People of the Word

We can dabble in the philosophies and understand a little bit of the viewpoints, but ignore the theology of the word. We can even defend our political preferences with vigor, but can we defend the gospel?

We can quote stock prices. We cannot quote scripture. We can find our way through the Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine, but we cannot locate the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. Is it any wonder that the average believer in the Evangelical Church today is a person of the world and not a person of the Word? Welcome to Wisdom for the Hearts, the Bible teaching ministry of Stephen Davey. Stephen's passion and desire is to help you go deep into the Word of God, because it's in God's Word where you truly find life. There are many people, even Christians, who seem to know more about the world than they do about the Word. And friend, even if you know God's Word really well, there's always more to learn. Could you use a refresher on the importance of scripture? Stay with us.

This lesson from Ezra is called People of the Word. Let's take a personal survey this morning. I want you to just calculate in your mind some of the ways you spent your time this past week, and either calculate it in your mind or write it somewhere discreetly on the back of your notes or somewhere. How many minutes, maybe hours, did you spend reading the newspaper?

I know, you know, if we called on you, you'd say it was a waste of time to read the NNO, but how many of you read it at all? We'll calculate the time. How many hours this past week did you spend watching television, videos, going to the movies?

Okay, three hours, four, five? Add that to your newspaper reading? You got the total in your mind?

Or magazines? All right, how many hours did you spend this week on maybe some form of personal entertainment? Maybe it was a hobby or golf game?

You're looking at me like, Steven, we know you're setting us up, okay? All right, now how many hours did you spend this week reading or studying the Bible? Think back. Now, I'm not up here arguing about the value of hobbies and movies and newspapers. My argument is not along those lines of inerrant value, but my concern has to do with the amount of time we spend and the influence that that exerts in our lives and over our thinking. There is little wonder to me why it is so easy to become a person of the world instead of a person of the Word. We can discuss today the events in Kosovo in the Middle East, but no little of Colossians and the Minor Prophets. We can identify the fashions of today, but we cannot defend or define our Christian faith. We can dabble in the philosophies and understand a little bit of the viewpoints, but ignore the theology of the Word. We can even defend our political preferences with vigor, but can we defend the Gospel?

We can quote stock prices. We cannot quote Scripture. We know the names of the hottest actors who are parading across the stage, but we do not know the books of the Bible by heart. We can find our way through the Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine, but we cannot locate the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. Is it any wonder that the average believer in the Evangelical Church today is a person of the world and not a person of the Word?

Because we have allowed ours to influence even in this past week of the world and spent more than likely most of us little time in the Word. What the people of God need today is the same thing they've always needed, and that is a return to the Word. We are in desperate need of another Reformation and that cry of that Reformation that emanates from our hearts and our lives, that demands, that hungers, that pleads after, that states it is a return to the Word. And it states it is the Word of God alone.

John Armstrong wrote these interesting words. He said, Christians seem to be looking for a missing dimension. They long for something which they feel comes directly from God, and all along what is really needed is close at hand the Word. Open with power by the Spirit, it will do what is needed in anyone open to God and His revelation.

It is the Word and it is close at hand. But as we talked about last Lord's Day, we will drive across town to get under the sound of the Word, but we will not walk across the living room floor and get into the Word for ourselves. Now we introduced in our last discussion a man by the name of Ezra, and we introduced this man as a man who had discovered that missing dimension. Let's pick it up and actually go back to verse 6 where we're told that he was a scribe skilled in the law of Moses. Today the average Christian would say, so what? He was skilled in the law of Moses, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. How many of us have spent much time at all in the Book of Leviticus lately?

Probably not many of us, including myself. Well, of what value is the law? Well, for starters, let me read to you what David, King David, said of the law. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The judgments of the Lord are true. They are righteous altogether.

They are more desirable than gold, yes, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb. In other words, if you want reviving, go to the law. If you want wisdom, go to the law. If you want joy, if you want endurance and the understanding of what is really right and what is really wrong, go to the law. If you want something better than money in the bank, David says, go to the law. If you want something sweeter than honey, eat the law. Ezra had found all he wanted in the law of God, and you and I will find all we need here in this book as well.

Then we kind of skipped over, but let's go back. He had a life-changing decision to make. In the middle of verse 6, you read, and the king granted him all he requested because the hand of the Lord is God was upon him. And some of the sons of Israel and some of the priests and Levites, the singers, the gatekeepers, the temple servants went up to Jerusalem in the seventh year of King Artaxerxes. In other words, what this tells us is that Ezra turned in his career as the administrator of Jewish affairs to the king. The title or term given him scribe so fair or skilled scribe carried political implications. Ezra was connected politically. In fact, he was able, the text implies, to directly request from the king what he desired. He had that kind of connection into the palace, but he walked away from his palace connections and headed for a broken down city filled with broken down people whose excitement for the things of God had grown cold over the past 50 years since they had first returned from Babylon to Jerusalem.

They were in desperate need of a reintroduction to the law, the word. And you think, what could Ezra do to make a difference? He's one man. He's one believer. He's one person. My friend, I want to camp out this morning along these lines. He will make the same difference that you and I can make in our world.

It is the same thing. He was a man with a threefold passion. He wanted to learn the word. He wanted to live the word, and he wanted to communicate the word. Now let's take a closer look here in verse 10. You notice his passion is clearly articulated for Ezra had said his heart to study the law of the Lord and to practice it and to teach his statutes and ordinances in Israel. You ought to underline that phrase or that passage, that verse, his statutes. Those are general principles about life.

Ordinances, those are specific practices in Israel. He set his heart. He made up his mind.

He focused his attention on. He surrounded himself with, he purposed in his heart to learn it, to live it, and to teach it. Now, when you read in the text that Ezra set his heart to study the law, you could render that he determined his heart to study literally to search out the law, to dig, to find out what it says and know what it means. The New Testament counterpart, by the way, of Ezra for every believer is 2 Timothy 2.15. Study, there's the word again, to show yourselves approved to God, workmen of the word who need not be ashamed in life.

Why? Because we can rightly interpret to our lives the word of truth. Solomon wrote the heart of the righteous studies. To know its answer. Now you say studying the Bible, Stephen, sounds a lot like flossing your teeth.

Doesn't sound too exciting to me. Well, a lot of it has to do with how we approach the Bible. I want to give you some things that will help. Five C's that will help you as you dig for spiritual gems. Number one is the word content. You go to the Bible and you ask the first question, what do the words say? And you learn to ask the journalistic five who, what, where, when and why.

Asking the question who, what, where, when or why can shed tremendous significant light on the events of the text. Just think of asking the word, when, when did this happen? Peter denied Jesus Christ three times. When did that happen? That happened the morning after the night when Jesus Christ invited Peter to pray with him three times. And three times Peter said in effect, Lord, I'd really rather what sleep? It was after that. That's when maybe God is trying to teach us that we are prone to deny him, to disobey him when we ignore him.

And we refuse to spend time with him. Just asking the question when can help. The second C is the word context. It is what are the words mean then?

You can discover it by looking at the immediate context versus before and after, but you're trying to climb back into that original context. Frankly, one of our problems and our misinterpretations and primarily misapplications of scripture come because we want God to speak to us now and say, we don't spend the time discovering what it meant then in the first century or fifth century BC. We ask and answer the question, what did the words mean back then to the people that were originally reading the words?

Then there is the word comparison. That is, what do other passages say about the same principle or doctrine? No verse is an island unto itself. If somebody has said, and I believe it is true that every cult has a verse to back it up. You take one verse and you can build false doctrine around it. And so the principle of analogy of scripture is very important. You know, you go to James and you read James saying, see then a man is not justified by faith alone.

And you read that again and wait a second. And then you go to Ephesians and you hear Paul saying, you are saved by faith, not of works lest any man should boast. It is faith alone. So you ask the question and you begin to study and you ask what the words say and you look at the context and you discover that James has a book and you don't start in the middle of the book. You start at the beginning and you read it to the end and you discover that he is intensely interested in the believer justifying themselves in the presence of men. And you are never justified before men who watch you by virtue of your faith.

That means nothing to them out there. You are justified in their eyes by virtue of your works. But Paul is defining salvation and you are justified.

You are saved by faith alone and not of works. You compare scripture with scripture by comparing scripture with scripture. By the way, you recognize that the best commentary on scripture is what? Scripture.

Another C word is culture. What was life like then has a lot to do with context, but now you're going to pull out a book maybe with Jewish customs and cultures. You read a verse of scripture that relates to life back then and you get out some books to find out what that really was all about. When Paul encouraged the believer to take up the shield of faith by which you will extinguish the flaming missiles of the evil one in Ephesians chapter six, you might have this picture in your mind of the soldier. You've got your you've got your shield strapped to your forearm and you're running into battle and you're shouting that battle cry and you're just knocking those arrows out as they come firing missiles, though they are right at you. Right.

That's exciting, isn't it? However, you do a little study of what this culture was like and you discover that you're not rushing toward the enemy. That's that shield was four feet tall by two and a half feet wide. You stuck it into the ground and you hid behind it. The hero in that passage is not the believer. It is the object of the faith that you hide behind. When the enemy comes against you, you hide behind the one you've placed your faith in.

You stick it into the ground and you hide. Or the second thing you could do because it was constructed with a beveled edge is you could hook it to the person next to you who hooked it to the person next to them. And then together you made this unifying force, this power that advanced into enemy territory. The culture of Ephesians, I mentioned them, the armor they had in their city, the Temple of Diana, that made an incredible business out of selling what was called Ephesian letters. These Ephesian letters were little charms strung along beads or rope, and they would tie them as bracelets around their wrists, wear them as necklaces, and they were somehow, because of the Temple of Diana that had constructed them by their temple prostitutes and slaves, that these had spiritual power. And if you wore an Ephesian letter, you were invincible to the enemy, those unseen enemies. In fact, the legend was already proliferating by the time of Paul, of that Olympic wrestler who had never been defeated in a wrestling match, only to discover that he had been wearing an Ephesian letter, and the judges told him at the beginning of new Olympic Games to take off his Ephesian letter, and he took it off, and he lost the first match. See, that culture was telling them, if you want to be protected against unseen forces, wear an Ephesian letter. It is to that culture that Paul said, if you want to be protected against the unseen enemy, wear the armor of God.

It has to do with culture, and we must take time to discover that. And I mentioned this earlier, but let me give you the last word. These are all interwoven.

The last C word is consultation. That is, what light do others shed on the text? You have a concordance in the back of your Bible. You have some notes in between the text on your pages that you're looking at with other references. Well, you look those up. They typically link passages by thematic words. The Atlas shows you where things occurred, where things took place. Commentaries are extremely helpful.

I consider them good friends. Truth is not original, and you can stand on the shoulders of those who've studied before you. Greek and Hebrew works for the English reader are out there. You don't have to have had Greek or Hebrew to understand the meanings of words, and they're very helpful. I have often encouraged believers who were struggling in their own study to stop reading the typical promotional books, especially the ones that have titles like Growing Spiritually in Three Minutes a Day or A Verse a Day Keeps the Devil Away, those kind of things. I've encouraged many a believer to simply get their Bible and a Bible encyclopedia and start reading them together. It's fascinating. It will explode the meaning of the word to you. And I will say something that may surprise you, but I'm going to say it still. There isn't any way in the world you will ever understand or be able to apply to the fullest significance, the scriptures, unless you are willing to study deeply and read widely.

Those two go hand in hand. When Jesus Christ told the church in Sardis that message in Revelation chapter three, we know nothing of what that means by the text alone unless we go back and discover what Sardis had gone through in their history. And so when Jesus Christ said to them twice, wake up, we understand it was because Sardis had been overthrown by enemy forces only because when the enemy came against the city, they discovered that the soldiers at their posts were asleep. Those believers immediately took that as a danger sign, as a warning. They better wake up. The enemy is coming. In fact, Jesus Christ said to them, if therefore you will not wake up, I will come like a thief and you will not know at what hour I will come.

Wake up! Later on in that chapter, in verse 14, when Jesus Christ told the church in Laodicea, among several things, that they were going blind, that means nothing unless you've climbed back in through consulting your dictionaries and encyclopedias and your history buff friends that you have on the shelves, and you discover that the eye powder of Laodicea was world famous. The Tephra Phrygia, it was exported in tablet form and the doctors would take those tablets and grind them in and add water and create a salve and put it over the eyes of those who were having difficulty with weak or ailing eyes. And Jesus Christ said to this church, anoint your eyes with eye salve that you may see.

That meant something to them had jumped off the written record. God was telling them, you're going blind spiritually. No wonder you say I have need of nothing.

You can't see. So buy from me eye salve. He was telling proud Laodiceans who were proud of their product that they needed some spiritual product for themselves. Needless to say, we have so many resources today for the Bible student if you really want to learn it. But may I go on to say learning is not the end of the process.

It's really the beginning. You look back at the text and you notice that he was passionate about learning it. Ezra said it's hard to study the law and to practice it. You see, the mark of spiritual maturity is never determined by how much you learn, but by how much you live. And part of the problem is we kind of go through life and we stuff all this stuff and we put all this stuff into our spiritual backpacks.

And I took that class and I took that course and I read that book and I'm just stuffing it all in here and I'm learning more and more and more. And Jesus Christ says, Are you going to live it? He did not say in John 13, 17, Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you can repeat them. He said, Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. The proof of learning is living. A person who is not living it has not really what?

Learned it. James picks up that same theme in chapter one, verse 23. He says, If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he's like a foolish man who looks at his natural face in a mirror. For once he looks at himself and gone away, he's immediately forgotten what kind of person he was, but one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty and abides by it, not having become a forgetful here, but an effectual doer.

This man will be blessed in what he does. The word is likened to a mirror. And James says, Nobody but a foolish person will look into a mirror and walk away.

I mean, every one of us this morning, I guarantee none of us like that first reflection. Did we? We began praying for a revival. We began the reformation process.

We would accept nothing but total transformation, right? Ezra said in his heart, I want to live. I want to learn. I want to practice it. And I'm so glad many women that he used the word practice. Paul used the word in a similar context when he referred to the mature believer who, by virtue of practicing, trains his senses to know the difference between good and evil practice. He didn't say Ezra mastered it.

He practiced it. You know, you've never talked to a piano player who would say these words. I've learned how to play it. No, I am learning. You will never say I mastered it. There are just things in life you never mastered. Did you know that that's the Christian life? You never master it. You practice and you practice and you practice. And Ezra had a passion to learn so that he could practice it so that he could live it so that he could inculcate it into his life.

That is the Christian experience. One of the best ways to live the Bible is to ask six questions. Let me give them to you real quickly here. These are questions of application. These are questions that relate now that you've asked the who, what, where, when, and why, and you have the context and the culture and the consultation and all of that and you've worked through it. You're moving now toward where we typically jump in.

We make some terribly inaccurate applications. But now that you've studied, now ask these questions. Is there an example that I should follow? Is there some behavior that I should avoid? Is there some sin that I should confess? Is there some command I should obey? Is there some truth I should believe?

Is there some promise I should claim? Finally, the passion of Ezra was not only to learn it and to live it, but to teach it. You say, but I'm not a teacher. Yes, you are if you are a believer.

You just never realized it before. There are two ways that you teach. First of all, through virtuous character. Paul implied in Titus 2 10, you make the truth of God attractive as you adorn yourselves with the doctrine of God. That is, you take the word and it's as if you robe yourself in it and then you live it and you make the truth of God attractive. People see the way you live, they watch the way you work, and there's something that is attractive about that and you ultimately point them to God by virtue of your virtuous character.

Second of all, through verbal communication. Ultimately, that person may come to you and say, I got to know something, or they come and they tell you about their lives or they have a question, and then you find yourself at that moment as Ezra. At that very moment, God has positioned you to intercept that person's life with the truth of the word that you are learning that you are practicing.

And now I have an answer for you. I have something that God has said. You communicate to them the truth. Let me give you four things. Number one, get ready to write.

Have some form of written record. Maybe it's just the margin of your bibles. You're writing in your thoughts and something that God may be saying and challenging you with. Step number two, add a little pressure. We don't go to the word with the attitude of, well, you know, I'm going to think about that and maybe change that thought to I will. I will do that. I will live that. I will obey that. Don't let yourself get away.

You're not going to the Bible to just find trivial facts. You're going for total transformation, reformation of soul and heart. Feel the weight of pressure on your shoulders as you study and read.

It is good pressure to change. Number three, turn it into prayer. Would you please allow me by your spirit to live that truth and just learn it, practice it. You turn it back into prayer because this is ultimately the reformation process. God is at work and it's just you and your friends bound in leather and your Bible.

And then fourth, don't keep it to yourself. You will discover as you learn that God will give you opportunities to share. It might be to a child, parent, neighbor, co-worker, whomever, but God will give you opportunities. So bank on it, plan on it. Don't be surprised by it when it happens. One of the reasons that it may not be happening is because God knows you haven't learned it. You're not in it. You're not studying it.

You're not living it. But I can guarantee you, my friend, based on what God has said in his word, that when you learn it and desire to live it and you practice it, you will have opportunity to share it. What we need today are people with this passion, people who desire above all else to learn the word, to live the word, and to teach the word.

The lesson you just heard is entitled, People of the Word. We've taken this lesson and turned it into a booklet, and that booklet is available today. We're sending one free copy to everyone who makes their first contact with our ministry. Take advantage of this offer. Give us a call at 866-48-BIBLE. That's 866-48-BIBLE or 866-482-4253. Again, we're going to send you a complimentary copy of the booklet, People of the Word. Call today, then join us back here next time on Wisdom for the Heart.