Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - Fourth week into Lent

“Teach believers with your life: by word, by demeanor, by love, by faith, by integrity. Stay at your post reading Scripture, giving counsel, teaching. And that special gift of ministry you were given when the leaders of the church laid hands on you and prayed—keep that dusted off and in use.” (1 Timothy 4:13, The Message Bible)

                 “Hear the word of God for these are the most important words you will hear from me today.”

                This is how Pastor Ross Carkner always introduces his reading of scripture in a worship service. If I was still in congregational pastoral ministry, I would so totally “steal” this habit. I deeply resonate with this idea of the Bible being the “most important words” that any of us need to hear.

We are People of the Book.

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul expands upon his counsel to remain faithful to the Word of God: “Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and useful one way or another—showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting our mistakes, training us to live God’s way. Through the Word we are put together and shaped up for the tasks God has for us.” (2Timothy3: 16-17, The Message Bible)

                Through the Word we are put together!

                I have a very high, esteemed, reverent relationship with the Bible. Every time I read or study the Word, I come away with fresh and relevant insights, challenges, nourishment, correction and helpful and often insistent counsel to help me in my growth and development as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus Christ.

                The Bible sometimes is plain and simple, but also sometimes hard to understand. While by no means a word-for-word translation, but more of an interpretive rendering, that’s why I find the Message Bible so often helpful because it so often captures in a more modern way what the spirit of the passage is conveying.

                The Bible is like some vast sacred ocean – deep, wide, with many hidden mysteries waiting to be discovered. Sometime the gentle waves and breezes off the texts can soothe, comfort and calm our anxieties and fears, bringing us a sense of assurance and constancy about the Presence and Love of God. But sometimes, the words rise up into a storm of life-course, life-altering  corrections that we need to make. The words toss us about in our small life-boats, at least until Jesus comes along side and gives us hand and calms the turbulence.

                Traditionally, historically, Baptists have practiced the concept of “soul liberty.” It means that you or I have the freedom, guided by the Holy Sprit, “to choose what his or her conscience or soul dictates is right in the religious realm. Soul liberty asks the believer to accept responsibility for his or her  own actions and not try to force anyone else to do or believe anything contrary to his own conscience.” (Web Source). We have also practiced the precept of “sola scriptura” that the Bible is our sole and final  authority on all faith matters and we need  no other. The two together work for us to keep the Bible “dusted off and in use.”

                The Bible may well be infallible indeed but we mortals who interpret scripture are not. Sometimes, we want to cherry-pick the passage which we think and argue makes us in the right, and everybody else in the wrong who don’t see the text the same way.  I once knew a hospital chaplain who had crossed out all the passages in the New Testament, mostly Paul’s, which he obviously didn’t like. Sorry, we can’t do that. 

Yet, I don’t think Paul knew he was writing scripture when he penned his letters, but we have judged them to be so, so we must take his words with utmost seriousness, all of them not just a few.  But even he said of himself that not everything he wrote “was from the Lord.”  Sometimes, we simply have to sort through the context of Paul’s letters and figure out what caused him to write the way he did and weigh their significance, importance and their place in his whole body of work. To bring his words into our modern context can be very challenging but sometimes his prose and words can be uplifting and liberating, too. It is up to each of us to decide, with fear and trembling, without coercion, threat, compulsion to allow the Holy Spirit to convict us of the truth of God’s Word.

                Of course, we may not always agree about interpretation. It has certainly divided Baptists over our long history. But I still affirm the essential need for God’s Word to shape, crystalize, call forth, and impact the fullness of my life.

                “For the Word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.” (Psalm 33:4, New Living Translation)

 

Dale