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In this sermon, guest preacher Alex Rea discusses the importance of reading and understanding the Bible. He emphasizes that the Bible is a true word and that everything God says is true. He also highlights the need for community and the importance of reading scripture together. Alex explores the concept of man as an image bearer, an image breaker, and a redeemed image in Christ. He encourages believers to delight in God's word, apply it to their lives, and share it with others. The sermon concludes with a reminder to respond to God's word in faith and to live in accordance with His teachings.
Takeaways
Takeaways
- The Bible is a true word, and everything God says is true.
- Reading scripture together in the community is important.
- Man is an image bearer, an image breaker, and a redeemed image in Christ.
- Delighting in God's word and applying it to our lives is crucial.
- We are called to share the gospel and respond to God's word in faith.
Creators & Guests
Guest
Alex Rea
Youth Pastor at First Baptist Church of Gonzales
What is Redeemer City Church - Lafayette, LA?
Pastor Aaron Shamp preaches about the Gospel and facets of Christianity at Redeemer City Church. These podcasts are his sermons.
Aaron Shamp (00:00)
So if this is your first time over here at Redeemer, my name is Aaron and I am our lead pastor. Normally this is where I would give you guys the teaching for this morning.
But we have a guest coming in today. And so I've got the morning off from preaching. And so I'm getting to play with the band, and that's a lot of fun. But I'm excited to have Alex up here. If you've been at Redeemer for a while, he's been here a couple of times now. And every time he comes, it is just an absolute blessing. Alex has become a good friend of mine. And so I look forward to not only being blessed by his sermon, but also just having him here is wonderful as well. And also his family, if you see his beautiful kids.
running around. It's great to have them here. Alex is a graduate of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is a student pastor, the student pastor at First Baptist Church of Gonzales. And he is also doing his PhD in apologetics right now at New Orleans. So it is a pleasure to have him. You guys give him a warm welcome.
Good morning. It's a pleasure to be with you here this morning. We're going to be in Psalm chapter 1 eventually. So if you have your Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. You guys have been walking through this series called the Seven Arrows. And I've been enjoying being able to follow along that with you over in Gonzalez. And she's thinking about what an incredible privilege it is to be able to read the scripture to begin with.
And when I look around, I come in here this morning, and one of the things I love about being able to come here is to see, one, new faces, number two, new babies. I come here in like six or seven month increments or so, and so I see these new babies, and I said, I love seeing children in the church. And I said, I think sometimes we get maybe embarrassed of having crying children. I said, that's silly. A crying church is a living church. And so what a blessing it is to have a children's ministry.
and I'm just very thankful to be with you here this morning. We're going to continue in our series called The Seven Arrows, and I believe Aaron has some bookmarks and stuff like that that he made for you all and pastors along. And this is a really good, I think, format or structure or a template, as it were, to be able to read scripture. And on our drive in this morning, I was listening to my son. My son is five years old, and he's learning how to read.
And so I don't know where that is on average. I don't know if that's late or early, but he's reading. He's learning how to read and he's doing like the phonetics. Like he's spelling out sound. And this is all new to me, of course, seeing being a parent of someone who's learning how to read. And so I'm listening to him in the back seat. He's reading some book and he's spelling out each letter individually to get to cat or spot or whatever it was this morning.
And I was thinking on my drive in just a little while ago that that's really cumbersome for him. It's difficult for him. The more we practice it, the easier that it gets. And I was thinking that maybe that might be the same kind of thing for us when it comes to scripture. That when we look at these seven different eros, we think, man, seven steps, that's a lot. Like, how am I going to remember seven different steps every time I read the text? And I think even though we're not five years old anymore, learning how to read in general, I think.
just like I'm hoping it is with my son, the more he practices and the more he develops his reading skills and reading habits, it'll become second nature to him. You can all read now because somebody taught you how to read. So the same thing comes when it comes to the text of scripture, that we're using these seven arrows and just like with my son, it becomes more and more, hopefully becomes more and more second nature to him, the more and more that you use these seven arrows, the more you won't have to think, oh,
What is step three again? What is arrow four again? It's just going to become second nature. Thankfully, when we look at what Christians are, Christians have always been people of the book, what they've been known as. And I've lost count how many times over the years I've heard someone say something like, I want to know what God is like. That's a wonderful statement. And I want to know what God is like. Or they'll put it in the form of a question. Can I know what God is like? And thankfully, as Christians, we believe that God has revealed himself and his word.
that someone once said a long time ago that we believe that when the Bible speaks, God speaks. And that we have a God who reveals himself. We have a God who is not distant, who is not unknown, but God who revealed himself solely through his word. First and foremost, we also see that God has revealed himself primarily, really, through Jesus. That's the book of Hebrews chapter one says. And so we see we have a God who speaks. Now the question is, how did you and I understand what he said?
And then later on, talk about how do we obey what he says. That'll be coming later on as well. And so look at the four arrows, well, arrow number four today. The first arrow was, what did this passage say? Arrow number two is, what did this passage mean to its original audience? Arrow number three, what did this passage tell us about God? That was last week. And then this morning, what did this passage tell us about man?
And so I know that each week, Pastor Aaron has been kind of talking about a foundational truth to camp out on before moving to these eros. Last week, you looked at the Bible being a unified word. There is unity in the Bible. It's not just a bunch of random books that are collected together haphazardly, but they're the unison, they're the unity, they're the harmony, one might say, all throughout scripture.
So you have 66 books of the Bible, you have over 40 different authors, you have three different languages on three separate continents written over 2 ,000 years. And what's insane about all that is even with all those factors played in and taken into account, you have one main player. You have one main figure and that's God himself. That's what Aaron talked about last week, that there's unity. No matter where you turn to in scripture, in some way, shape or form, we learn more about who God is in that.
learn more about who God is and that. Today we're talking about how the Bible is a true word. Not only is the Bible a unified word, but we also see the Bible is a true word. Now what does that mean? Well, let's take a step back. One of the things that we believe as Christians that who God is, that God is all -powerful, that God can do anything that can be done, God can do it. Now here's the thing. Here's the question for us. I just said that God can do anything that can be done.
Here's the question, are there things that God cannot do?
Can God stop being God?
Can God sin? The Bible says he can. So even though God is all powerful, God cannot go against his nature. God can't stop being God. God cannot sin. But here's what that means specifically for our time together today. The fact that God cannot sin means that everything that God says is true. If God cannot sin, then everything he says is true, which means everything he writes in his scripture is true.
Everything that we see in scripture is true. Everything that the Bible teaches is true. God's word is true, John chapter 17 says. And thankfully, we also have very strong evidence, very good reason to believe that the Bible that you and I have in our hand this morning is actually what was written down. Just recently, I was asked, or I was having a conversation with a student of mine who was...
thinking that the Bible was basically the game of telephone. Remember playing that game when you were a kid? And so the idea of the game of telephone was you start with somebody at the front of the line or circle or something like that and you tell the first person, I like mac and cheese or something, some random thing, right? And they pass it on down to the next person, they pass it on down to the next person, they pass it on down to the next person, so on and so forth. And when you get to the end of the line, even though you may have told this person, I like mac and cheese, the last person,
when you ask them what was the first thing that was said, they say something totally opposite. Instead of saying, I like mac and cheese, they say something like, I don't know, something totally gibberish. It doesn't make any sense at all. And so the idea behind that is that some people think that's how the Bible came to be. That it was just one person that wrote something down that got passed on to the next person, that got passed on to the next person, that got passed on to the next person to the Bible that you have in your hand. And let me just tell you, that could not be further from the truth. That we have good.
strong evidence to believe and to really argue that the Bible that you have in your hand actually was what was written down. The question is how? I'm glad that you asked. We have copies of manuscripts of the Greek and the Hebrew to where you right now can learn Greek and Hebrew if you wanted to. You could learn Greek and Hebrew, or just pick one, and you could learn it so well that you could pick up.
and a copy of these manuscripts that were written in Greek or in Hebrew, and you could translate it for yourself. So maybe that's in Pastor Aaron's tenure plan. Maybe you can come out with the Aaron's, the Aaron Shamp version. Maybe that's in the goal, I don't know, but his sabbatical, whenever you take the sabbatical, maybe he'll come out with that. Whatever it happened to be, you can take, you can learn it so well so that you can come up and come up with a translation on your own, but it's not the game of telephone. It's not the game of telephone. We have good reason, all that to say that the Bible is,
true and we can believe that it's true, the good evidence that it's true, the good evidence that we can rely upon it and trust that what we have here is actually what was written down originally. And if God can't lie, and he can't, and everything that he says is true and it is, then we have what is called the doctrine of inerrancy, without error, inerrancy, that the Bible is inerrant. Now if you think about some of the claimed descriptions, they sound pretty audacious. So for example,
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It's a pretty audacious claim. It's the first verse of scripture. And then you get into all the other verses of scripture. Like one of my favorite, my son's favorite stories is David and Goliath. Loved that story. We read it all the time. You also like Jonah. You also like a bunch of other stories that kids kind of tend to gravitate towards the pretty incredible story of scripture. And I think as we get older, we start thinking, could that really have happened?
Could Jonah really have been swallowed by a giant fish for three days? I think I spit up. I don't know about you, but if Genesis 1 .1 is true, I think everything else is at least possible. If we have a God, if it truly is the case that God created everything out of nothing, then I think having a large fish swallow God seems kind of like challenge play. Seems pretty easy to me.
God created heavens and the earth, it's true. Everything else is at least possible. Maybe another claim is that Jesus is the only way to salvation. That there are not multiple ways of salvation. It's not like you just live your best life now. You try to do it best as you can. And even if you're sincere and all these things, you can be sincerely wrong. And Jesus says that I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one come to the Father except through me. It's another pretty audacious claim. How about this one? Jesus is returning again. Jesus is returning again.
another true statement, everything in scripture is true. Now here's the thing, even though everything in scripture is true, then the question becomes, well, how do we as readers of scripture rightly interpret what it says? Because you and I as readers of scripture, you and I are not, we have no role, I suppose might be the word there, to succumb in and say, I want to twist scripture to make it mean whatever I want it to mean.
It's not my word to do that, it's God's word. God says what he says, he means what he means. The question is that you and I need to uncover that meaning and discover that meaning, then apply that meaning to our lives. So let's go back to the Audacious Claim, number one, how did God create the heavens and the earth? True. Now, how did he do that? When you read Genesis chapter one and two, how ought we to understand the timeline of Genesis one and two?
How should we understand the creation narrative? How long did all these things take place? That's a wonderful conversation to have in -house among brothers and sisters in Christ. We can believe that God did all this and still have a discussion about how exactly all that took place. Number two, Jesus is the only way of salvation. Pretty straightforward. But then you think, okay, well, hold on a second. Jesus said in John 10, I am the door.
iron the door. Now what did he mean by that? Did he mean that we've made out of oak and he had a doorknob on his stomach? No, he was using metaphorical language to make a literal point. And he does this all the time. Jesus was a master storyteller. He used images and metaphor to convey a serious point. He used metaphorical language to convey a literal point. So in about an hour or two or so.
Pastor Aaron and I are gonna go out to eat and I will probably say at some point in the meal before we eat, I could eat a horse. I love food and Louisiana is a great place to eat food at. Do I mean that I could really literally eat a horse? No, I'm just saying I'm using a metaphor to explain a literal reality. I'm hungry, I'm ready to eat. My son says the same thing every five seconds. Like we know what...
that is like and so Jesus uses that kind of language all the time. He's using metaphor to make a literal point. We need to understand John, we need to understand hermeneutics, and understand how to interpret what he's saying in context. The last one I mentioned was that Jesus is returning again, which is absolutely true. Amen. That's the only hope that you and I have. That we have a risen Savior. A dead Savior can't save you. A dead Jesus is no good.
but we have a living Jesus who promised to come back and save us from this world. But then when you read the book of Revelation, how do we understand that? How should we understand? How should we interpret the book of Revelation? That's a wonderful question you guys can talk about in your small groups. Which brings me to my second point in this, which is to say community. Notice that everything I've shared thus far, when we talk about reading scripture, we ought to be doing it in community.
that we are blessed to be able to read the Word on our own and we ought to. But there's a serious blessing that we neglect when we neglect or we miss out on this blessing when we neglect getting together, doing this right here, getting together in D group, getting together in community group, being part of the rooted ministry, being part of the foundry ministry, all these different groups to what we are doing life together.
I don't care how good your favorite YouTuber or podcaster is at exegeting scripture. They may be wonderful and that's fantastic. They cannot take the place of a local church.
cannot be part of a virtual church. The church by definition is embodied. What you're doing here, this is church. And so being part of a ministry, being part of a connect group, being part of any kind of thing where you're getting together and you're wrestling through scripture together, you're talking through scripture together, you're asking questions, you're answering questions, that's one of the blessings of being part of a body of Christ. That we have this reality, the truth that God's Word is inerrant.
It is not false. It is true in everything that it teaches. And you and I get to go on this journey. We get to go on this adventure to read it together. That is a blessing.
Which brings me to arrow number four. Arrow number four, which is what did this pastor say about man? We have this reality that we have the word that is true. We have the word that is true. We ought to be reading it together in community. We need to be reading it first and foremost at home, with our children, to ourselves, with our spouses. But then we also need to be reading it together in community. Then we get to arrow number four, which is what is the...
Bible, what did the passage say about man? Then I was thinking that I was thinking to this question. What did the Bible before we get to this passage at the whole we'll get to Psalm one in a moment. But before we get to that, what did the Bible say about who man is? I thought of it and for four point number one, the first point is that that man is an image bearer. That man is an image bearer. What I mean by that is that contrary to a world.
to if you're a college student contrary to your professor who might tell you that you're to cosmic accident. They may not put it in that way, but they'll just say something like you're here, you're the product or the end result of a blind process of Darwinian evolution that did not have you in mind. And so you're here. So, you know, good for you. That is that kind of what we're told that you're here by accident and there's no rhyme or reason to it. There is no God. There is no purpose to things.
The Bible had a very different story that I mentioned Genesis one a moment ago that there's this really beautiful cadence, this rhythmic cadence in Genesis chapter one and two where God creates something and it's good and God creates something and it's good and God creates something and it's good. And then it said God created man and it was very good. It was very good. The world says, no, you're here by chance. The late Richard Feynman.
scientist Richard Feynman said that man is a universe of atoms and atom and atom in the universe. That man is a universe of atoms and atom in the universe. Quite poetic.
quite poetic, but it's exactly what a naturalistic, materialistic, atheistic view takes it. There's nothing important about you. You're just one among many. And as soon as you die, no one cares, but no one notices. Outside of maybe your family and friends. This goes against directly what scripture said. Not only are you not a cosmic accident, you have a fixed worth. You have worth and value, not because of how much money you have.
Not because of how tall or how short you are, not because of how skinny or how fat you are, no matter how good you look or don't look, no matter what your tax bracket was when you filed your taxes recently, no matter anything like that, you have worth and you have value solely because you're made in the image of God. Solely because you're made in the image of God. We live in a world that's very different than that.
where our worth and our value is determined by how viral we went on social media, how many likes we get on a picture. It's something that we have to earn. In the world that we live in, we have to earn our worth. We have to earn our value. And God said, no, you have value that can't be taken away because you're made in the image of God. So we're image bearers. Not only are we image bearers, but the Bible tells us that we're image breakers.
That when we see in Genesis chapter 3 that sin enters the world, and because sin entered the world, now we do what's right in our own eyes. And listen, if we're honest with ourselves, we can't even live up to our own standards, much less God's standards. We can't even live up to our own standards, much less God's standards. I mean, think about it. How many times have you told somebody, I know I've done this, how many times have you told somebody you should do this, and then you don't do it?
or vice versa. How many times have we said, hey, you shouldn't do that? Especially parents in the room, their kids. We tell our kids, don't do this. And we do the very same thing that we just did, that we just said not to do. We do that. Our entire lives are full of us being hypocrites. And so forget God's standards for a second. We can't even live up to our own standards. We live in a very fallen world. We miss Savior. We live in a fallen world.
the writer of Proverbs chapter 20 verse 9, he said, who can say I have made my heart pure? I am clean from sin. Who can say that? The answer is nobody. None of us. We look around the world and we see evidence of this and in and of ourselves, we have no hope. In and of ourselves, we cannot save ourselves. We can't pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
We can't do enough good to outweigh the bad. We need a savior, but we know one. His name is Jesus. And in Jesus, we go from image breakers to being redeemed images or renewed images. That he who knew no sin became sins that we could become the righteousness of God, Paul says. You know, I was thinking,
So my wife and I were celebrating our anniversary in a couple of weeks. And when we were, before we got engaged, she knew I was going to propose sometime in the near future, we went ring shopping. And that was a totally new experience for me. I'd never looked at ring. I mean, it wasn't, you know.
I think most guys like that. And so we go around and we're looking at rings and I found out that a whole world about diamonds that I did not know about. I knew about the four C's. Maybe the men, remember the four C's of diamond? I knew I was gonna forget so I wrote it down. We have color, clarity, cut, and carrot. I started learning about this whole world about the four C's of diamond and I found out that you usually had to kind of pick and choose. Like you might want a good carrot.
wanted to be heavy and weigh a lot, but you might have to compromise on clarity perhaps, you know, and all that kind of stuff. But whenever you go and look at a diamond in a jewelry store, you can remember doing that. Whenever you saw a diamond and you look at it in the display case and they pulled it out, where did they put that diamond in order for you to see it? They laid it on top of the glass case? No. What did they put it on? They put it on a, like, they used a black felt of some sort, right?
either like an actual, like a ring box or a little, a black pad or something like that. Why? Because if you put it on the case, on a display case, you're just going to see right through it and not be able to see anything about the diamond at all. But the blackness of the felt, the darkness of the felt, highlight the beauty of a diamond. And if you didn't have the darkness of the felt, you wouldn't be able to see the beauty of the diamond. And the same thing comes when it...
when it comes to our understanding of who Christ is, understanding who we are, that unless we understand the severity and the reality of our sin, what Jesus did didn't make any sense. What does it mean to say that Jesus saved us and that's good news unless we understand the blackness of the dark news to begin with? Unless we have the bad news, the dark news, the dark cloth as it were, then the good news doesn't stand out.
We have to understand who we are, that Christ is not, that Christ is able to save us, not because we're good enough. I know I'm certainly not, but because Jesus is, he's good enough. That's why he makes a wonderful savior. And I'm able to appreciate that more when I remember that apart from Christ, I have no hope. I can't make my heart pure. I don't think any of us can. So not only are we image bearers, not only are we
image breakers in Christ, we are redeemed images. And then from there, we are image spreaders. We are image spreaders that once we've been made new by Christ, once we've been changed by Christ, our heart type change, we then live differently. That we think about what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter five, which is that we're called to let our light shine. Why? For that others would see that light and then glorify God who is in heaven.
Then we look at all the lives of the apostles. They went from being people who rebelled against God in various ways, Paul specifically, that Paul was a persecutor of the church. And then he went from being a persecutor of the church to an ambassador of Christ, going and planting all these churches. Paul would change, had his heart tuned to Christ, and he spent the rest of his life saying, let me tell you about a man. Let me tell you about a man, which by the way,
That's what the woman at the well said in John chapter 4. Remember that? It's a beautiful passage. John chapter 4, Jesus rocks this woman's world, turns it upside down. And then after her world rocks, she leaves everything behind and goes to the village that she came from. And he said, let me tell you about a man.
I should say this, if you know enough of the gospel to be saved by it, you know enough of the gospel to share.
It's that simple. If you see the woman at the well and John chapter four, she didn't go to some, some summer long training camp, although they're fine. She didn't go to seminary, although that's great. She didn't, she just went down to where she came from and said, let me tell you about a man. It's that simple. If you know enough of the gospel to be saved by, you know enough of the gospel to share it.
So what does it mean when we look at this fourth arrow? Let's look at applying this fourth arrow here. Remember last week Pastor Aaron talked about how the Bible is about God first and foremost. About what God, about who God is, what God has done in this world. And now we're looking at what did the Bible say about us personally? See about this Bible, now we're looking at it, we're gonna narrow it down and say what did this passage say about us? So Psalm chapter one.
Psalm chapter one, this is an incredible Psalm. I love this Psalm, it could have kind of broken up in half. If you notice, yeah, verse one through three is like one half, and then the second half is verses three through six. But here's what the text says, this is God's inspired word. It's a blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. But a delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yield to fruit and season, and his leaf does not wither. And all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like shafts that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
We have here we see in this pattern, what does the pastor say about man? We see there are two ways to live. Very simple. There's two types of people in the world, those who live for God and those who live against him. And the one that lives for God, the one that's like the Psalm, it's like the Psalm chapter one, he hungers for his word. He loves his word. He rejects the word of those who were actively against God. This is the man who delights in his word. Here's a question for us. Do we delight in the word?
Do we have a hunger to read scripture? Do we have a hunger to wake up in the morning and read God's word? And not just be readers, not just be hearers, but be doers as well. The man of Psalm chapter one is always thinking about how to apply God's word to his life. Always wanting to orient his steps that are in tune with what God has called him to do because he wants to live for God. There is no such thing as a compartmentalized faith.
and scripture. You know what I mean by that? There's no such thing as when we say, okay, we're here on Sunday morning, we come to Redeemer, we maybe go to one of the ministry groups throughout the week, and when we walk into those rooms, we put on our Christian hat, and we say the right Christian things, and we say at the right time, and we speak the Christian language, and then Monday through Friday, nine to five, we're a totally different person. Take off the Christian hat.
and wear the college hat or wear the administrative hat, whatever it happened to be. The man of Psalm chapter 1 is a man who is fully engaged in the things of God no matter where he's at.
every second of every day. He is wanting to please God. Now, does that mean that he's perfect? Of course not. Of course not. Roman chapter seven, what Paul says, Paul says the very same thing that you and I often say, the things that I want to do, I don't do. The things that I don't want to do are the thing that I do. Maybe some of us just said that less than 12 hours ago last night, perhaps. I did this thing again. I said I was never going to do it again. I did it last night.
But then we get to 1 John chapter 1. 1 John chapter 1, which says that, if we confess our sin, God is just and faithful to forgive us of our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. What a beautiful promise. So we can hate our sin, we can lament our sin as we ought to, but then we trust and remember that God is good and just and faithful to forgive us of our sin. We get detoured as that he would.
This man here in Psalm chapter one, he delights in the word. He hungers for the word.
His life is ruled by the word. But yet the wicked don't do this at all. And what's interesting about when we look at the, kind of the common culture of how we look at what scripture is and the bearing, the weight of what scripture says, we might hear something like, you know what? Surely we know better by now. It's 2024 after all. Surely we progress. We don't need Iron Age peasants, what their stuff they write in here. We can figure things out on our own. What's interesting, I've noticed this over,
time and time again, example after example after example, that the snake eats his own tail. That when we cut off the branch that you're sitting on, chaos ensues. That to think that we have it all together, it to be woefully ignorant and naive and wicked. Because again, things don't go well when we try to do things in our own strength, in our own power, in our own wisdom. Things never work out.
We can just look at that in our own lives, and our own lives, and prove positive of that. We can look at a live to our friend, our loved one. We think we know best, and think don't go well.
I was thinking, um, we have any Marvel fans here in 2021, there was a show called WandaVision that came out. And it's really, I'm not the biggest Marvel guy, but it's interesting. As I was watching WandaVision, and if you don't know that, you don't know the show, um, I'm not sure if there's been more seasons since then, but, uh, in the middle of the season, you find out there's two people, Wanda and there's, and there's Vision, they're married. And, and you come to find out throughout the show that Wanda has used her superpowers to construct.
this shit spoiler alert, but construct this city of her own that they're all living in. And so Vision thinks of this as a real place. And you find out throughout the show, this is just a figment of her imagination. And she kind of made this whole world that she's in. And so the waking moment in the show, about halfway through or so, is Vision starts to see something's off. And it's like, if you imagine this room is the church, it's like the city that she builds.
And at one point in the show and one of the episodes vision comes out but like half of his body is in the city and half of his body is outside the city remember though if you saw the show and what happened is the half of his body that is outside the city is like a literal wall there. It started breaking apart. It starts literally falling apart like it's pretty graph.
like the part of his body start falling off, the half, the bottom half that's inside the city is totally intact, totally normal. The upper half that is outside the city on the other side of the wall is falling apart. I thought, man, what an incredible, I doubt they had the Bible in mind, but what an incredible analogy to what it looks like when we depart from the world that God had created. That when you and I try to break away from God's design.
When you and I try to break away from how God has structured things, I got to design things, that God had created things, chaos always ensues. Breakdown always happens. It never goes well. This is one of the reasons why the Psalmist in Psalm chapter one says that when the wicked are against God and the wicked always lead to destruction, which that time and time again throughout scripture, the wicked always lead to destruction because they're going outside of what God has called them.
to do.
In Psalm chapter one, we see that the one that prospers is the one that lived according to how God has called him to live. That's what it means. What does this passage say about man? The one who prospers is the one that lives in accordance with what God has called him. He loved his word, he reads his word, he studies his word, he obeys his word, he applies it to his life, he shares his word with other people. That's what this man does.
How about Matthew 21? There's another passage that we were looking at. Matthew 21, this is a passage where Jesus makes a triumphal entry into Jerusalem. And what's interesting, I know Aaron pointed this out, is all these different Old Testament passages that are all highlighted and alluded to all throughout it, fulfilling scripture yet again. But what did we learn about man here? Just from this passage, well, I was thinking how, just a couple of chapters later in Matthew 27,
The very same people who were shouting Hosanna, the very same people who were praising Jesus in chapter 21 are the same people who were shouting, crucify him in chapter 27. Remember, this isn't like two years down the road. We're talking days.
What do we learn about man in this passage? We learned that people are fickle. Their allegiances are weak. But the same people who cried her Xanadu, who shouted her Xanadu are the same people who picked a legitimate criminal over the sinless Son of God. You remember how when Pilate came up and said to the people, I don't know what's wrong with this guy. What has he done? Remember how they responded? They couldn't even come up with an answer.
Matthew 27 verse 23, and he Pilate said, why, what evil had he done? But they shouted all the more, let him be crucified. They couldn't even come up with an answer. They just said kill him. People are fickle. And this passage is one of many, I think, would it tell it about man, it reminds me that I'm broken apart from Christ.
How about Colossians chapter one? Colossians chapter one, scholars believe that this was a hymn that was sung in the church. Imagine reading Colossians chapter one verses 15 through 20. Imagine getting together with your brothers and sisters on an early Sunday morning and singing that together. Colossians chapter one verses 15 through 20. We see that this passage is primarily about Christ. This is the preeminence of Christ.
We also learn things about man here too, that we see that Jesus is the ultimate one. Jesus is the firstborn of all creation. What that means there that he is the head honcho. He is the supreme. There is none better than Christ. There is no plan B. Jesus is the greatest. He's the ultimate one. He's the one that saved us. We can't save ourselves.
In verse 16, we see that He created all things, that means you. In verse 17, it says that He hold all things together, that includes you. In verse 18, it says that He's the head of the church, that includes Redeemer City. In verse 20, it says that He reconciles man, even including you, if you call upon the name of the Lord and be saved.
So where do we go from here? We look at these three scriptures, we look at these fundamental truths, we see that God's word is true, that it's cohesive, that it's clear, that it's unified, that everything that God says is true. Where do we go from this? I think again, that when we read through scripture and we use a template, a form of sword, like the seven arrow, it becomes more and more natural to us as we keep on doing it. It's just like any skill or any kind of hobby.
Maybe it took a little bit of time when you first started it, but now you're not thinking sequentially, you're not thinking in steps, you're just going out there and doing it. As we talked about last week, every passage in scripture is about God. Every single passage. And then we see today again, that so much of scripture directly involving us. What does this passage say about man? But here's the thing, it's not just that we ought to read scripture, we're also called to respond to it.
You and I are also called to respond to it. Again, we're not just to be hearers or readers, but we're called to be doers of it as well. But how do we do with that whole responding part?
How do we do with all that? We read the text, we'll call to respond to it. How did that next step usually go? If you're like me, and I think that you are, if you're like me, we tend to make excuses. I don't want to do it, it's inconvenient, I know better, whatever. I don't want, I should don't feel like it. I love how one thinker said, he said, the matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand.
But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. I love that word. We Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute that we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.
Psalm 1 talks about two different ways to live. The one who prospered is the one who lives in accordance with God and how he called us to live. The Bible tells us clearly who we are, that we are image bearers, we are image breakers, we are redeemed images in Christ. That's the only hope that we have. And because we're redeemed, if that's you today, we were then called to share that redemption with other people. That others would then see our light and they say, man, there's something different about that guy. There's something different about that girl.
and then coming to know you, they then come to know about the God who saved you.
for image letters. You and I call to share the good news. That's what we're called to do. We're called to respond in saving faith. And the promise is that Jesus says that if you come to him, he'll never cast you out.
And that when you're in his hands, nothing will get you out of his hands. And then when you're saved by Christ, you then share that with other people. That's the responsibility. And actually, let me use a different word there. That's the privilege that you and I have today. That we are saved by Christ and for Christ to make much of Christ in all that we do. That's the privilege that you and I have. Let's do it.
Let's play together.
Father, I thank you for your word this morning and I thank you for the church.
I thank you for the leadership. I thank you for Aaron, for the elders, for the deacons. And Father, I pray that you would continue to bless the church, continue to bless the body, and that we would be a people who hunger after your word.
that we were meditated on a day and night, that we would hide your word in our heart, that we wouldn't sin against you.
that we would glorify you in all areas, that we wouldn't compartmentalize our faith, but that we would live fully for you, whether it's here in this building, whether it's at our job, whether it's in our homes, whether it's at the gym, whether it's at college, and that you be pleased to use us to make much of you and to further your kingdom.
We thank you for saving us. And I pray you would remind us that we are to abide in Christ in all that we do. We thank you for your love. We thank you for your mercy. And I pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.