Banner Logo

Sermon

Sermon Graphic


St. Stephen's Anglican Church
Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar, October 20, 2013


All Scripture is God-breathed


Text: 2 Timothy 3:16

There was a time some years back when a large number of the members of our congregation attended a meeting to talk Biblical theology. That was not what the meeting was promoted as. But that is what it came down to, for we were preparing for an upcoming convention, and the topic of interest was what the Bible has to say about homosexuality. It was, and remains, a divisive issue, because Christians differ on what they believe about the words of the Bible on the subject. It isn't that the words are unclear or confusing. The issue is whether we are free to disregard what the Bible has to say. The folks from our congregation made impassioned arguments on behalf of the Bible. And at some point, a person on the other side of the issue stood up and said, "We don't worship the Bible. We worship God."

Now, of course, she was right. The Bible is not an idol for us to worship. We worship only the One True God. But who says that He is the One True God? Who says we are not to worship any idol or put any god before Him? God says; and He says it in the Bible. It comes from the First of the Ten Commandments in Exodus Chapter 20 and Deuteronomy Chapter 5. The question is not whether we worship the Bible in place of God. The question is to what degree do we submit to the Bible as the Word of God? What authority do we admit that it has in our lives? To what extent are we free to disregard it or change it?

Today, I want to look at a short passage of scripture from Second Timothy 3:16: it says "all scripture is God-breathed." God-breathed. Isn't that a powerful image? As we consider what that means, we will explore the different ways that people think about the Bible. I'm going to make this a personal testimony, for two reasons. First, I think many of you will identify with the stages through which I have gone in my understanding of the Bible. And second, these stages represent the spectrum among Christians who regard the Bible as their book of faith. Let's call these four stages,

I grew up in a liturgical church. We had a book from which we took our service every Sunday. And we read from scripture as part of that service. We read two passages from the Bible, one from the Gospels, and one from another part of the Bible. We recited or sang a Psalm, which also comes from the Bible. In Sunday School, we discussed Bible stories, like Noah's Ark and Jonah and the big fish and David and Goliath.

I have to say that I didn't understand much about the Bible. What I heard was isolated passages. We didn't have Bible Studies, so we didn't go into depth about what was written in the Bible. Nobody connected the dots for me or gave me the big picture about what the Bible has to say about God and His plans, or about us and how we fit into God's plans.

So how would I have addressed an issue like homosexuality if it had come up at that point in my Christian life? I would not have known what the Bible said. Nor would I have known where to look. I am confident that we would simply have asked what the priest said, and that would have been our answer.

A good name for this stage of my relationship with the Bible is "disinterested." It is safe to say that many Christians are in that stage of their understanding of the Bible. And as a result:

You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them. [Isaiah 6:9-10, quoted by Jesus in Matthew 13:14-15]

I've been there. I know how hard it was to make moral decisions. I know how hard it was to stand up to the false, secular worldview that confronted me in college. But at some point, I moved to the "questioning" stage in my relationship with the Bible. Somehow, I got interested in reading a little more in the Bible. I didn't have anyone to coach me in this, however. So I just started reading, beginning with Genesis. I got bogged down fairly shortly. The language was archaic. The people were ancient people, and I had little interest in history. I still didn't have anyone to help me connect the dots or see the big picture. So what I was left with was that I was reading just another book. As far as I was concerned, Its author or authors were old guys who lived long ago. What they had to say didn't have much relevance to my life. There were other books that said different things about the same matters. I had my own opinions about some of the things I found in the Bible. So I felt free to disregard the Bible's opinions if they didn't say what I wanted them to say. I had no reason to submit to the Bible in any meaningful way.

There are many people whose relationship with the Bible is in this stage. As a result, we hear things like,

I know. I've been there. And it was a very confusing place to be. If the Bible was just a book that may or may not be right, which books were right? How do I know which philosophers or thinkers to trust? But as Jesus promised, when you seek Him, you will find Him. And He promised to send the Holy Spirit to teach us all things. (John 14:26) When you begin to read the Bible seriously, you can expect the Holy Spirit to begin working on you. I remember giving up on reading the Bible but coming back to it some years later. And that was when I first got involved in a Bible study. I learned that there were many authors of the Bible—forty or more. And each one spoke for God in some way. I didn't have a real grasp on what that meant. But it did cause me to take the Bible seriously in a way I hadn't done before. I decided to try treating what the Bible had to say as true. And in order to do that I needed to gain a much better understanding of the Bible. That was when I entered the "committed" stage.

At this point in my Christian walk, I would come across something in the Bible that I didn't like, but instead of rejecting it, I looked into it further. And I found out a lot of amazing things about the Bible. For example, those 40-some authors were a widely varied group: farmers, scholars, doctors, fishermen, tax collectors, historians, kings, governors, and priests. The Bible was written over a period of 1500 years, and miraculously, it was preserved in uncorrupted form during all that time. Thousands of copies of ancient texts have been found, and they agree with amazing precision. I discovered that there has never been an archeological discovery that has contradicted the Bible in any detail.

The Holy Spirit truly did go to work on me. Once I accepted that the Bible is true, He made me want to know more. And that is when I began to appreciate the singular, unified testimony of God's history, His plan and His glory.

Once the Christian grasps all this, and once the Christian accepts that the Bible is the truth, things fall into place in a new way. I know. I've been there. Now I had a worldview that made sense to me. And it answered the questions of life in a way nothing else can do: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What is the purpose of our life? Why is the world so wonderful and so screwed up at the same time? What am I supposed to do about that? What is our ultimate destiny?

And it gives you a reliable moral compass. You have the Word of God to tell you the answers to your question, "How shall I live?" Sometimes you won't like the answer, because it is the hard road, rather than the easy one. But at least you know it is the real answer.

Most of you have had the incredible experience of seeing how the wisdom in the Word of God is ever fresh and new. We liken it to peeling the many layers of an onion. You can read the same passage you have read many times before, and God's wisdom will jump out at you in a fresh way that opens your eyes anew.

One reason for that is that the Holy Spirit blesses us with understanding.

Another reason is that the more we trust and submit, the more He reveals to us. And the third reason is that all scripture is God-breathed.

If it comes from the heart and mind of God, the wisdom He sets before us is going to have no end of things to say to us.

I discovered this expression in the New International Version of the Bible, "that all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness...." (2 Timothy 3:16) Just about every other Bible translation has a slightly different expression, usually that all scripture is "inspired by God." But I looked back at the original Greek in which the Apostle Paul wrote this, and it is one word, theopneustos, which literally says, God-breathed. The meaning may be the same from version to version. But to think of the Word as God-breathed gives me an image that lights up my imagination. I can picture the words flowing directly from God's breath into the people whom He appointed to record His message.

That visual picture helped push me over into the fourth stage in my relationship with the Bible. Now, I not only knew the Bible as true and authoritative; but I became hungry to read the Bible. Reading the Bible became a delicious meal, rather than an intellectual chore. And that meal is essential for life. Maybe that is where you are in your love for the Word of God. Maybe that is why so many of our members are involved in Bible study.

No, we don't worship the Bible.

And where do we meet this Jesus and get to know Him? In the God-breathed Word.

© The Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar, 2013

Return to top

Sermon Archives