Notes from the Flyleaf of My Bible

Do you ever wish you could take a peek inside the notes of the pages in Alistair Begg's Bible?

Well, today we're in for a treat. On Truth for Life weekend, Alistair is sharing some personal and practical lessons he's gleaned from many decades spent poring over God's Word. Today's message is titled, Notes from the Fly Leaf of My Bible. The things that I want to share with you are things that are pressingly important to me. They are personal things. They are biblical truths. They are necessary matters. I have always appreciated the individual who can turn a phrase, and indeed, apt phrases have registered with me throughout all of my life. I liked, for example, the review in the London Times of Hamlet, where the reviewer commenting on the way in which the part of the king was played, he wrote these words, he played the king as if he knew that someone was waiting in the wings to play the ace.

In other words, he didn't do much of a job of it at all. Now, on account of that, I want to give to you one or two of the statements that have become and remain for me foundational in my life. Let me turn in somewhat random order, then, to the fly leaf of my Bible and begin with this statement.

It's from C. T. Studd, who was a missionary. If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice that I could ever make for him could ever be too great. In the words of Paul in Philippians 3, he writes, But whatever was to my profit, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.

I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead. When we think of the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus on our behalf, that he would bear our sin in his own body on the tree, then Paul says in light of God's mercy to you in Christ, offer your bodies to him as living sacrifices. Take a walk in these lovely surroundings. Get away by yourself and say to God, Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee. Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of your love. Take my feet and let them be in the right places and at the right time. Take my tongue and let me sing always only for my King.

Take my talents, take me." And there is no saying what God might choose to do with a life that is wholly yielded to him. That's number one on the flyleaf of my Bible. Maybe you'll put it on the flyleaf of your Bible. And then, when you're old, you can tell someone else the same thing.

Let me change the tune just a little and tell you what I have next. Isaiah 66 and verse 2a, This is the man to whom I will look, says the LORD, He who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word. Now, I put that second because it's so vitally important. The matter of our heads is an important matter—how we think and how we think about ourselves. Some of us have, if you like, pinheads and need to be helped more realistically about ourselves, insofar as the love of God for us is wonderful and he has plans and purposes for us, and we think too little of ourselves in light of the provision that God has made for us, both by creation and redemption.

But for most of us, the problem is not the pinhead syndrome, but it is the fathead syndrome. And we have bought the narcissistic culture of our day, teaching us somehow or another that an inflated view of ourselves is the antidote to all of our difficulties and all of our evils and all of our problems. If we would just think more about ourselves, then all would be well.

And we read the Bible, and Paul says, And in the last days there will be grievous and perilous times, and men will be philautos, lovers of themselves. Can I tell you how to amount to virtually nothing for God? Think of yourself more highly than you ought. Tonight, having come from your school, maybe a big fish in a little pond—welcome to the big pond, little fish!—there will be people around you who make you mad, because you thought you were the best, and you may have been. Don't fight it.

Thank God for it. One of the greatest detriments to usefulness in God's kingdom is a proud heart. Uzziah was greatly used of God, a tremendous leader, did awesome things, built up the kingdom, tremendous military expansion, balance of payments, exceptional. And the record of him is this, that he was gloriously helped until he became strong.

And when he became strong, he grew proud to his own destruction. I'm sure tonight that you understand that humility is the very seedbed in which all of the graces and gifts of God grow to their maturity. That's why when Peter writes to the scattered Christians of his day, he says to them, humble yourselves, therefore under God's mighty hand that he may lift you up in due time. Resist the temptation to push yourself to the front of the queue. Resist the temptation to rush, as it were, to the head of the parade.

Resist the temptation for the key seat. For this is the man and the woman, the young man, the young woman to whom I will look, says the LORD, he or she who is humble and contrite in spirit and who trembles at my word. Thirdly, if our prayer is meager, it is because we believe it to be supplemental and not fundamental. If you're like me, of all the things that we don't want anyone else to find out about in relationship to our spiritual pilgrimage, it is how little we pray.

Not how keen we are to pray in the late hours of the evening when we resolve that we will arise in the early hours when it is still dusk and we will conquer this matter of prayer. Oh no, I understand that. I'm not talking about our resolve. I'm not talking about our desires or our designs. I'm talking about our doing. And I don't want to make you feel a wrongful sense of guilt.

It would not be a fine start. But I want to confess to you tonight that the hardest things for me, both in life and in ministry, ultimately come here. And when I talk more than I pray, when I study more than I seek God's help, when I'm tempted to think that when I'm on my feet I'm at my most useful, and when I'm on my knees I'm sometimes or somehow filling in time that could be more beneficially exercised, then I'm declaring that I'm on the wrong side of this equation. You see, since prayer is the key area of our relationship with our heavenly Father, it is this area that is most frequently under attack.

Indeed, I think I might safely say to you that you will face no greater attack than in this area. Because the evil one knows that the weaponry that our commander-in-chief, namely Jesus, has given to us is prayer and the ministry of the Word of God. Therefore, he will come to confront us with our view of Scripture and to seek to call in question the veracity and the sufficiency of God's Word. And he will at the same time seek to undermine any deep-seated conviction that we have that it is imperative that we come before God and cry out to him, Abba, Father, and that we seek his help in every part of our journey. If you pray only when you feel like it while you're a student here, you're not going to pray very much at all.

And we need to help one another in this. That's why God will give to you here in your studies friendships that will long pass your college career. Seek out good friends. Be a good friend. Be prepared, even in a Christian establishment like this, to be thought fanatical for Jesus Christ.

A fanatic in Christian terms is usually just someone who loves Jesus a little more than I do. When Paul, again in the Philippian letter, encourages his readers, he says to them, I want you to rejoice in the Lord always. I'll say it again, rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Don't be anxious about anything.

There's a word for most of us, isn't it? I love the fact that it's there. Because it's not a redundancy. He's not writing about something that is a possibility.

He's writing about something that is an actuality. Don't be anxious, he says. Why would he encourage them not to be anxious? Because their natural response would be to be anxious.

And when you come and you get these reading lists and you get these professors and you look at them from row seven and you wonder what they're really like and how they'll grade and what they'll do, and you wonder how your dog is having left it behind and you wonder what your mother is doing and you wonder all these things, you can be virtually enveloped in anxiety. God knows. He says there's a problem.

You should face it. And then he provides a wonderful pattern for us to follow. He says, whatever is true and noble and right and pure and lovely and admirable and excellent and praiseworthy, think about these things. If you and I fill our minds with verse 8, there will be precious little space left for anxious thoughts. And the promise of God is that as we come to him in this way, his peace will guard and keep our hearts and minds.

Indeed, the God of peace will be with us. Now, I hope I'm making it clear to you that I haven't come in here to tell you of how successful I am in all these areas. Why would I write these things on the flyleaf of my Bible? To constantly remind me of the challenge that is here. To constantly confront me in relationship to this truth with the fact that no Christian is greater than his prayer life. That the secret of praying is praying in secret. But in the matter of praying, how tragic that so many have left so much to so few. You'd be surprised how much your experience here can even mitigate against the development of a private prayer life.

If you read and find somewhere in the archives a book by Rosalind Rinker, who worked with the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, she tells the story of having come from Malaysia and gone to the Moody Bible Institute. And she tells how she began to pray in groups, and she found that her mind wandered, and she found that some of her friends were a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, because what they were saying in their prayers, they weren't living in their lives. That wasn't their conversation at the meal table. That wasn't what she heard in casual overarching speech. And she used to get up early in the morning and go to a broom closet in Moody Bible Institute, and she closed herself in with pails and mops and brushes.

And that's where she developed her conversation with God. Now, I'm not going to suggest to you that you all go and charge out and try and find broom closets. I'm sure there's not enough for everybody, nor is the need, I'm sure. If our prayer is meager, it is because we believe it to be supplemental, not fundamental. Let me give you just two more, shall I?

How about this one? He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord. Or we can turn it round and say he, she who finds a husband finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord, although the Scriptures actually don't say that in the same way. I mention this because relationships are vital. And coming into an institution like this and returning to an institution like this, you know that it is rich with opportunity and fraught with difficulty. Relationships are seldom neutral.

There are friends in whose company it is easy to be good, and there are friends—and they're not really friends—but there are acquaintances in whose company it is easy to be bad. And that is particularly true when it comes to relationships with the opposite sex. Not all of us will be granted the privilege of marriage. Some of us will be blessed with the gift of singleness.

I would be surprised if many of you have already concluded that that is the case at this point in your life, although some of you may have chosen to do so. Don't say it too loudly. You may be missing a great opportunity. I have vivid recollections of girls in my church in Scotland standing up and making these great declarations of how they were married to the Lord Jesus, and he was their only husband, and they were satisfied. And today they are now married and have five children and an embarrassment when I remind them of their great declarations. Go steady on this one. Indeed, go steady on the whole matter of relationships. Resist the temptation to go rushing into things and making extravagant claims and silly protestations of your undying love and affection.

Goodness gracious, you don't even know yourself, let alone the girl that you just met in the hallway or in the cafeteria. Read the biography of Billy Graham, and you will find that he fell in love with frequency. His mother was alarmed that he had a different girl every semester, we are told in the biography. And none of them was the right girl until, of course, Ruth Bell came along. It may well be that you meet your spouse here. And that will be fine.

Because there is no relationship in all of life that is capable of greater joy or deeper sorrow than the marriage relationship lived in the parameters that God has established or violated. And therefore, I caution you in relationship to these things. When I was sixteen, I met an American girl. She was thirteen. She had blue eyes, and that was about it. But they were lovely. And I started to write letters to her from 300 miles away, and then from 250 miles away, and then from 3,000 miles away. And tonight, Susie Jones is at home in Cleveland trying to prevent a young man like me from deciding that our daughters have lovely blue eyes and suggesting that he begins to write letters to her. It's different when you become a dad.

You'll never know until you become a dad. But there will be tragedies on this campus in the space of your four-year pilgrimage. And they will come in this area. Don't be one of them. Set your moral compasses now. Take the high ground.

Go for the gold. Live for Christ. There is no good thing that the Lord withholds from those whose walk is blameless.

The last thing I'll tell you for this evening, at least, is this. More spiritual progress is made through failure and tears than through success and laughter. More spiritual progress is made through failure and tears than through success and laughter.

Now, don't misunderstand me. There is no question that you and we who care for you are hoping that your experience here in every realm will be an outstanding success. Indeed, that is your purpose and your goal, and it is right to hold to it. This statement is not to serve as a cop-out for those who've determined that they don't want to do their best and they'll just meander along the journey and just eke out their existence and finally leave.

No. But I do want to tell you, on the basis of the biblical record and on the experience of my life, that in fact more spiritual progress is made through the difficult days than through the successful days. Read Hebrews 12 to cross-reference this. Think of the heroes of the faith. Consider those who are nameless, who were sawn in two, who were buried alive, who suffered great tragedy, and yet whose testimony is there to encourage us to look unto Jesus and to finish the race. Realize that our temptation will be to run away from the things that make us. And as the Puritan writer has said, it is in shunning trials that we miss blessings.

Surely this is why James says, Count it all joy when you face trials of various kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance, and when perseverance completes its perfect work, then you will become all that God intends for you to be. We've been listening to some personal words of wisdom from our Bible teacher, Alistair Begg, on Truth for Life Weekend. Today is the last day in our Lessons For Life series, and if you missed any of these messages or would like to re-listen or share a message with a friend, you can download a single message or the entire four-volume series for free at truthforlife.org. In fact, you can actually download or stream any message from Alistair's entire teaching library.

It's nearly three thousand messages. Visit truthforlife.org and search by sermon or series title, even by topic. You're able to stream or download or share as many sermons as you'd like without cost. If you'd prefer, you can also stream and share using the free Truth for Life mobile app. If you haven't already added the Truth for Life mobile app to your smartphone or your tablet, let me encourage you to do that today. It's a convenient way to hear the programs or access the daily devotions, blogs, and more.

It's entirely free. It enables you to access any message in the entire Truth for Life archive, whenever you want, wherever you are. So take a minute and download the Truth for Life mobile app from your app store or visit truthforlife.org slash app. When you visit our website, you will find information about a great book that is titled O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. It's a 40-day Advent devotional that will help prepare your heart and mind throughout the weeks leading up to Christmas and into the first week of the new year. You will enrich your family's experience of Advent as you set aside time each day for worship together and as you look forward to celebrating the arrival of Jesus and eagerly anticipating his second coming as well. Once again, you can learn more about the book O Come, O Come, Emmanuel when you visit our website at truthforlife.org. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for including us in your weekend. Next weekend, we'll hear a special message that will help set the stage for a joyful Thanksgiving. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.