teachers had been inducting them with.

The effect of studying and knowing of God's word therefore opposes in and of itself what is wrong. It rebukes what is wrong. It addresses the flip side of truth that it is communicating. It addresses the lies, in other words. This is extremely counter-cultural in our day where everything must be positive, where everything must be well-intentioned and sugar-coated.

We must accept and not condemn. But the Bible calls out the negative as well as the positive. We must be prepared to read the word of God and see where it points out what is wrong in us and what is wrong in this world. We must approach the word of God with this expectation. We need to be challenged by the things it preaches to us, things like the consumerism of our lifestyles, things like people suffering in our cities, in our own backyards.

Our consciousness should be cut by these things. We have to be challenged with regard to the purity of our speech. We have to be cut by the purity of our thoughts. We need to be provoked to speak out against theological lies like the prosperity gospel or a thousand other spoilers of the true gospel. This is what the word of God must do.

It must rebuke these things in us. Now there might be someone who says, well, I don't want to stuff my head full of these do's and don'ts, these things that come from the Bible that might not immediately be relevant to me right now. What do I need to know about how I treat someone down the road? It's not immediately my problem right now. I've got a whole bunch of other problems.

I've got ninety-nine problems. This is not the one. The thing is however that all truth will always be practical and insightful at some point. All truth will be practical and insightful at one point. A young child learning their times table at school doesn't sense the immediate usefulness of this knowledge, but it is a foundation on which many later practical skills can be built.

Who remembers having to learn their times tables? Just no point. Why learn algebra? Similarly, studying the Bible regularly lays theological foundations that may not have immediate life-changing impact, but these are truths that we do need to know. Beyond that, however, is the punch of where truth meets our reality, when our passage being studied has direct and obvious relevance for life today.

And we've experienced those moments, haven't we? We've experienced when a sermon has struck us right between the eyes or touched our hearts, warmed our souls. We've read Scripture passages that we needed to know that morning when we opened our Bible. It is God-breathed as well. It is God-inspired, God-led, God-guided these truths.

There is a punch to truth when it has direct and obvious relevance for life today. If you were to wade into a river in the Northern Territory and someone calls out, "There's a croc in the river." That piece of factual information doesn't need to be interpreted or directly tried to be linked to my situation. No, that piece of factual information is directly relevant to where I am right now and what I am doing. And the amazing thing about the study of God's word is that it seeks you out.

It seeks you out more often than not. When we study the truth of God's word, the truth that teaches and rebukes, we believe that it is the Holy Spirit that also brings it home and He's got work to do when we open His word. So we've touched on the teaching and the rebuking element of God's word. Then we come to the training correcting aspect of God's word. Paul says that the word of God has this aspect of training in righteousness, in correcting our will towards righteousness.

In recent years, you may have realised or may have seen churches have rediscovered this element of training. For many, many years, we may have preached really good sermons on how to do evangelism, that we must do evangelism. We've gone to Matthew 28 and we've said that we have to be disciples to the entire ends of the earth. But it is one thing to teach or preach about praying, it is another thing to train people how to pray. It is one thing to tell people how important it is to evangelise.

It is very different from equipping people to be competent in sharing their faith. That is why I sent out that email on organic outreach, March 14, just a little plug, at Brae Park on how to share our faith in a natural organic way to train us. Rebuking false views of male headship is different from correcting poor or wrong patterns among fathers and husbands. Many churches now recognise this difference and acknowledge that they have often trained their people poorly. And so they've begun internal programs on how to do this and this is something that we're trying to do as well.

The Bible, similarly, and because it actually gives us this example, therefore we do it as churches. The Bible is in the business of training and correcting us in terms of righteous living. Again, J. Adams points out that Jesus did this all the time when He preached, when He taught. J. Adams says that for each command Jesus gives, He gives an instruction on how to live that out. For example, in talking about prayer, Jesus says how not to pray. He corrects it.

He says, "Do not pray in a place that you will be seen on the street corner. Do not babble on and on and repeat yourself in a vain way." And then He says, "But this is how you pray." He says, "Go to your room, go privately, and then pray along these lines," and He gives us the Lord's Prayer. That is how Jesus trains us, His disciples.

This is an example of how God's word trains and corrects us, simultaneously even. Pray this way, and then if you have been praying in this way, stop doing that. And we need to go to the Bible often to be trained in these ways, friends. Scripture tells us that we are not robotic beings. We have not been built with cold hearts or anything like that, but God has given us a capacity to choose, to make decisions and to act.

Our choices and our actions are a function of the will, but our will always reflects the state of the heart. Our will always reflects the state of the heart. Jesus again pointed this out when He said, "Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks." The unregenerate heart is always expressed in choices and actions that are, at the end of the day, wicked and rebellious. It chooses for self.

It always chooses for self against God. After regeneration, however, we are enabled to live in increasing conformity to God's will and we are constantly urged by the Bible to do so. An example of this again is in Ephesians 4:22-24 where Paul writes to the church in Ephesus and he says this: "You were taught in your former ways of life to put off your old self, how you used to be, which is being corrupted by deceitful desires, but now to be made new in the attitude of your minds and so put off, put on the new self created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness." The training, correcting aspect of God's word is an act of the will. The training, correcting aspect of God's word is an act of the will, of the putting off of the old self and the putting on of the new self.

And here in Ephesians 4, we see the connection between the other aspects of teaching and rebuking happening as well. We see all four elements happening. Paul says our minds are being renewed, and so our hearts are starting to be recreated in the image of God, and so our actions will change. It is therefore expected that as people hear biblical preaching, as they hear biblical study, they are renewed by this truth and then actions will follow. Their wills have been changed.

The Bible expects it to be so. The Bible expects that our hearts and our minds will be trained towards righteousness. That's why the New Testament repeatedly calls us to pray, to give, to serve, to love, to grow in godly virtues, to obey God's law and so on. The Bible expects that of us. In training and correcting us, God mends and He moulds our will in such a way to bring about righteousness in our life, to produce life-giving, joy-enhancing lifestyles and behaviours. So as we start this program, as we start this venture, we start by asking the question, very important question, why do we study the word of God?

Well, it's because we believe that the word of God is God-breathed. It has a life of its own brought about by the Spirit Himself. It is the same breath that breathed life into Adam, the very breath that caused the universe to come into existence. It is useful. It is profitable for us in teaching, in rebuking, in training and correcting us towards lives of righteousness.

Why study the Bible? Because it is deep. It is beautiful. It is life-giving. It is life-affirming.

It provides light for our eyes and protection for our hearts. I want to finish this morning by sharing with you a poem that a man by the name of Edwin Hodder wrote in a hymn in the eighteen hundreds regarding the power and the effect of God's word and it goes like this. He writes in a prayer to God: "Thy word is like a garden, Lord, with flowers bright and fair and everyone who seeks may pluck a lovely cluster there. Thy word is like a deep, deep mine, and jewels rich and rare are hidden in its mighty depths for every searcher there. Thy word is like a starry host, a thousand rays of light, are seen to guide the traveller and make his pathway bright.

Thy word is like an armory where soldiers may repair and find for life's long battle day all needful weapons there. O, may I love thy precious word. May I explore that mine. May I, its fragrant flowers glean, may light upon me shine. O may I find my armour there, thy word, my trusty sword.

I'll learn to fight with every foe the battle of the Lord." Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. Where would we be without it, Lord? We thank you that in it, we are made wise the way of salvation.

We thank you that by it we may be trained towards righteousness. O Lord, we pray that we may celebrate and find it to be so precious in our eyes, in our hearts, in our minds. May we hunger for it, Lord. May we desire it like the psalmist of Psalm 119. Lord, that your word is sweeter than honey from the comb.

Lord, may we find within these pages ways to live, ways to sacrifice our lives daily to you that it may be a pleasing aroma to you. Father, develop in us the discipline to go to your word regularly. May we discipline our time and our minds, our schedules, our weeks, our days in such a way that we may be refined, that we may be drawn closer to you, that we may find immense joy and freedom in these words. Create in us, Lord, a new spirit and a new heart. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.