Streams of Living Water

(III) What should I do as I read the Bible?
 

Read: John 5:31-47
Over the last few weeks, we have been looking at the subject of ‘reading the Bible’. We have used different pictures to describe how we are to view reading the Bible. The first week, we saw that the Bible is like a bucket with which we draw waters from the wells of salvation – it is through the Bible that we understand and appropriate for ourselves all that Christ has done for us. Then last week, we saw that the Bible is like Zaccheus’s sycamore tree – the vantage point from which we get a better view of Christ. I want to begin this week by pointing to another descriptive picture we have of the Bible – that is the Bible is like a ferry across the river of our sin. God and all the blessings of salvation stand on one side of the river. We stand on the other side of the river. The Bible is the ferry which carries Christ and the blessings of His work from His side of the river to us. Every time you read the Bible, the ferry sails and you get more of Christ.

As you will recall, we have been using the answer to the Westminster Shorter Catechism Q.90 as a model for understanding how to get the most out of our reading of the Bible:
Q. 90 How is the word to be read and heard, that it may become effectual unto salvation? That the word may become effectual unto salvation, we must attend thereunto with diligence, preparation, and prayer; receive it with faith and love, lay it up in our hearts; and practise it in our lives.

I want to notice a very important word used in the answer – that is the word ‘received’ – the Word of God is to be ‘received with faith and love’. The dictionary defines the word ‘receive’ as ‘to take into one’s hand or possession’. In other words, the word ‘receive’ has to do with the idea of communication – someone gives and you receive. Here then, in this context, we are told that in order for the word to become effectual unto salvation, we must receive it – I must take the word in my hand and possess it. It is not enough that God speaks, I must also listen. It is not enough that God gives, I must also receive. Radio signals pass throughout our skies every minute of every day, but it is only the person who has a radio, who receives the signal, who benefits from it. It is a great and inestimable blessing that God gives, but we must also receive – and it is through the reading of the Word that we pick up the heavenly radio signal. The man who has a Bible has a heavenly signal, but it’s only the man who reads the Bible who hears God’s message. So receive God’s Word by reading it – possess it and take it into your hand by opening its pages and scrutinizing it.
But the question is, how do we receive it? You may open up your Bible and read it but still not receive God’s heavenly signal, because you’ve got the dial tuned to the wrong frequency. How then do you tune the radio so that you’re picking up God’s message for you? How should you read and listen to God’s Word?
[A] Receive it with Faith
Thomas Boston said of the importance of faith in Bible reading, “Faith is the mouth of the soul, by which one receives the sincere milk of the word, and drinks water out of the wells of salvation, and without which one gets no good of it to his salvation; but it is as water spilt upon the ground, which cannot be gathered up again.” Last week we spoke of the role of prayer in preparing to read the Bible. One of the things we pray for, indeed the most important thing we pray for, before, during and after we read the Bible is for the presence of the Holy Spirit to lift the words off the page and into our hearts. If the Bible is God’s ferry for bringing Christ to us, then the Holy Spirit is the ferryman who guides and sail the ferry.
(There is actually a Biblical basis for this imagery, since in 2 Peter 1:21, which talks of the divine origin of Holy Scripture we read, ‘for prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit’. The word translated ‘carried along’ here is actually the Greek word ‘feromenoi’, the word from which we get our word ‘ferry’. So the Holy Spirit is the ferryman in 2 Peter 1:21.)
Now, if the Holy Spirit is like the ferryman, and God’s Word is like the ferry, there must be some harbour on our side of the river in which the ferryman can dock his ferry. That harbour is faith – it is through faith that the ferryman does His Work and Christ comes to us.  In other words, the Holy Spirit and faith are complementary – what the Holy Spirit does in our hearts (that is showing us Christ and transforming us in His perfect image) is done through faith. So faith, you see, is of first importance in allowing the ferryman to dock God’s Word at the harbour of our souls. What is the faith with which we are to receive God’s Word?
(1) Faith of Assent
Faith of assent is primarily intellectual. Faith, belief and trust all mean the same thing, and when we talk about assent, we are talking about something we do first and foremost with the mind, and then only secondarily with the heart. By assenting to something, we are agreeing with it and saying, ‘Yes, I think that too’.  In other words, the Word gains access to our hearts through our minds – our minds must be employed as we read and study the Scriptures (we shall speak more of this next week). Thomas Watson wrote, “If the word written be not believed, it is like writing on water, which makes no impression.” So what do we assent to as we read the Bible?
(i) That it is the Word of God – The Christians in Thessalonica are commended in 1 Thessalonians 2:13 because, as Paul writes, “when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe.” When you read the Bible, the faith of assent believes that it is reading the very words of God; that these words and phrases and sentences and books are God’s words, phrases, sentences and books. In 2 Timothy 3:16 we read, “All Scripture is God-breathed (or breathed out) by God and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”
(ii) That it directs us to His Glory – Having been told in Answer 1 of the Shorter Catechism that our chief end, or purpose in life, is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever, Answer 2 tells us where we may go to find out how to glorify and enjoy Him. “The Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him.” God is glorified in us when we are converted and live in a Christ-like way – how can we do this? By living according to the Scriptures. 2 Timothy 3:15 – ‘and how from infancy, you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through Christ Jesus.’
(iii) That it directs us to Our Good – our good and God’s glory always coincide. It is to God’s glory that we are remade in the image of Jesus Christ, but that is also our greatest good. It is the Word of God which recreates us and so glorifies God, it is therefore also the Word of God which yields our greatest good. God’s will, as expressed in His Word, is what Paul calls in Romans 12:2 ‘his good and pleasing will.’
So there we find the three features of the Bible which we are to give our intellectual assent to. Know these things in your mind and keep on telling them to your heart – this is God’s Word, it is for His glory and my good.
(2) Faith of Application
Faith of Application takes what we find from the Scriptures and applies it to our own hearts. In a sense, the faith of assent is general, in that the three elements of it apply to every man, woman and child. But faith of application takes the truths of Scripture and applies them in a personal way. Now faith of application is not to be understood as applying what the Word says to us in every situation – as we would commonly understand by talking about ‘applying the Word’. We’ll talk about that kind of application in a later sermon. Rather the application being spoken of here is the application of a medicine to a disease, or a plaster to a cut. Application here means personal appropriation – if you like taking the truths of Scripture from ‘out there’ to being ‘in here’. Faith of Application takes the objective truths of the Bible and says, ‘that applies to me’. So what are the features then of the faith of application, and for what purposes do we take the truths of Scripture and internalize them?
(i) To convict us of sin – On the day of Pentecost, Peter preached from God’s Word and the result was, in Acts 2:37, that ‘when the people heard this, they were cut to the heart’. As Peter’s audience internalized the Word of God, in particular its teaching regarding the person of Jesus Christ, they were convicted of their sin and guilt. As we also read the Scriptures, and we learn more about the person of Christ and how He kept God’s standards perfectly, we are convicted of how far short we fall. As we internalize God’s Truth, it cuts us to the heart and we realise that we are sinners in need of forgiveness.
(ii) To lead us to Christ – having shown us our need of forgiveness, the Bible then proceeds to show us the way of forgiveness through Jesus. We realise, as we are taught by Scripture, that salvation can only be found in Christ, for, as Peter again said in Acts 4:12, ‘there is no other name given under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.’ Now the faith of application comes and internalizes that objective, outside truth and says, ‘Christ can forgive my sins too. I can be saved through Him.’ The faith of application takes what Jesus Christ did on the cross at Calvary and applies it to the broken heart, just like a mother applies a plaster to a child’s cut. Now here, of course, you must understand that I am not just talking about people who are coming to know Jesus for the first time – that is only the first time they have ever exercised their faith of application. I am principally talking to Christians, to those who come again and again to Jesus confessing their day to day sins and having them all forgiven.
(iii) To direct our lives – The Bible is the sole rule to direct us how we may live in a way which is glorifying to God. Peter calls it, in 2 Peter 1:19 ‘a light shining in a dark place’; the psalmist calls it ‘a lamp to my feet and a light for my path’. It is through the Word of God that our minds are renewed, in the language of Romans 12:2. Applying the Word means taking the truths of Scripture concerning the way in which we should live our lives and internalizing them – it means not just knowing these things intellectually to be the way by which God is glorified and our best interests are served, but also to have them so ingrained within us that they become for us our way of life – our default position. I have noticed on my computer in Microsoft Word that when I open a New Document, the default settings are font: Times New Romans, size: 12, page: Portrait – these are the template’s default settings. If I want to open a Document I can use for writing sermons, I have got to enter in new default settings, so when I open a new document it gives me font: Times New Roman, size:10, page: Landscape. If I don’t specify that this is the template I want, the computer will automatically assume that I want the default template. Now internalizing the truth is like changing the default settings on your computer, so no longer do you automatically think in a worldly, sinful way, but you begin to think automatically in terms of what will glorify God – in other words, the default position ceases to be self, instead it becomes God’s Word.
(iv) To bring us comfort – the Scriptures are jammed full of promises and encouragements to us as believers. Romans 15:4 tells us that ‘everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.’ Applying Scripture to our hearts brings comfort in all our troubles – it again is like applying germolene to a cut, or TCP to a bee sting. Knowing God’s truth only in our minds will not encourage us or give us hope – only when we, by faith, apply these truths to our hearts, will we be comforted.
[B] Receive it with Love
Thomas Watson wrote, “Well then may we count those the sweetest hours which were spent in reading the Holy Scriptures.” Not only are we to receive the Word as true, as we do through faith, but we are also to receive the Word as good for us, as we do through love.
(1) Why should we Love the Word?
(i) For the sake of its Author – Psalm 119:159 tells us ‘See how I love your precepts; preserve my life, O Yahweh, according to your love’. We love God’s Word because we love God.  Now I believe that the way I’ve framed this statement is very important indeed in terms of our relationship with the Bible. I say it like that – ‘we love God’s Word because we love God’ – in order to counter 2 other false views:
a. I love the Bible, but I do not love God – this is the Pharisaic view of Scripture, where we love the Bible for its beauty as a piece of literature, or as a set of rules, or whatever, but we don’t love it because we love God. Such a love therefore does us no good.
b. I love God but I don’t love the Bible – this is the postmodern position, because postmodern Europeans love to pick and choose – they’ll take God but they won’t take the Bible and they won’t take Church or prayer. I personally despise this position because of its utter hypocrisy. Imagine a husband saying ‘I love my wife, but I don’t want to know anything about her’ – because that is in effect what the postmoderns are saying – ‘I love God, but I don’t want to know anything about Him’. No! Love makes you want to know everything about the person you love. The person who loves Christ will love the Scriptures, because as Jesus himself said in John 5:39 ‘these are the Scriptures that testify about me’.
(ii) For the sake of its Excellence – Psalm 119:140 tells us ‘Your promises have been thoroughly tested, and your servant loves them.’
(iii) For the sake of its Usefuleness – 2 Peter 1:19 calls it ‘a bright and shining light’, and 1 Peter 2:2 calls it ‘pure spiritual milk … by it you may grow up in your salvation.’ Thomas Watson writes, “The Scripture is profitable for all things. If we are deserted, here is spiced wine that cheers the heavy heart; if we are pursued by Satan here is the sword of the Spirit to resist him; if we are diseased with sin’s leprosy, here are the waters of the sanctuary, both to cleanse and to cure.”
(iv) For the sake of its Necessity – Job proclaims in Job 23:12 ‘I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my daily bread’; Jesus saw their necessity during His temptation – ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ (Matthew 4:4). Moses saw their necessity in Deuteronomy 32:47 ‘They are not just idle words for you – they are your life.’
(2) How should we Love the Word?
The ultimate measure of how much we love the Word is expressed in our putting it into practice in our lives, but in relation to our attitude to the Bible, there are two things ways we show that we love the Word:
(i) By Prizing it – Psalm 119:72 tells us that ‘the law from your mouth is more precious to me than thousands of pieces of silver and gold’. David tells us in Psalm 19:9, 10 – ‘The ordinances of Yahweh are sure, and altogether righteous. They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb.’ Do you prize God’s Word like that … that possessing a copy of the Bible is worth more to you than having all the gold in South Africa or the tea in China?
(ii) By Desiring it – our desire for God Himself will be evidenced by our desire for His Word – the Psalmist knew what it meant to long for God and so in Psalm 63:1, 2 he could write, ‘O God, you are my God alone, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.’ But this longing for God expressed itself also in a longing for His Word, in Psalm 119:20 – ‘My soul is consumed with longing for your laws at all times’. Reading the Bible is like eating at a 5 star restaurant, the more you get on your plate, the more you want on your plate. The more you read of God’s Word, the more you desire God’s Word.
How then does your Bible reading compare with what I have been talking about? Are you receiving God’s Word with faith and love? Are you engaging your mind, body and soul in pursuing God through His Word? May God grant us grace to value and prize and desire His Word, and for it to be our chief delight! AMEN.