The Role of the Holy Spirit in Understanding Scripture

The passage of scripture from John chapter 14, if you'd like to find that in your Bibles. And I'll be reading from verse 25, if you'd like to find that and hold it. The Bible is God's message to us. The Bible uses the word word to describe that and it really means the message that God has to give to us. The Bible is God's message to us. Now the message that he gives us is something about himself. From the beginning of the Bible all the way to the end, God is telling us who he is, what he's like, the standards by which he operates, the principles by which he himself lives. The Bible is telling us who God is. Now you know what a person's like when you see them in all kinds of different circumstances. So the way we know what God is like is we see him in all kinds of interaction with people from the beginning of creation all the way to the end of the story of scripture. Even telling us how he's going to act in the time in which the earth is finished and everyone is then taken to the eternal reward prepared for them. So God gives us this great picture so that in all these circumstances we can see what God is like, how he acts and how he thinks. He also gives us this picture because he's showing us the principles of life that he's provided for us. He's created all the people in the world to be able to live in a relationship of trust with him so that God would be like the very best friend that they had or the father that they had that they could depend on. He shows us that the people who live by the principles that God has set forward for them, the life that they live and how God is able to bless them. He shows us what happens when people rebel against their father in heaven and begin to live like they want to without regard to the principles of God and the disaster that that brings to their lives. He shows how that even in the moments of disaster, God comes to them and says, would you please re-change your direction and come back and live according to the principles I've set out for you. Whenever people admit or acknowledge that they've done that and ask for God's forgiveness and renew their devotion or commitment to live as God directs them to live, how their life then begins to change in a better direction so that they find the fulfillment of life for themselves. All of these are the words that God gives us to help us understand who he is, how he reacts to people in various circumstances, and what it's like when people live in obedience to God and what happens to them when they live in disobedience to God and how God reacts in all those circumstances. This is God's message to us. The Bible is God's message to us. Now, to understand the Bible, it means that it's written over a long period of time. It covers 4,000 years of human history and 2,000 after that for us, or 1,000 after that for us. So we see in this story what God wants us to understand about how to live. God wants us to be able to see what he's like and how he operates and acts in the world. This action of God is the means whereby God guides us. Here's what God wants, here's what happens when you do it, and here's what happens when you fail to do it. So we read this story in the scriptures and we're able to find circumstances that mirror the same events and circumstances in which we find ourselves. This is a guidance for us. So God's word, or his instruction for us, allows us to be able to understand ourselves and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. God's direction covers all kinds of circumstances. So when you read the Bible, you don't just pick it up and read a verse of the scriptures. Oftentimes it may not be exactly what you know or think it might mean. Since it's a story, you sit down when you read a passage of scripture and you find out what happened before that. It helps you to see what it means right there. Also, it changes over the period of time from the time of the beginning of the world till now, many things have changed. The world changes geographically, different countries start, some expire, science changes our knowledge of the world, history changes our views of things and circumstances, and the words of God from the very beginning to now are all true. Now we may understand things differently because of world history or science or our own experiences, but the truth of God from the very first pages to the last pages are always authentic and true. God has spoken what will never be eliminated. Now it is true that in the Bible from the Old Testament to the New Testament there's some difference. God said the truth in the Old Testament when the minds and lives of people were a lot more simple. They didn't understand a lot of things about science or about the world or geography or all kinds of circumstances, but everything he said was true. He spoke it in simpler language in the beginning and more complete language in the end. Jesus came saying, I didn't come to eliminate the Old Testament. Not one single letter in the Old Testament am I going to eliminate, but instead I'm going to show you the fullness of what God was trying to say to you even in the Old Testament. Now we get a picture of what God did. He said to people, I don't want you to kill anybody. If you don't kill people, then the world's going to be a different place and a better place. And he gave that rule and it worked. But when he came to Jesus coming, he said, God not only doesn't want you to kill people, but the very source of murder is inside your heart when you get angry. So God can never be fully satisfied just when you stop killing people, but you want to kill them if you could. He wants to remove from your own heart all anger, resentment, and bitterness. So he didn't violate the commandment that he gave, but he fulfilled it or completed it. Now we know what God wants. He sent Jesus to come and live in this world and live exactly as he ought to live. And there we saw in a one human being everything God wanted to show us. So when you read the Bible, if you start with the books of Jesus' life story, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and you read that and you get it down, then you can go back and read all the rest of those stories in the Bible and you can compare them to the life of Jesus and understand exactly what God meant throughout the Old Testament and through the New Testament. Because now you see the character of God, full and complete. So God has given us his word. He lets us know what he's like, the principles we should live by. He lets us to know what—he gives us an insight into what happens when people do that. He gives us insight into what happens when they don't and how they can renew that relationship with him. We live in the best of times in all the history of God's dealing with people. In the beginning, God never related to people. Only a few people. Moses could talk to God, but not everybody who was his followers. Then Jesus came and human beings could walk right up to Jesus and say, I have a question about God. And Jesus could answer their question. But he couldn't talk to everybody. I mean, he couldn't talk to 4,000 and 5,000 individually, personally at a time. But he had these group of people, 12. You can ask me anything. You can watch what I do. You can hear every word I say. And you will find out exactly what it means to live as God wants you to live, reflecting his character and his nature. The time came when Jesus was getting ready to leave this world. His disciples, when they heard about this, were astonished and afraid. They'd been so used to being able to have Jesus there all the time. Jesus took them aside and said, I'm not going to be here much longer. I'm going to be leaving. The disciples were shocked and disturbed. Jesus said, but I want to tell you this is not a bad thing for you. In fact, it's the very best thing for you. For when I leave, I'm going to give to each of you the Holy Spirit that has guided my life. The Holy Spirit guided everything Jesus did. It helped him to know how he should make the choices that he should make, what he should say in circumstances. He lived the perfect life, completely devoted to God, so we can see what it's like. It's the standard by which we measure ourselves. And Jesus' followers could say to him, I didn't understand this part of the Bible. Explain it. And he would. But he explained it because the Holy Spirit told him what it meant, and he could communicate it through the words of the Holy Spirit to his disciples that were around him. So they got right straight from the mouth of God the instructions God wanted to give them. Jesus said to his followers, I'm going to leave, but here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give to every single one of you the same Spirit of God that has lived in me, directed my words, directed my thoughts, directed my actions, and you will have an opportunity for every one of you to personally communicate with God. Ask him any question you want, and he will respond to you personally inside yourself, in your mind. Now there are millions of people at this very instant all over the world connected to God. They can say, God, what would you have me do about the situation I'm in right now? And every single one of them get an answer from God. Jesus, when he was leaving his disciples, this is what he told them. All this I have spoken while still with you, but the Counselor, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said. Peace I lay with you, my peace I give to you, I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid. Jesus' instruction was to say to us, the Holy Spirit will now teach you. So you have this book, and you're reading it, and you don't understand what it says. The Holy Spirit will teach you. The Holy Spirit inspired the action of the people in the book. The Holy Spirit directed those who wrote the book. The Holy Spirit directed those who translate the book. And the Holy Spirit now will make it real to you when you read it. The one who saw it firsthand, the one who wrote it, the one who translated it, the one who made it available to you, that one, now when you read, will say, here is what this means for you. Jesus could only do that with twelve people. The Holy Spirit does it with every single follower of his, of every single language that they speak. The Bible, God's Word, is made alive to you because the author of the Bible lives inside of his followers. I've heard a lot of people say, I've read the Bible, I can't get anything out of it. It doesn't seem to make sense to me, because there's a secret. You can only have the Holy Spirit inside of you to give you information about the Bible if the Holy Spirit is directing your life. So to have the Bible open up to you, this has to happen. You have to come to the place in your life where you say, I have not surrendered my life to the authority of God, I'm living the way I want to, doing the things that seem right to me, but I haven't said to God, you tell me what to do and I will do it. If you haven't done that, then the Holy Spirit only does one thing to you. He tells you when you're wrong in your life. He doesn't help you to do anything more than say, you know what you need to do? You need to get your life straight with God. That's all he tells you. The moment you say, okay, God, I'm ready to live by your words, I surrender my will, my emotions, my life to you, I pledge to live in obedience to you even though no one else in the world may do this. The moment you do that surrender, God places his Holy Spirit inside you and you pick up the Bible and now the book that seemed mysterious to you tells you the truth. I've had people who come to make that promise to God and they say, I used to read the Bible, I couldn't get anything out of it, but now I read it and it seems real to me. That's the difference between the author of the Bible talking to you by means of your own mind and your own mind trying to figure these things out. God has given us this great gift, the presence of the Holy Spirit in every believer. So that every circumstance he gives you help in understanding what the Bible is saying to you. God's word by means of the Holy Spirit becomes a personal word for you. So when you need to hear what God has to say and you read what the scripture says, the Holy Spirit makes it live and personal to you. Every time someone teaches the Bible, the Holy Spirit guides them as a teacher to teach. Every time someone preaches the Bible, the Holy Spirit guides them as to what to preach. This is a way by which God gives you information about the scripture. And when you're listening to someone who's teaching or preaching who's following God, you understand the scriptures more and it seems to fit you in a different way. Sometimes you'll hear people go to a class or a service and they say, you know, today it just seemed like everything that happened was pointed directly at me. And when you hear that, you know that God's Holy Spirit is keeping his promise. He's taking the words of humans, he's putting it in the mind of humans, and they say, this is for me. What God wants us to do is to read the Bible every single day. That's his purpose for us. It's how he teaches us who he is. It's how he teaches us what he wants us to know. You see it in the life of Jesus. He was 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness, no food. He was looking around and Satan put in his mind, you know, you have the power of God in you. You could turn these rocks into bread. All you have to do is say, give me bread from these rocks and it becomes bread for you. You have all the power. Satan was tempting Jesus to do what Satan wanted him to do instead of what the Father wanted him to do. The Holy Spirit inside Jesus went all the way back and drew out a scripture, man shall not live by bread alone. And he rejected the temptation of Satan by quoting the words of God to Satan. And he was rescued from the temptation. That's what God wants to do with you. If you don't read the Bible so that you know it, you come into circumstances and situations you don't know what to do and you don't even understand because God can't give you those verses to help you. Every day you should read the scriptures. Every day you should reflect on them. What is it, God, that you're trying to say to me? God not only puts those things in our mind, but he also uses the words of scripture to shape our life. In 2 Timothy chapter 3, Timothy is writing this letter instructing people about how God works in their life and the role that scripture plays in their life. Chapter 3 of 2 Timothy verse 16. So what he's talking about is when you read the scriptures, there's a pattern you should go through. Look to see what's ahead of it. Look to see how it fits in the whole story of the scripture. But there's a very important ingredient that only you can fulfill. When you read a verse or a paragraph, you should stop and say, what are you saying to me about my life? Because the scriptures intended to show us what God is like and how he wants us to live. So when you read it, certain things will happen. This is what Timothy says, all scripture is God-breathed. He means it comes from God like the breath of God comes out of him. The scripture came out of his mouth. It's his word for us. So everything you read in the scripture comes directly from the mouth of God. It's a word given to us from God to let us know who he is, what he is like, to help us know what is right and what is wrong. Straight from the mouth of God. All scripture is breathed from God and is useful for teaching. So here's what you do. You read the verses of scripture you're thinking about and you say, God, what do you want to teach me? What can he teach you? He teaches you who he is. He teaches you about yourself, what you've done right and what you've done wrong. And in those moments as you read the scripture, all the stories of people in the past are collected here. You will find as you read through the Bible, you'll identify with certain people because they're like you. You'll find in the circumstances that they're in that they have circumstances like yours. None of us have any circumstances come to our life that the people in this book didn't have. And what we see is how God led them in those circumstances to do the right thing. We see that those who did the right thing find fullness of life and those who do the wrong thing find disaster. So that's our guide. We read the story of other people's lives and say, God, what are you trying to teach me? And that's when you stop and you start thinking. Close your mind, your eyes to anything else. And you just say, God, what do you want me to learn? If you sit down to read the Bible and you say, okay, I'm going to read five verses a day, and you read five verses, slam the book, close and run on, do whatever you're going to do, you're not going to get the point. The conversation between you and the Holy Spirit is critical to understanding scriptures. What are you teaching me in this passage? He might teach you something about yourself, what you're doing right or wrong. He might teach you something about other people around you, what they're doing right or wrong. He might teach you something about friends that you know. He might teach you something about himself that you never really understood. But you're listening to the Holy Spirit to take the words of God and put them in your mind. This is what Jesus said, I'm leaving you, but the Holy Spirit is here, and the Holy Spirit is now going to do for you exactly what I was doing when I was physically here. So you have the very presence that Jesus Christ gave to his own disciples every time you read the Bible. And you sit and think, what is it you're trying to teach me? And when you come to Sunday school class or preaching service, that's what you ought to be asking yourself. What did you intend me to learn today? I'll guarantee you that every Bible lesson you go to, every sermon you hear, God is trying to teach you something. And if you don't look for it, and you don't ask for it, you won't notice it. You're driving down the road, going the speed limit. There are signs on the side of the road advertising all different kinds of things. If you're looking straight ahead and pay no attention, you're not going to see a single one of them. If you're reading the Bible and you're thinking about something else, you're not going to hear God. If you don't give God an opportunity to teach you, you'll never learn the things that he wants you to learn that will save your life, your home, your marriage, your business. He's trying to direct you by these words. So whenever you read the Bible, God is teaching you. So you ask yourself, what is it that you want me to learn from teaching me? Then he says, when you read the Bible, you will also be rebuked. That means God is going to point out your own failures. He's going to point out what's wrong with your life. You may be living and having a lot of problems, and you say, why are all these problems here? If you read the Bible, you listen to what God has to say, sooner or later, he'll show you the story of someone who's acting in circumstances just like you are, and doing the same things you're doing, and you can see the disaster that's come to their life. It's your time of warning. You are doing the same thing that this person was doing, and it was a disaster. Please alert yourself, change your behavior, change your attitude, change your lifestyle before it's too late. When you read the Scriptures, God warns you of the things in your life that are not exactly the way he wants them to be, so you will get rebuke. But you know, it's not very helpful for people to tell us what's wrong with us. We oftentimes know that. Now, you may have had some good friends that come up and say, well, I've noticed this about you, and they tell you, and you say, I've already known that, but I don't know what to do about it. The Scripture not only rebukes us, but he says, the Scripture corrects us. It's for teaching, rebuking, and correcting. So whenever you read the stories, and you find all the different people in these stories, you can pick out people who've done the things that are right and those that have done them wrong, and you have a learning experience. So you see someone who's lived their life, and disaster comes to them because of disobedience. What did they do? They admitted it to God, they asked for forgiveness, they renewed their promise to say, I'm going to live in obedience to you, and then you see the change in their life. So he's teaching you how to change from the place where you are to the place God wants you to be. God has a desperate passion to shape your life to be exactly as he made it to be. He doesn't want all the problems in your life that come to you and overwhelm you. He wants to bring you through those things with victory. He doesn't want you to turn bitter or to turn you angry. He doesn't want your life to be a failure. He has every desire in the world that your life would be fulfilled and complete. So he wants to teach you how to live. You can learn something every time you read the scripture, every service you go to. I was in college, and we had a preacher there that was not really very good or dynamic. He wandered around telling stories about his family. Sometimes he'd take a little photo picture, and the church was half again as long as this one. He'd hold it up and say, here's my grandson. Well, I mean, you couldn't see it unless you're on the front row. And he would start out with his sermon. He'd get about halfway through, and he'd look at his watch and say, it's 12 o'clock. I quit. He'd stop right in the middle of whatever he was talking about. A lot of the kids in college said, I don't go to that church because you never get anything out of it. But I tried to listen to God. And when he read the scripture, I focused on that scripture. I listened to what he had to say, but I was listening to say, what about this does God want to do in my life? And sometimes I wandered away from what he was talking about with his grandkids or whatever else it was. And I was focused on that scripture and what it meant to me. I don't think I went away from any of those services without experiencing God's direction and instruction. You see, the Holy Spirit is not dependent on the skill of the teacher or the preacher. It's dependent on the power of the scripture and you listening, saying, what do you want to teach me? What do you want to correct about my life? And what do you want me to teach me about what's different? And God will teach you. That's the promise. And he teaches you, Timothy said, in training and righteousness so that a man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. Reading the Bible equips you to do the right thing in every circumstance you will ever face in your life. He wants you to be able to do in every circumstance it comes to you the right thing. You look at the life of Jesus and there were many things that were disastrous in his life. Some of his best friends turned against him. People were mad at him almost everywhere he went. He started preaching and had big crowds and they left him. His business, his career was failure. Finally killed on a cross. But through his life, everything God wanted to have happen in Jesus' life took place. And here we are saying, we want to be like Jesus. It doesn't mean your life is going to be perfect. But it means it will be everything God wanted it to be. If you will listen to the word of God given you in scripture. Read it every day. Make yourself available for every opportunity where the Bible is taught or proclaimed. And when you're reading it and when you're listening to it being taught or proclaimed, you ask yourself, what do you want to teach me today, God? I can guarantee you this. If you get to know everything God wants you to know and you live everything God wants you to live, he'll take you to be with him. The fact that you're still here means you have something to learn. No matter how far along you are, you have something to learn. What do you want to teach me today? What in this story tells me that I'm thinking wrong or I'm doing the wrong things? So God rebukes you. What is it, God, you're trying to say to me about my life and how I need to change? What can you tell me that I should do? If I have trouble with my anger, what is the remedy for that? Teach me how to do it your way. And he will show you that. And the end result is you'll be shaped every day to be more and more like Christ. I'm afraid a lot of people start out in this journey, their life may be pretty bad and they are hungry. They read the Bible, they want to come to church all the time, they want to hear all these things, and their life begins to change and change, and then they get to the place where they're kind of better than most of the people they know, and as good, about as good as everybody in the church is, and they think, well, I don't have to read this all the time now. I've read it a lot. I don't have to do this all the time. And so their Christian life gets stalled. Here is the test. Ask yourself, if you ever get to thinking, I don't need to read the Bible that much, I don't need to go to church all these times, if you're exactly like Jesus. If you have a flaw or two, maybe you do need to read it every day. Maybe you do need to make time to be where it's taught and preached. If you already know everything, I think God would take you home. Maybe He's trying to do something in your life that will change you so you'll be like Him. And if you don't know that you're not like Him, you've been rebuked, you don't know you need the changes. And if you don't know you need the changes, you're not going to look for them, and God can't help you. This is God's word to you, to make you into a person of righteousness and holiness. And what that means is, to be like Jesus Christ. That's His goal for our lives. This is the word of God, given by the Spirit, written by the Spirit, provided by the Spirit, so that when you read it, the Spirit of God, for all this work, thousands of years, brings for this very moment something you need to have to make life as it ought to be. God's plan is to make into, from every one of us, a person of righteousness and holiness like Jesus. And the word of God is the medium by which He shows us what God wants. He shows us when we violate what God wants. He showed us how to solve the problem of confession and renewing our devotion to God, and He teaches us how to change our lives, how to change our thinking, how to change our values, how to change our behavior, that we might be like Him. God has a great interest in your life. He wants you to find life in all of its fullness. That's what Jesus said when He came. So what I want you to do, He's saying, is learn to live the way I live. That's your standard. In this story, God, am I like you, Jesus, or am I more like my neighbors? Then you'll begin to find how God is going to direct your life. But it all begins here when you say to God, I give my life to you. Not just believe that He existed, not believe that it's a good thing to read the Bible, but to say, God, I surrender myself to live as you tell me I should. From now on, my standard of acceptance of myself will be whether I'm like you or like the people around me. When you say that to God, at that moment, His Spirit enters your life, and the Bible then becomes the living word of God to you, and it will change you and give you life in all of its fullness. Now, you can accept that and live like you want to, or you can accept God's authority over your life and the word that He gives you and find life. That is our choice. Would you bow your heads, please, for a moment to pray? Okay, let me ask you, Dale talked about this this morning in saying there was a time that came in his life when he understood that he ought to give himself completely to God. He'd been in church, he'd been in it a long time, but then he discovered Christ did not own his life. Where are you at in that struggle? Have you recognized your need for God? That's what God wants to do to change you. All you do is to say, Lord, I realize where I'm at. It's a scary thing to say I'm going to start living the way you want me to, but I really believe this is the only way to find life. You can do that this morning, right now. It's between you and God. Maybe you've made that promise to God, and you can look back on your life, and there were some times when God changed you a lot, but that's past for you. Just check, are you reading the Bible regularly? Are you letting God teach you through the teachers in your life that he gives words to? Are you looking at the Scriptures, looking for God to show you where you're right and where you're wrong? Are you open to allowing God to change even the deepest patterns that are in your life? By this time, if God wants to talk to you about something, he's already put it in your mind, and he may have said to you, this is the change I want to have in your life. That's the part of rebuking. And he said, this is what I want you to start doing, that's the part of correcting, teaching you. What we do at the end of our service is give you an opportunity to say to God, I've heard you, I believe what you say is true, and today I will do what you've told me in my mind I should do. Maybe God wants you to profess your faith in him publicly and openly, commit yourself to be baptized to show your old life, self-directed, is gone, new life has started with Christ. Maybe he's asked you to take a job that he's been talking to you about. Maybe he's asked you to pray for people. Maybe he's asked you to start reading the Bible. If this is a promise you want to make to God, you can come and share that with me, and I'll pray with you that you'll be able to fulfill what God wants and help you to know the next step. So I hope today this is a word of God to you, I hope you've heard it, I hope God speaks to you, now I hope you'll do what he tells you. There's a commitment that God wants you to make, you will feel the urge to come and say this is the promise I need to make to God, and he's told me to share it with you. You do what God's told you. Amen. I'm sorry, I knew, this is Olivia Herman. Olivia is also going into fourth grade, but I didn't realize that she was here until I sat back down, and I looked and went, oh, there's Olivia. I have a card for Olivia, and we thank you for being here. Olivia is Shelley Widener, our pianist's granddaughter. Thank you for coming, Olivia. Will you stand, please, for a moment to pray? Lord, give us the courage to never ignore your word to us. Whatever you've said to us today, we want to live today and the rest of our lives. We promise to you that your word we will hide in our heart, that we would never violate what you want us to do. In the name of Christ, we make this promise, amen.