Hook Your Life to God's Word: Scripture-Centered Living

But number three, I would just say this. You can read your bible all day long, but if you don't know Jesus, you're going nowhere. The point of the scriptures is Jesus. And so I wanna invite you to connect with him today. And so this is what I want us to do as we take a time of response. Would you just close your eyes where you are right now? Now I want you right now for everybody in this room just to take a moment and just tell Jesus you wanna connect with him today. [01:10:01] (28 seconds)  #ConnectWithJesus

Man, that's your step to simply say, Jesus, if you're real, I wanna know you. And if you're that person today, you can pray a prayer like that. This is not giving your life to Jesus today. This is a step even before that. It's simply saying, Jesus, if you're out there, I want to know. I want I'm curious. And I'll just throw this out. I I don't I didn't mean to say this, but maybe for you, the step is for you to ask Jesus for something. [01:11:44] (29 seconds)  #AskJesusIfReal

And I think there's a great danger in editing God's word. You're gonna be almost like, you know, I'm gonna soften this. I'm gonna try to make you see it from God's point of view. God doesn't need to be defended. We're not God's editors. We're his servants. There's a big difference. And I found myself sometimes and I'll just be, like, really transparent. I found myself as sometimes putting myself in a position where I would, like, almost place myself as more kind than God, which is crazy because God invented kindness. [00:53:11] (36 seconds)  #HonorGodsWord

I mean, what would be the hateful thing to do? Yep. Go take that scooter out there down that hill, see if you find a car. Like, that is that is not loving. Right? Loving parents are like, no. No. No. Watch out. Stay close to me. Just just be aware. You're not seeing everything clearly. This is what love is. [00:54:14] (20 seconds)  #LoveProtects

Other religious systems see God is simply one of laws, or you have to do certain things, or even others like see God as just this impersonal force. The bible is the place where we get this idea that God actually is love. And anybody that says that God is love and then divorces it from the rest of the Bible is really just hijacking Christianity. [00:50:39] (21 seconds)  #GodIsLoveAndTruth

So the biggest thing I find over and over again is that people are asking the question, who am I? Who am I? Like, I I lovable? Am I am I am I somebody has a story that matters. Am I am I just by random chance walking through this world, like, what am I? Who am I? Why does it matter if I live or die? Does anybody care? The Bible tells us [00:54:41] (28 seconds)  #YourStoryMatters

So if you're like, here's somebody, hey, God is love. Just kinda do something that's completely opposed to the moral character of God, you need to run from that. Because God reveals himself fully through the scriptures that he's both just and holy and righteous. That he's got a standard that he wants us to live up to, and he's loved. And if you were wondering, like, how do you know that God says that he's loved? Look at me at first John verse four [00:51:00] (25 seconds)  #GodIsJustAndLoving

And so there's a pretty easy case to make sense that the New Testament is like, hey, for us Christians, we should just live by it, follow it because it's the word of Jesus and his followers helping us understand how to live out God's word and live underneath it. But I know there's many of us who will say, okay. But then what about the old testament? Seems like God was a little angry back then and just need a nap or something. Like, there's it seems like it was, like, heavy, [00:58:34] (23 seconds)  #NTandOTTogether

And so I think a lot of us are sidelining ourselves because we're not deeply drenched in God's word. And here's the thing I want you to know. At First Baptist, we're telling you, we're centering everything on the scriptures. We're gonna base everything we believe out of the bible. That's what we're gonna try to do here. Okay? But it only goes so far if you don't do that for yourself. It's not just me doing it or our church doing it, you need it. [01:05:24] (26 seconds)  #BeDrenchedInScripture

And there's something about getting tools that last forever. See, it's not just the newest tool, the newest gadget that matters, it's the right one. One that really will last, which brings us to what I wanna talk about today which is the word of God. We're talking today about how the word of God has to be the tool that we hook our life onto, which is part of what we're going through in this series. We're talking about different values for our church. [00:43:18] (27 seconds)  #AnchorToTheWord

And today, we're gonna be looking at the second value, which is that we are scripture centered. We're scripture centered. We are focused on the word of God. It is the foundation to everything we do. So what I've been saying about this value is that the word of God is foundational to our faith and practice. Okay? So that means that the very centerpiece of everything we do is focused on the bible. [00:44:54] (26 seconds)  #ScriptureCentered

The things that we know about God are not just things that you can just figure out because of other religions or because of nature. Like, you go outside and see that nature is beautiful, and you might say that God might be good because of the good things that you see in nature or that God is creative whenever you see a platypus. You're like, what? Whatever you're doing there, that was awesome. Right? [00:49:41] (22 seconds)  #NatureIsNotScripture

Listen. No other religious system other than the scriptures tell us that God is love. They don't. In fact, in in in any other belief system, they have different views of gods. Usually, the Roman and Greek gods, the gods of this time, of Paul's time, were that the the gods were, like, capricious and fickle. They would just kinda do whatever they wanted. Sometimes they play pranks on people. Sometimes they use people. Sometimes they would just do terrible things to people just because they wanted to. Right? [00:50:09] (30 seconds)  #ScriptureRedefinesGod

Well, what we understand about inspiration is that God speaks through ordinary men when he was writing the bible and he used their natural abilities, their time that they lived in on the earth, their their skills, their their culture, their personality, but used that to give us the word of God. And you find this over and over again where you see this pattern happening, where there's, like, something greater than just human, like, wisdom being displayed in the scriptures. [00:56:23] (32 seconds)  #InspiredScripture

Because this is a it's just a tough read. Jesus is like, this is what I'm gonna use as my weapon against the prince of darkness, the book of Leviticus. And so you find Jesus holding fast to it. And what we find from the scripture is that it's not simply there to just give us information, but it's supposed to give us transformation. So you see that the scriptures are there for teaching. So most of us, okay, I learned something. It's cool. [01:00:06] (23 seconds)  #ScriptureTransformsNotJustInforms

What it says right there is that the bible has the ability to get inside your spirit and your soul in a way nothing else does. It convicts you, it changes you, it draws you closer to Jesus, it brings conviction in your life. And when you engage with it, it has the power to change people. I have a friend who was a very bright research professor in Bogota, Colombia where I grew up. He was a a man who was very very intelligent, but there was a moment where his life changed. He got in a car wreck and became paralyzed from the waist down. [01:02:58] (35 seconds)  #BibleHealsAndConvicts

by you, it begins to read you and change you. And so one of things I try to do when I talk to people about studying the scriptures and and being in the word, I just let the word of God do its work in people's life. And often when I open my Bible, what I do is I tell God, I'm like, God, whatever you want me to hear today, whatever you want me to understand today, I just want you to speak to me. If you do that when you open your Bible, you'll find that God will. [01:04:05] (30 seconds)  #AskGodToSpeak

good work. There's something that the Bible does that changes you and equips you for ministry. I think there's a lot of us who are out there trying to serve Jesus, but we have not memorized scripture. We have not learned god's word. We've not hidden it within our heart, and so we're ineffective. We live our life constantly trying to be wise in our own eyes and not using the word of God to help us know what to do and how to do it. [01:04:59] (24 seconds)  #HideScriptureInHeart

closely with God and you allow him to show you where you're going. Here's what I need you to know. Listen. The most important decision you can make is to spend time with God every day and just read your bible. There's a LifeWay study that came out recently trying to figure out how people grow in their faith. Because you ever thought about that? Like, how does somebody become more mature? Like, how do you how do you stop being an idiot and start making good decisions? Like, how do you grow deeper? And they found that there's two factors [01:06:02] (26 seconds)  #DailyBiblePractice

really deeply and richly in their love for Jesus. And so this is my encouragement to you. This is the time of the year where most people just stop reading the Bibles because they started a Bible reading plan in January and they're like, woo hoo. Gonna read through the Bible in a year. Right? And they got all jazzed about that and they got the app and they're like looking at the YouVersion and they're sending it to their friends and they're putting inspirational quotes on Instagram and they're doing the whole thing. Right? And then this time comes around, they hit the book of Leviticus and they're like, oh, no. [01:07:23] (26 seconds)  #StayOnYourBiblePlan