Navigating Scripture: The Need for Discernment and Guidance

today every tom dick and harry is his own guru as far as the interpretation of scripture is concerned and you you find that people come up with the most crazy ideas and you say well where you get that that idea well i was reading the bible and and you know god revealed this to me now here's the problem and here's exactly what peter is saying is if that is the truth how come god revealed it to you and he didn't reveal it to anyone else [00:14:37]

we've become so arrogant in the human race that that there are thousands of christians running around thousands of pastors running around all claiming that they have understood they know stuff that they have revelation they have interpretation that god hasn't revealed for 2 000 years so what makes you so special that you know what wesley and and spurgeon and the list goes on and on and on great men of of past the centuries and others today that you don't that you know something nobody else got nobody else understood [00:15:10]

without being taught the fundamentals of the faith the chances are are excellent that you will end up in some era and in some heresy oh but what about someone who gets saved out there in darkest africa and they they just have a new testament and nobody yes there are exceptions god is able to to to to work with them i think i've shared with you the testimony of my grandfather who got saved in a in a in a prison cell as a prisoner of war and jesus appeared to him and preached the gospel to him [00:16:37]

the rule is that we are taught and one generation teaches the other but when we come up with our own fancy ideas we must question and folk i i cannot ex i cannot stress this enough the importance of checking that we are right at the beginning of this year if i remember right when like we came back from australia at the beginning of the lockdown when i was still preaching inside with nobody in here um i i spoke about getting on a train in england and having a ticket and finding and i really was the train was going in the right place but i needed to get off halfway and the train didn't stop at that particular station [00:17:50]

we need to check we need to make sure and the way that we check is to find other points of reference i think i may have shared with you so i think i did but for those who are new maybe have forgotten others have forgotten but in south africa one of the port cities is a city called durban which is an hour away from where we come from and in order to get into the harbour the ships have to come into a very narrow channel it's dredged so that the big ships can come in and in fact the captain of the ship cannot bring the ship in a pilot has to go out and he gets on board the ship gets or goes out on a tugboat he gets on the ship and the pilot will bring the ship into the harbor [00:18:50]

when he brings the ship in it's it's like a bay and on the other side of the canal or the channel in which it comes there are three lights but it's a built up area there are many houses and street lights and all sorts of lights but there are three specific lights that he has to line up and when he lines up those three lights he is on the right way on the right in the channel if he's if he's 10 feet to the left or the right he's going to get into a sandbar now he can't choose any lights on the bank because there are many lights he can't just choose one light there are three lights that must line up [00:19:58]

what happens is that we we we get our own interpretation and then we say well it's got to be right because i got it some go a little further and they say well let me check and see whether in fact i'm right and so i start shopping for someone who will agree with my point of view so you knock on the first door you watch the first video read the first book whatever you do oh no no he doesn't agree with me so okay he's he's wrong i'm right now the problem is that if you shop long enough eventually you'll find somebody to agree with you or you may find somebody like myself who eventually gets tired of disagreeing and say well just have it your way [00:20:43]

we don't need two or three witnesses in order to confirm our doctrine we have thousands of witnesses we have two thousand years of teaching we have thousands and thousands of good solid doctrine and theologians and preachers and teachers that we're able to refer to and if your doctrine does not line up with what we call orthodoxy now when i use that word orthodoxy i'm not meaning greek orthodox or armenian orthodox the word orthodox mean commonly accepted commonly believed [00:21:56]

when you come up with the idea that there is no three in the trinity but there's only two well you better check because it's very easy to check those kinds of things is it possible that we can disagree on some of the points with that which is orthodox yes it is possible and there are one or two points in my own theology which differs from what is commonly held but you need to be very very sure of your facts when you choose to go outside of what is orthodox and those points do not change anything of our main doctrine they are minor there are minor non-essential issues and so forth [00:23:07]

no prophecy no scripture can be interpreted the way you choose to interpret it it has to be checked it has to be agreed by the broader body of christ now immediately you're going to tell me but you know everybody disagrees on all sorts of things there are no two churches in la probably that agree 100 yes there are no two churches that agree 100 but you can go to any and i and i use the word evangelical not in the modern sense of the political thing it has become but you can go to any evangelical church in l.a and ask them about the essentials of the faith and they will all agree on the essentials of the faith [00:25:56]

if you think you have a a doctrine that you have dreamt up that you've figured out and you can't get agreement with respected teachers i mean you can get you can get anyone to agree with you and we spoke about their witnesses last week you remember they were those witnesses that testified that jesus was a criminal basically well the first problem they had is they couldn't get three witnesses or two witnesses witnesses to agree and then eventually when they did get them to agree they agreed on a lie oh jesus said he was going to break down this temple but jesus never spoke about the temple he was speaking about the temple of his of of his body [00:27:06]

when it comes to doctrine you better check more than twice because once you establish an idea in your mind and especially once you start speaking to others about that idea and they run with that idea and it's not the truth it's impossible to bring that back again to undo the damage that you've done in your own thinking and in the minds of others so no prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation [00:28:48]