The Biblical Illiteracy Crisis - Part 3

How do we know whether we're studying the Bible enough? And given how low the standards have become in the church today, is it possible for us to stand above the crowd and yet be below Christ's standards? Because you may assume, or I may assume, that we're doing well in our personal Bible study because we hit the Bible occasionally from now and again, and that's perhaps because most Christians don't study it at all.

You know, it's easy to feel good in a crowd like that. The standard, friends, is not set by you and I. It's set by the Lord. If Jesus were standing among us today and we were to ask him in this room right now, how much time each week should a Christian spend in devoted study to the Word of God? What do you suppose his answer would be?

Do you think it would surprise us? Do you suppose his answer might be more demanding than we anticipate? Welcome to Discerning the Times.

My name is Brian Thomas. So great to be with you once again this week as we're going to continue looking at the biblical illiteracy crisis that is plaguing our church. But before we get to that, I want to remind you, as we always do, that your eternal state is far more important than your current state. If you have never received Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, I urge you to receive him today. Otherwise, you will spend eternity in the lake of fire separated from Almighty God. So we ask that you give your heart to Jesus Christ on today.

So once again, we're looking at the biblical illiteracy crisis. Glad to be joined by my co-host, Dr. Bruce Logan. So we will pull him in now. So, Doc, how you doing? And I know you're ready to dive into this topic that we've been covering for a couple of parts already. I'm good and glad to be here and excited about this topic that we're on and just looking forward to picking up where we left off.

All right. So that opening clip was Pastor Armstrong. He again is speaking on this biblical illiteracy crisis. And as we've talked in past weeks about it is just something that's plaguing the church. And we really need to address it and really need to attack it. So to get us going today, I want to share also a clip. This is from Sir Walter Jones, and he's speaking with Corey Manor on this very topic of biblical illiteracy.

The best song I can think of is feelings, nothing more than feelings. You know what I'm saying? That is what has directed our whole life, our feelings. And this is the problem that Jesus had with the Pharisees. You know, they were walking around with big boxes on there, enlarging the boxes so that they can be seen. And call me rabbi. Jesus said, don't call him nothing. Look at him. And they're standing on steps using big words.

They like the fanfare, the pomp in the circumstance. And so the Lord has raised up to me some boldness that I didn't know where it came from until I realized, oh, wait, this happens to be God, because I'm usually a very compassionate man. But when I see this kind of stuff, I get righteous indignation and I can't take it anymore. I'm just not going to allow you to raise my children up in this mess. This messology is what I call it. And mislead them, because now I got grandchildren and then they're going to raise my grandchildren. And now we've got generation of a generation of people who are lost on something that can be rectified really easy.

All right, Doc. So that's really a lot of what we see this centering around, as you said, feelings. A lot of things now is not based on truth. It's not based on doctrine. People are just operating by their feelings. I couldn't have stated it any better myself because we live in a church and culture environment, especially in our communities where emotion and feelings is the central focus of everything that we do. Bible study has been put so far on the back burner that it's not even staying warm anymore.

It's just cold. I mean, it's almost non-existent. If you just follow various ministries, for an example, on social media, Facebook and Twitter and so forth, and you can kind of get a feel for what they prioritize by what they advertise and what they promote the most in their advertising and their Facebook feeds. And if you notice, there's so many ministries, they will just pump daily advertisements if they're having a big program, if they're having a musical, if they're having an anniversary, if they're having some kind of special service, they will promote it to death.

But when it comes to a Bible study or doing a series or doing a study of God's word, you will see virtually no advertising about that at all. You might see a little ad, oh, by the way, come to Sunday school, or by the way, a Bible study is at seven, but you won't see any inferences, no thrust, no prioritizing of motivating and stimulating people to be interested in coming to Bible study. And then on Sunday morning, you have just regular service and you have people leaving feeling good and emotionally stirred up, but you won't see very much expositional biblical teaching. People will go and they'll leave feeling good, feeling better, feeling good about themselves. And in many cases, that involves feeling good about your sin, not being convicted, not feeling any type of spiritual or Holy Spirit conviction, but you feel good about yourself. You're encouraged, you're motivated to continue on in your sin or continue on in your ignorance because there's nothing coming from the average pulpit that was going to stir our peer minds, is going to renew our mind. It's going to bring about Holy Spirit conviction. It's going to give us discernment for what's happening in the world. And that is a very big problem in church today.

And of course, we could go on on that, but that's really the main focus of why we're doing this particular series. And it's becoming much, much worse because our children, our youth, they're growing up in a culture and bear in mind that when our children go to school, I used to be able to say, parents, make sure when your children go away to college, that they are rooted and grounded in a biblical worldview because if they're not, they're going to come back a completely different person than what you sent them off. That still is true, but now you can't even send your kids to a public high school or public junior high or public elementary because they're getting indoctrinated. And when you stop to think about it, if you do the math, if a child is in school eight hours a day or six hours a day, however long it is, the only way that we're going to get out of this or combat this is through the word of God. It's just that plain and simple. Yeah. Through the word of God.

That's the only way. And yeah, you're so right. Today it used to be where it was just going off to the college campuses where you were indoctrinated with things like Marxism and all that. But yeah, it's in the grade schools now and they're starting them out at a very, very early age. So we're going to also today look at an article that was written by Rick Dubose on this very topic, biblical illiteracy.

But before we get to that, I want to play one more clip. Again, this is Sir Walter Jones and he's speaking us still on this topic of the biblical illiteracy crisis. You got a Bible on your phone. When you go to the hotel, there's one in the drawer by the Gideon Society.

You go online, on your laptop is there, your desktop is everywhere you go. The scripture is everywhere. How could a book be implanted everywhere in your life and yet you still be biblically illiterate?

You want to be that way. And this is how the occult has gotten you to drink Kool-Aid because they say, watch me, watch me. The Catholic church did that. The scriptures, you couldn't even read it properly.

It was in Latin. So you had to go to the priest just to get the interpretation of it. And so whatever he interpreted to be, you had to believe it because the priest, he was law in the church. He still is because the many of them have to go down and say, Father, forgive me for I have sinned. They can't even go to the Father for themselves.

And I see that in many denominations that they have to go to the pastor in order to get anything from God. We put up a veil, the very veil that Jesus rent in half. We put it back up and we now got to go to our leaders for this. This is a feelings thing. And we've got to wipe this feeling out of the mindset of the people. Yeah.

He's all right. Feelings. And we just got to get that out of the mindset of the people. I'm going to have you respond to that in a moment, doc. But before I do, I want to share a little bit from this article, again, written by Rick Dubose on this topic of biblical illiteracy. He writes that this requires a very focused group effort that will take us down three paths. The first path is the pulpit. And he says, what we preach is more important than how long we take or how creative it is. He goes on to state in the zeal of the church growth movement, leaders have too often designed their pulpits to be places of attraction rather than education, information, or correction that can produce a wider church, but often shallower Christians.

He also says there must be a managed process in place, which is the second path to increasing biblical literacy. Now I'm going to pause right there because doc, you know, things that he said and tying it into what Walter Jones said. You know, I think about this a lot too, where Christians in a lot of churches, unfortunately, you know, we say it's a mile wide, but two inches deep, a very shallow surface type of things, no real digging into the scripture. But what are your thoughts about Walter Jones and the, the excerpt from this article? What he said was so spot on that just that clip alone deserves a whole episode because everything he said was just like prophetic because it is exactly what's happening in our culture. And when you look around at the breakdown of the culture, you can see the impact of what he said being affected throughout our culture. And here's the thing, if the church is not discerning, if the church is not teaching God's word, then the world is most certainly is not going to do it. You mentioned, you mentioned something that I don't, I'm not sure how many people in the audience really picked up on. So I want to reiterate something you said, you used the term people being young, you've been indoctrinated in Marxism and what this is exactly what we're seeing happen in, in society.

And so many Christians are biblically illiterate that we not only have, not combating this Marxist takeover that's going on in the culture, but we even go as far as voting for it without really realizing what we're doing because we don't have a biblical worldview. Just to kind of give you a quick example is that our, our state, I live in the state of Ohio, two weeks ago today, think about this, two weeks ago today, we passed legalized marijuana and legalized abortion overwhelmingly within minutes apart and through a state constitutional amendment. Okay. And those are, and that's the most, more difficult type of bill or legislature to overturn when it's impact, when it's kind of put into a state or national constitutional amendment.

And the thing that kind of saddened me about it is that the enemy didn't even try to hide that this is what they were doing. Right. You know, I mean, it was out and open every commercial, every ad that was ran, it was clear that there were billions of dollars of out-of-state money that was dumped into the state of Ohio to promote this agenda. And then it'll go, earlier in the year, I believe it was in June, that they had another issue that was on the ballot that we had to vote for in the state of Ohio in order to change this, how, how state constitutional or the state of Ohio constitution, it can be amended to vote percentage.

In other words, like right now it's 51%. And so there was a bill to try to get it up to 60% in order to, because that mirror what it is to amend a national constitution. Well, the people that were promoting that understood that this is the money that was coming in from organizations like George Soros, because they had been doing it in previous States in previous years, like in Michigan. This has been the strategy that the enemy has been using ever since the Roe v. Wade overturning a couple of years ago. So they said, okay, we're not going to just sit back and take the L, we're going to go, we're going to come up with a strategy.

And so we're going to go state by state by state. And they didn't even try to hide that this is what they were doing. But my point is, is because it passed overwhelmingly. And I believe that the only reason why it passed such an overwhelming result in passage, both bills at the same time is because the pulpits in the state of Ohio are, were either silent or ignorant or completely undiscerning as to what was going on because we were so, we're so busy being caught up in our feelings and emotions and our traditions that we're not paying attention to discerning the signs of the time.

And that is, I believe that that's directly attributed to why this bill passed. I mean, think about it, two major satanic bills passed at the same time. I don't think in my lifetime I've ever seen anything like it.

Maybe there has, but I don't recall. I mean, at the same time, like back to back, you know, and so, cause you know, at night, you know, you'll watch the election results, you know, pass across the screen and literally the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen was like one and then the other, issue one, this passed, issue two passed, like right back to back. And I just, I just sat there and I just shook my head.

I can't even believe that I'm seeing this. And again, it has a lot to do with the fact that the church was not active or discerning. And this is how this was able to get passed. But I do not believe that the church, just speaking in the state of Ohio, was in mass discerning and the pulpits were alarming and warning the people and educating their congregation throughout the state of Ohio.

I don't believe it would have passed that overwhelmingly. Yeah. Yeah. You're right.

It's, it's the sad reality doc. And the thing about it is, you know, in Ezekiel, the prophet, by way of the Holy Spirit warned about God calls us to be watchmen on the wall. And God says, well, when you're a watchman and you don't sound the alarm, he's not going to allow you to be guiltless. So for all those out there who are not saying anything, you know, that there is a price to pay for that, uh, either on this side of life or in the life to come. So we need to sound the alarm.

We're going to continue now. I want to play pastor Armstrong. He's addressing how much time do we invest in Bible study. Now, even Christians who understand the importance of Bible study rarely invest as much time in it as they should. And I say that as much for myself as anyone, because of the same problems we all face, hectic work schedules, life in all its forms, kids, sports events, social commitments, weekend diversions, the internet, Netflix, Monday night football, you name it, all of those things compete for our attention.

And if we added up all the hours we spend every week in all the various activities of our life, what would that list reveal about our personal priorities? Which activities in your life are receiving more attention than learning God's word? What gets more of your time? What gets more of our time, Bible study or TV? Bible study or surfing the web?

Bible study or workouts? Or hobbies? Or movies? Or house chores? Or yard work? Or shopping? Perhaps I should reverse the question. Maybe we should ask it this way. What activities in our week get less time than Bible study? Brushing your teeth?

Backing up your computer hard drive? That's probably worse. Here's a good question. In any given week, do we spend more time staring at an open Bible or a smart phone? So how much time is a Christian obligated to spend in serious Bible study on a regular basis? How much is enough? How many hours per day?

How many days per week? How many years of our life? Now the answer to that question is going to vary, of course. It's going to vary depending on the spirits leading individually, but I think we can all agree that that number is somewhere above zero. Wouldn't you agree?

And yet zero is exactly where the church seems to be headed today. All right, Doc. So you and I are both sports fans. We enjoy sports. We like watching sports, but we keep it in the right perspective.

You know, we don't worship sports. And I was watching the football game over the weekend. I think it was on Saturday and I don't remember what teams it was, but it was cold out there. It was raining. I mean, I'm not talking about just the drizzle. I mean, it was, it was raining good. And you're talking about over 60,000 fans were in the stands.

And I was asking myself the question, how many people would sit out in the cold rain to hear the word of God? And it just shows really where we are as a society. Well first of all, you kind of, you kind of, it used to be a thing. If you can't say man, say ouch. And cause I'm, as you stated, I'm a big, I'm a big huge sports fan. Shout out to my Buckeyes this weekend, beat Michigan. But that aside, you know, I mean, there's a lot of truth to what was said. I, myself personally, Ohio football is like a religion in Ohio.

That's not literally literal. It's just kind of a figure of speech, but it's meaning that football is like, it's like really big. And high school football is big time in the state of Ohio. And I have personally said I countless number of football games in the cold, in the snow.

I couldn't feel my toes by halftime and I'm just sitting there and I'm not moving. Okay. But with that being said, I still had a priority in studying God's word because that's been my personal passion ever since I accepted Christ back in 1980, 1979 to be exact. And so that was, that's always been a priority for me. And one of the things that I've always been disillusioned by is the fact that I, at the time, you know, I was excited, everything I would learn about God's word. I would want to go tell people what I would want to go talk to like some of my elders, man, did you know this? I just read this. What did this mean?

And they will look at me like I got two heads. Right. And so, and so, I mean, and that was very disillusioning to me because I wanted everybody to have the same view for wanting to learn, wanting to learn that I had. And it just didn't exist. And I didn't understand, we knew all the latest artists, you know, we could sing the words, you know, off the top of our heads of all the latest songs, all the latest hits. I remember that, you know, there was a Christian record store, they're closed now, but it used to be very popular in the area. And, you know, that's where all the saints would go, you know, that would be the hangout, you know, we're going to see what's the latest, you know, we're going to get the, you know, and then all the different songs and the music and the artists where I would be, you know, at the same time, while they, while the majority of my colleagues and peers were going to this record store, I was going to the Christian bookstore, you know, and they, you know, they all, all the ladies there, you know, they knew me by first name.

They knew I was coming in like every payday. That's where I was going. You know, I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to the record store. I wasn't going to the, to nude the clothing store to get to see what the latest, you know, attire was. I wasn't doing any of that. I was going to the bookstore. I'll never forget.

I'll never forget. I was watching, I just happened to see a study on television about the tabernacle. And this was probably around, I want to say 85, 86. And of course, you know, I had never heard of the topic or the subject, the tabernacle, where it just so happened that the person doing the study, you know, was using the images and the graphs and the charts. And I'm like, Oh, maybe they were all in color in the, in the arc and the mercy seat and the shoe bread. And they were showing the tabernacle and how the tribes were aligned around the tent. And I'm like, Oh man, this is awesome.

I never even heard of this, right? The very next day I'm in the bookstore and I'm grabbing everything I could get my hands on, you know, about the tabernacle. That became like a subject of mine at the time. And because that was just the passion that I had for learning. And I wanted to try to get everybody else. So I started, when I got into the teaching ministry, I started teaching, you know, about the tabernacle and I'm thinking that people going to be looking at all, man, have the same reaction that I had.

And like, it was like, just like blank stairs. Right. And so that was very, very depressing.

Yeah. And, and I can relate similarly to what you mentioned when you learned something and you were very excited and you thought others were going to be excited as well. I remember when I first started, I decided to teach Bible prophecy and I was excited about what I saw in Revelation and Daniel throughout the scriptures. And, and I shared it to people and I said, Hey, this is what the Bible says. And now look at what's happening in the world. Don't you see this connection?

And again, it's just like people were stone face and it just really makes you wonder. But as you said, it's because not enough for in the Bible. And so we need to get into it.

So we're going to wrap things up today. I want to share one more excerpt from this article by Rick Dubose. He states, quote, first of all, believers were devoted to the doctrine of scripture. It became as much a part of the process as eating and fellowship later in acts to Luke reports that church members met regularly from house to house and in the temple where I believe they not only shared communion, but also what the apostles had given them to share about the scripture.

What was the result of this process? The word of the Lord spread through the whole region. The early church experience, not just an increase in the number of disciples, but an increase in the knowledge of the word. It wasn't just apostolic preaching, but a process centered on truly knowing and applying the Bible in their lives and neighborhoods. Then he goes on to say, becoming a biblically right church will take longer than three to six months and will require more work than expected. It will require a permanent commitment from the pastor, the staff, and every other member of the church end quote.

So doc, what do you have to add to that in the last minute before we wrap things up? Well, again, that's perfectly stated and let me just close it out by saying that what we need to start doing is we need to start as a body, as a collective unit, especially in church, especially from the pulpits. We need to have to, we need to begin to go away or get away from always doing topical sermon where one week we're doing a topic on one topic and then the next week of something totally unrelated. We need to start doing more expository teaching and preaching on Sunday morning. Having said it better, that is a great way to end it on because, um, yeah, we're just having this major problem.

And as you said, it's, it is a crisis and we need to tackle it. So we're out of time for this week, but doc, always good to sit down and chat with you and to our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. Please come back and join us next time as we continue to discern the times by viewing life through the lens of the Bible. Until then, remember to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Bless God's great nation of Israel until the only wise God be glory through Jesus Christ forever.

Amen. Thank you for tuning into discerning the times. Please come back and join us next week as we continue to encourage you to view current events through the lens of the Bible until next time. Remember to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Bless God's great nation of Israel and seek first the kingdom of God. Discerning the times is presented by blessings to Israel.