What To Do With Your Bible
February 12, 2017
Dr. Tom Pace
Exodus 24:3-8, Acts 8:29-31, 35


And Moses came and told the people all of the words of theLord, and all the judgments: and all the people answered with one voice, and said, All the words which theLordhath said will we do. And Moses wrote all the words of theLord, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the children of Israel, which offered burnt offerings, and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen unto theLord. And Moses took half of the blood, and put it in basins; and half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar. And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that theLordhath said will we do, and be obedient. And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which theLordhath made with you concerning all these words.
(Exodus 24:3-8 KJV)

Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot.And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Esaias, and said, Understandest thou what thou readest? And he said, How can I, except some man should guide me? And he desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him. Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus.
(Acts 8:29-31, 35 KJV)

You might know that we’re looking at a lot of different Scripture today because we’re talking about Scripture, and I wanted us to get a broad view of that.
A Scripture from the Gospel of Mark is one of my favorites. It’s a passage in which Jesus, early in his ministry, comes into a synagogue and has a confrontation with the Pharisees. If you’d like to follow along you probably can’t read the little tiny dots in the pocket Bible I gave you but you can open the pew Bible if you’d like. The Gospel of Mark is the second book of the New Testament and it is the shortest of the Gospels of the story of Jesus’ life. So listen to this event, these words from Mark 3: “Again he entered the synagogue and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see if he would cure him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come forward.’ Then he said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath? To save life or to kill?’ But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger. He was grieved at their hardness of heart. He said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him how to destroy him.” This is the Word of God for the people of God.
Let us pray, O God, open us up, open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel and then O God, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
I want to talk to you about what you’re going to do with the Bible that you’ve got. If you don’t have a Bible that you can read or study let us know and we’ll be glad to give you one.
But the first thing that I want you to do with your Bible is read it. Read your Bible.
We read it here together. There are only two kinds of worships – one is called the service of the Word and the other is called the Service of the Sacrament. Most Protestant churches put those together when Communion is served but technically they’re two different worship services. A Service of the Word and a Service of the Sacrament. In the Service of the Word the only requirement is a public reading of the Holy Scripture. So you don’t have to have an offering, you don’t have to have prayers, you don’t have to have music, you don’t have to have a sermon. The only thing that’s required is a public reading of Holy Scripture.
If you go back through the whole Bible you’ll see this over and over again. We heard a story from Exodus 24 where Moses comes down from the mountain where he has received the Law of God and he reads to the people. You see it again in the sixth century BC and the story is found in the book of Second Kings where King Josiah – actually one of his priests – finds a copy of the Law in the wall of the temple as it’s being restored. They’re restoring the temple and they find this copy of the law, and he brings it to Josiah and he reads it. He calls for an assembly and he reads it to all the people who are there together, and that’s the beginning of what’s called Josiah’s reform because all the people had kind of strayed and Josiah’s setting them straight again. The reading of that law is what we know as the Book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy literally means “second law.”
Two centuries later Ezra and Nehemiah bring the children of Israel back from exile in Babylon. And when they get back they go to the water gate and they gathered all the people together and they read the Holy Scripture aloud again, the whole thing. The Scripture says that some of the people cried, and some sang and laughed and you could not distinguish the singing from the weeping. It was such a powerful time.
When Paul writes his letters they were all read aloud to the churches.
Now here’s why I tell you that that’s so important. It’s because this community, this group of people, this church, is to be a people, a community shaped and formed by Holy Scripture. It is to transform us. And that’s not going to happen unless we read the Scripture.
We’ve set this goal. Two thousand people in Bible study with others by the end of 2017, so we’ll be a church of people who study the Scriptures. And if that happens I’m convinced that we will be shaped by that Scripture.
Now we can’t just read it together, we have to read it alone. The Scripture you heard read a few moments ago from the book of Acts was the one with all the “thithers” and the “whethers” and she was reading it out of the old Authorized King James Version. If it was good enough for Jesus then it ought to be good enough for us.
Here’s the story. There is a eunuch, a man who is part of the court of Candace, the queen of Ethiopia. So he’s part of this royal court. He’s educated, and he’s powerful. The reason he’s a eunuch is so he can be close to the queen. He’s the advisor to the queen. He’s sitting in his chariot. He’s gone with the queen and she’s off doing her queenly business, whatever queens do. And he’s sitting in his chariot reading the prophet Isaiah.
I love that picture. It’s like he’s taken his kids to soccer and in the meantime he’s reading Scripture while he’s sitting there. What do you do in your dead time? What do you do when you’re sitting in your chariot waiting?
What would it be like if one time a day instead of reaching and getting out your Smartphone and looking at your Facebook feed or your Twitter account, or your emails, or your photos or your text messages, or whatever other crazy things we look at on our Smartphones. What if in those moments, what if just one time a day instead you think, “What am I going to do right now? I’m bored.” What if in those times we got the Scripture and read the Bible?
You could carry your pocket Bible with you. I like to carry a pocket Bible because you can actually feel it in your pocket so you might think, “I’ll get it out and read it.” So I like to read it in the airport or on the airplane or wherever I am and I’m just sitting around. Because it allows me… I’m still the guy who checks my phone more than I’m supposed to. Don’t misunderstand me.
But there is a sense that the more we read it.. it’s just that simple – the more we read it the more it will soak into us.
Now on our new app – the Scripture Shared App – there is a place called “Daily Readings.” It’s really simple. Download the app – Scripture Shared – it’s free. And you hit the button that says “Daily Readings” and there’s a reading for each day of the week. It’s fairly short, just a couple of minutes. You ought to be able to read it. It has a little context that some of our staff write for every day to try and explain it, to relate what it actually means. Then there’s a reflection question that asks you a question to think about it. And if you want to, there’s a text box so you can type your answer in. I’ve been told to remind you that nobody else will get that answer. It doesn’t get emailed to me, I don’t see it. Type whatever you want. It’s yours.
So the first thing I really want to challenge you to do is to read Scripture. That’s the first step. For some of you that’s already a big part of your life. But for others if it hasn’t been a big part of your life I want to encourage you, and we’re trying to make it easy for you to do that.
Now here’s the second thing. Understand it or at least seek to. Seek to understand what it says.
You remember I talked to you about this official in the court of Candace. Here’s what we know. He’s educated, able to read, powerful as part of the queen’s court. You know, it’s interesting when I look at that person. I think how much like many of us he is.
Our congregation is made up of people who are not willing to check our brains at the door. We’re not willing to say, “Just tell me what it says. I don’t need to really get it.” No, we want to understand it, we’re a community of people who are willing to say, “Why does it say this here and this over here in Scripture and they don’t seem to be the same? Why is that?” So we have to study and try to understand. We have to read the commentaries and understand the context.
On the Scripture Shared app we have a video and once a week we want you to be a part of studying the Bible with somebody else. We’re trying to teach so there will be moments when you say, “Oh, I get it now! I didn’t understand it before.” We have to take it into our heads. We aren’t people who say, “Just tell me what it says and I’ll do it.” We need to understand it.
Now that’s not the end of the road, though. It needs to go from just reading it, coming into our heads into our hearts.
At the beginning of the service today we began with a Call to Worship, a rather famous passage from Jeremiah where the prophet says, “There will come a day when my law will not be written on tablets of stone but on the hearts of people.” Wow! It’ll get from words on a page to being inscribed on our hearts.
What does that mean? What does it mean that it becomes a part of who we are? I was reading a website that had an interview between two musicians. No, I am not a musician but I have to say that this spoke to me. Here’s the way it went and bear with me. It seems to go in an odd direction as it begins.
“So I asked my friend Mel, ‘Why are there so many great Jewish violinists?’ And Mel answered, ‘Because they don’t worship idols.’ ‘What?’ I asked. He answered, ‘The music is the same, the notes are guidelines. People who just play the notes are not musicians.’ ‘Oh, really?’ I said. ‘Then what are they?’ ‘They are idolaters?’ Then I said, ‘What gods do they worship?’ He said, ‘The notes. They worship the notes.’”
For us to really have Scripture we have to go beyond a mechanical following of what the words on the page say to a place where the words fall into our hearts and change us from the inside out. I want you to hold that thought because I’m going to get back to us.
The fourth thing is that we have to live it. We have to actually live the Scripture. It has to get from the words on the page, into our minds. We have to understand it, it falls into our hearts and then it has to get from our hearts into our hands and our feet and our lips. We actually have to live what the Scripture says.
When Moses came and read the Scripture from the mountain to the people, here was their response, “And all the people answered with one voice and said, ‘All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.’” Then again in verse seven, “And he took the book of the covenant and he read it in the hearing of the people and they said, ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will be obedient.’” So part of living the Word is obedience.
Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “It ain’t the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do.” When I do get it and I realize what it’s calling me to do, how it’s calling me to live, that I’m called to be changed.
Here’s a test. If you’ve been studying, and reading Scripture I ask you this question: Are you behaving or believing any differently now than you were a month ago, three months ago, a year ago, a decade ago? If you’re not living any differently then you might as well quit reading Scripture because it’s not changing you. It’s not moving into your hands and your feet. If it’s not connecting with how you treat other people or how you spend your money or what you do with your time or any of those things, then frankly you’re not living it.
The way we understand things has to change us. The passage I read from the Gospel of Mark is one of my favorites and I’ll tell you why.
Here’s the story again. All of the Pharisees were challenging Jesus. It was the Sabbath and the law says you don’t work on the Sabbath. And that would include healing, or cooking, or picking grain or almost anything. They were testing him to see if he would heal this man on the Sabbath. So he sees the man with the withered hand in the synagogue and he calls to him and he says, “Come here.” And this is the part that gets to me. He looks around at the Pharisees and it says, “And he was grieved at their hardness of heart.”
The Scripture never hardens our heart, it always softens it. It always thaws it.
There’s an old Middle Eastern proverb that says “The Lord will break your heart open over and over and over again until it stays that way.” Until your heart stays open. Sometimes we read the Scripture and it needs to break our hearts, the same things that break Jesus’ heart.
Can we be changed? So it’s one thing to be changed from the outside in. “I’m going to be obedient.” But it’s another thing to be changed then from the inside out. To have our hearts transformed, which leads to a different way of living, a different way of life. I’m going to live it.
The fifth thing is we read it, we understand it, we love it, it comes into our hearts, we live it, it comes into our hands and our feet. And now we share it.
Here’s the reason I’ve given you this little Bible. It’s got little teeny, tiny print. We really should have put some magnifying glasses in the middle of it; it would have been more useful that way. Or maybe I just need a younger congregation. That’s the other option. It can go either way.
But these are a $1.80. We will provide you with all of these you want. Someone told me between services that Hallmark cards are now five bucks. So what I do is I carry these around with me and when I run across someone who needs prayer or encouragement or for a variety of reasons, I just open it up and jot a note. I say, “I’ve been praying for you,” I sign my name and find a particular Scripture. Often it’s from the Psalms. I’ll be honest, that’s why I like having Psalms and Proverbs in there. I’ll underline it, or maybe put a little mark around it, and dog-ear the page or put one of those sticky notes in it. Then I’ll drop it in the mail to them or hand it to them. It’s simply a way of saying, “I want to connect with you and Scripture can be life changing for you, too.”
I want you to remember what we said our goal was. Two thousand people in Bible study with others. Because we believe that studying Scripture together connects us with one another at a different level. It’s not just emotional, it’s not just social. It’s not just physical. It can be about families, too. But it connects us on a spiritual level that studying Scripture together can bind us together.
There’s a powerful scene in the movie “Amistad” where there’s this slave ship on the way and one slave is going through Scripture showing an illustrated Bible to another. A lot of the movie is about the conflict between those Christians who supported slavery and those who were abolitionists in 1840s. It’s a powerful movie if you’ve never seen it.
But the picture of these two men sitting together, one of them doing his best to explain this. The story about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch who’s in the chariot says, “You need someone to explain it to you?” And the man says, “Well, yeah. Get in!”
And he literally climbs into the chariot and sits next to this man and they talk about Scripture together. I want you to be bound together with others by this reading of Holy Scripture.
Now the last thing is this, and this is really the most important sometimes hardest for us to grasp. The purpose of Scripture is to show us Jesus. The Gospel of John says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us.” Jesus Christ is the living Word. When we read Scripture we are looking to find the living Word in the midst of the words. We don’t worship the words; we worship the Living Word in the midst of them.
The New Testament says Jesus is the “fulfillment of the law.” The embodiment. The law made flesh. When we read Scripture what we want to do is come to know the Christ that is within it.
Here’s what I’ll tell you. If you will do that, if you will study the Scripture and allow it to go through your head and your heart and into your hands and your feet, you can meet this living Christ. And that’s what will change your life forever.
Here’s the final Scripture from the Gospel of Matthew in the fifth chapter which is part of the Sermon on the Mount. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfil.” To embody the law and the prophets. “Truly I tell you that until heaven and earth pass away not one letter, not one stroke of the law will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and the Pharisees…”
That is, unless it changes not just what you do but your whole heart, your whole self, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Let us pray. Gracious God, we thank you for the gift of your holy Word, your Holy Scripture. We pray that it might come into our heads, and into our hearts and feet and lips and into our whole lives. That we might then share that with others that it would form our community here at St. Luke’s and that it would form and shape our relationships with others. And most importantly, God, we pray that in the midst of this we would come to know and love your Son Jesus Christ. In whose name we pray, Amen.