Okay. The Bible. Did I just say the Bible is boring? It's not. It's just a hard thing to teach. Okay. I believe in the Bible. I believe the Bible is true. I believe it with a fundamentalist. And I say this because I went to Vanderbilt where things like being educated was very important, right? I believe with a simplistic childlike faith everything that's in it. I believe in Noah's Ark story. I believe God created the world in seven literal days because I think it's a miracle. And I think if He didn't create it in seven literal days, that's a pretty bad way to communicate it. I believe the whole thing. But I don't believe it because of the books that I read or the scholarly kind of arguments I had to go through in seminary, just like I didn't stop believing it because of all those scholarly arguments I went through in college. I believe the Bible because of a guy named Nitro Joe Teagle. Okay, I'm going to tell you about Nitro Joe. Have you heard of my Nitro Joe story? I was a second year campus minister at Delta State University, which is a little smaller campus in the Mississippi Delta. which is where all the plantations were back in the day. And it was a freshman Bible study. Everybody was invited, but only freshman girls came. Okay? So I had ten freshman girls in a room just like this one, around the table like that. And I was going to teach them through 1 John. And at the end of the... Actually, during the beginning of the first Bible study, I noticed that the football team was having a study hall right outside the door. And I kind of get loud. And I was a little uncomfortable about this. But I taught my little study. At the end of the study, a football player is waiting outside the door. And he won't go away. And I'm not a confrontational kind of person at all. And so I was waiting and waiting for him to leave. And he would not leave. And actually, he even walked in. And so I said, oh hey, how are you doing? And he said, I'm fine, how are you? And I said, great. And he said, it sounds like you're doing a Bible study in here. And I said, yes, and I hope it was not a distraction. I really did not want to be on his bad side. And he said, no, that's no problem. He said, can I come next week? Sure. OK. So next week, I've got 10 freshman girls and a fifth-year senior football player. He just stood out as starkly as any human can stand out. I mean, he's got kind of the He's got tattoos and he's African-American and they're all white. It was just kind of an odd setting. I'm just sitting here going, we're going with this. We're just going to go with it and see where it goes. So I opened up the Bible study with a question I thought was fun. I said, do you have to be good to go to heaven? Do you have to be righteous to get into heaven? It's a fair question, isn't it? And all the girls were kind of bantering around with their little sweet girl answers. You know, nobody's really righteous, and nobody's really good, and just sweet little answers. And Nitro Joe piped up and he said, Well, I believe Hebrews said, Without holiness, no man will see the Lord. Yes, that is exactly what Hebrews says. And that was the first of 12 questions drawn out for my Bible study. And it was the first that he answered with stark accuracy from the Bible, quoting chapter and verse, which I still can't even do. And so, my opinion of him is changing dramatically. And after the study, I went to him, I said, well, man, it sounds like you really know the Bible. He's like, yeah, I guess I do. I said, uh, you must have really grown up in a great church. He said, no, I never went to church. I said, okay. He said, you must be in a good Bible study or have, you know, a good disciple or something. He said, no, I've never been to a Bible study. I'm not part of a group. He said, honestly, I didn't know there was another Christian on this campus until tonight. And, uh, well, it kind of made me feel good about how good I've been marketing my group. But, um, I said, well, what's your story? How do you know the Bible so well? And he said, well, when I was seven years old, I was growing up in kind of these real poor sections, inner city Houston. And we were already kind of getting into trouble. And my parents were never really on the scene. And no one was ever telling us when it was time to go to bed. So we'd stay up until 1, 2 in the morning every night. And we were going around, just kind of tearing stuff up, getting into trouble. He said, I didn't really want to do that, and I moved into this house, kind of this little shack, where me and my brother were going, and I have a bedroom, and I went into the bedroom, and I opened up the closet door, and there was that yellow Bible storybook. You know the yellow one? And it was in the middle of the story, I didn't want to say there's like a thousand Bible storybooks. I said, oh yeah, the yellow one, right. And he said, so I started reading it. I said, so you like read the whole thing? He said, yeah, I read it every night. I read it over and over, every night. I said, well, how long did you do that? And he said, well, until fifth grade. So like four years later. And then in fifth grade, those men that came to our fifth grade class and they gave us Bibles. So I started reading that. I read that every night. I said, well, how long did you do that? And he said, well, I did that until I was a freshman in high school. And then they came and they gave us the full Bible. I didn't even know there was an Old Testament. And he read it every night. And that's all he did. And it was just this fascinating testimony of somebody in a place where there were no missionaries, there were no churches, there was nobody reaching out to him, but this Word of God, living and active, got to him, was understandable to him, changed his life, preserved him from sin, and as a result, you know, he was graduating from college and going out into his life, and it was a living thing. And then I started meeting people who were converted in jail. And, I don't know if you've ever met, have y'all ever met anybody who's just converted by reading the Bible? No? By no other means, just reading the Bible? You ever read anybody like that? They are fascinating humans. And, their faith has this different, it's a different kind of conviction. And they're phenomenal. So I don't only believe it because of Nitro Joe. I believe it because of Malcolm Brown. And I believe it because of Michael Campbell. And I believe it because of the other people I met who were in prison or in house arrest. I met one guy at Mississippi State who was under house arrest. And he read straight through the Bible twice before he got out. And he basically started doing it as a punishment. His parents made him start reading it. And the Lord converted him. And so in that, I just saw this power that was there. It was transforming people's lives. The Word of God is alive and it's real. And that's the reason why I believe it. I believe it with a very strict sort of structure. There's four things I believe about the Bible. You'll turn over your page. You'll see principles to be understood and committed to. The first one is Scripture. And there's four things we believe about it in our church that we teach. First is the Bible is true. Oh, that was true. What it means to say, it says. And what it says really happened. Now, you know, there's all kinds of genres to the Bible. If you were here in the last six months, you heard me preach through Revelation, I don't really think there's going to be these weird-headed locusts coming out of a gap in the earth. And, you know, some things were meant to be read allegorically. Some things in the Bible were meant to be read poetically. And, yeah, we disagree with some of that, and that's fine. I'm not trying to come out with a strange kind of legalistic wooden interpretation that, you know, if you don't believe and, you know, that people are going to have a literal 666 tattooed on their hands and you're not a Bible believer. That just doesn't hold water. It's not a good interpretation at all. But what the Bible says is true and it's continually been validated. It's fun if you're part of it. people in y'all's generation, for most of you, one of you are my generation. Most of you don't really care about this anymore. It was a big deal to us when I was going through college. You know, is the Bible true? It was really interesting. Like when I was in college, one of the, all my friends took this New Testament class at the Vanderbilt Seminary. And, of course, none of the Bible is historic. You know, kind of silliness. You'd be silly to believe that it was true. And one of the things they really beat up on was John chapter 5. John chapter 5 talks about this, you know, Solomon's colonnade. It doesn't exist. It never existed. You know, and he has this real... description, you know, a really clear description of the place. It has five pools and all these columns. They would just go on and on about how that never existed. John was just... these stories were allegorical. They were written much later. They were written, you know, not by somebody who was actually there, not by a credible witness, but it's written much later by the church to kind of prop up this idea, this crazy idea of the deity of Christ. So, while... actually, while I was in college, an archaeologist went to the place that John said Solomon's Colonnade was. He got the grant to do an archaeological dig and found it. It was exactly where he said it was. It looked just like he said it did. It was proof that an eyewitness was there. All of those professors got converted. No, of course not. None of them did. Maybe that was true, but none of the other ones are true. History is continuing to move the slide. There's a lot of stuff in the Bible we can't validate. It's a 10,000 year old book in some places, right? We're not there. We don't have video, you know, continual video coverage for the last 10,000 years. But the spectrum that we're moving toward is true. The Bible is historically true. It is an accurate description of life. The most important things that I believe about the Bible are not the historical accuracies. but that it's a true depiction of life. It says life is beautiful and it hurts. It is beautiful but it's broken. There's such a thing as beauty, there's such a thing as truth, there's such a thing as goodness, but there's also such a thing as pain. Death is not natural. It holds up both truths. And it holds up the gospel as God's remedy to heal what's broken. The Bible describes God's world truly. That's the first thing we believe. The second thing we believe about it is that it's authoritative. What does that mean? It means I stand under it. I don't get to decide, okay, what is in the Bible that I like and what I don't like. I don't get to decide how I'm going to take it. And I think, and I'll be honest with you, I take this to a very high level. The Bible is authoritative over me. It tells me how life should function. I don't tell it. And that's difficult, okay? Just think about the word authoritative. It has the word author in it, right? A few years ago, J.K. Rowling came out and he said that Dumbledore's gay, right? You remember that? And everybody got mad about it, but you can't really protest it, can you? He is her character. If she says he's gay, he's gay. We can't argue it. You can't write an essay and say, no he's not. It's her character. If she says it, it's true. Well, the Bible is God's word about life. It's God's word about this world. If he says that we function best this way, we function best this way. We don't get to argue about it. You know, to argue about how God says, you know, God says, be monogamous, be married to one person, one person of the opposite sex. Anything else is not going to make you flourish. It's not going to make you, it's not going to be beneficial to you. And to argue with that is like arguing with the manufacturer of your car about what kind of gasoline to use. You know, I drive a Toyota and it says use unleaded gasoline. And that's expensive stuff, right? Water is cheap. I don't put water in the gas tank though, because that's not how it's designed to function. If I put water in a gas tank, it's not going anywhere. It's going to ruin the car. The authors said this is the way it should be run. God says this is the way we run our life. If you worship money, it will destroy you. I am an adamant day-taker-offer. I don't know how to finish that. I am adamant about taking my day off. I never feel like it. It never feels like the right thing to do. If you go to the hospital on my day off, I am not going to come see you. God was sovereign over when you got sick. Why am I like that? Because God doesn't want to destroy me. And He tells me I have to do all my work in six days and take one day off to worship and to rest. And He made me. And He knows how I function. He knows how I function best. And if I don't function the way He tells me to function, it will destroy me. And that's hard. That's hard. I'm going to give you some illustrations of where it gets hard in a few minutes. The third thing we believe about the Bible is that it's sufficient. We don't need anything else. I don't need visions. I get visions. You get visions. All God's people get visions. We call them dreams. Sometimes they might be helpful. Sometimes they may not be helpful. I had, you know, an absolute clear voice of the Lord calling me once to come out to Arizona to start an RUF, the University of Arizona. I was on my airplane flying out there, wondering, praying, begging the Lord, give me some direction. What should I do? Should I move? I literally asked the question, should I move? Started reading the Bible. It was January 15th. I was already a few days behind in my Through the Bible in a Year plan. I opened the Bible up. My Through the Bible in a Year plan was on, it was January, it was Genesis 12 that day. Looked down at Genesis 12. God said to Abraham, get up and leave this place and go to the country that I show you. Move your family and go to the country I show you. Clear voice of the Lord. Move your family to Arizona. Start this argument. Can you, could you deny that? Obvious. Right, God's providence. He made me lazy. I was behind. The only problem was nobody in Arizona thought I should move out there. They didn't offer me the job. It was a soul-crushing thing. Sometimes I get visions, and they're right. Sometimes I get visions, and they're wrong. Sometimes they're just silly. Sometimes my wife says, no, you ain't going to do that. Sometimes they're helpful, but none of them are authoritative. God didn't tell us to go buy the property that we just put money in. We had to make a hard decision. It was a difficult decision, but He guided us. He led us to a unanimous decision in a room that nobody thought was going to be unanimous. But it wasn't some kind of special revelation. It was people trying to apply the word of the Bible. This is going to be one of the most controversial things I'm going to say to some of you today. What you want is God to give you directions. He gives you a driver's manual instead. Okay. If you're ever in a traffic jam, a bad one. I was going through Atlanta one time and traffic on both sides of the interstate was just stopped. Eight lanes, dead stopped. And both of those are kind of moving. I was thinking, okay, one of these is a Rubbernecker traffic jam, and one of them is dead stop. And if I'm in the dead stop, then I need to get off the road. I knew it was a bad traffic jam because there were four traffic helicopters over it. Every news station in Atlanta was reporting on this traffic jam. It's like the only thing in the news. And I was just thinking, I wish I were in that helicopter. If I were in that helicopter, I would know whether I should take this exit or not. But I don't, and I'm not. And that's kind of the way we are in life, right? You have a hard decision in front of me. Should I take this job? Should I move to this city? And what we want is we want God to take us up into the helicopter and let us see things from His perspective so we'll know for sure we're making the right decision. And you never outgrow that. Who do you marry? How many children do you have? How do you raise them? How do you educate them? How often do you spank them? You're always wanting to go up into that helicopter and get his perspective, and you'll never get it. What he gives you is a driver's manual. Stay between the lanes. Follow these rules and you won't have a car wreck. And live by faith, not by sight. Be wise. It's harder. It's harder. We pray for guidance. Absolutely, we pray for guidance. But we have to believe it when God gives it to us, right? I had a friend one time. He'd taken a job. Every single person in his life told him he shouldn't do it. His mom told him he shouldn't do it. His pastor told him he shouldn't do it. His friends told him he shouldn't do it. But he believed God was telling him that he should do it. He said, I've been praying about this. That was his answer. I continued, I've been praying about it. And he told me about it. It was a disaster. He shouldn't have done it. And I just said, he said, well, I've been praying about it. I won't take it. And I said, well, the answer to your prayers is this. This is how God is answering your prayer. He sent me here to tell you no. And he said, well, I don't believe it. I've been praying about it. And I said, is there any possible way that God could tell you no? No. Well, if there's no way God could tell you no, then you're not really praying about it, are you? You're just baptizing your decision. That's an important thing for you to understand. The Bible tells us how to make decisions. It explains to us wisdom. I'd be glad to go through that. It's a whole series in Proverbs. You're welcome to download. But the Bible gives us sufficient grounds for wisdom on how to make decisions. We don't need anything extra. We don't need it. You don't need anything extra. You've got Jesus. You've got everything you need. Go make a decision. Live your life. Be happy. Fourth thing we believe about the Bible. I mean that. There's a lot of people who feel guilty because they didn't go on the missions. You didn't go on the missions? Lord, it's fine. He loves those people. You're doing fine. Don't be guilty. Alright, the fourth thing we believe about the Bible is it's clear. And what we mean by that is you can read it and understand it well enough to make out the gospel, be saved, and know how to live your life. You won't know everything perfectly. You need the church to explain some things to you. It took the church 300 years to figure out who Christ was. It took the church about 400 years to figure out the Trinity. You're not going to figure it out in an afternoon. Okay? So, be humble and realize that. You need some teaching handed down to you. And I'm about to explain how that works. But it's clear. So, this is my triangle of how we come to understand the Bible. And we're going to take a break as soon as I give you this. Okay? Let's talk about authority and I want to explain to you how the Bible, this is my paradigm for understanding, figuring out what the Bible teaches. How are we going to submit to it? Give me, you give me an issue. Give me something hard. Abortion. Okay. Abortion. How do I figure it out? What are we going to do with it? Well, we got three things. I want to come to the Bible with this question. Okay. Question of abortion. I'm going to come to the Bible with this question and I'm going to answer it, you know, what do I think, my personal exegesis, what do I personally think the Bible says about abortion? I'm going to make my calculation, figure that out. Then I'm going to look at what history is said about it. Because I'm not the first person to read the Bible. It's important, this is why you need to have a little bit of historical theology, why you too should go to Westminster Abbey and weep in the Jerusalem Chamber. That's where the confession was written. I want to see what the church historically said about it. And then I'm going to look at the present community. What are those who presently claim to believe the Bible, what do they say about it? And I'm going to have to weigh all three. At that point, I have to kind of step out, right? And say, okay, step out of myself. Maybe I see one thing, but do all these three agree? And how much promise do all three of them give? And I would say with this issue, there would be a no, you know? No to abortion, personally. And then that brings up all kinds of different questions than what we do. But I want to look at all three of these things to try to find an authoritative answer to the question. Okay? Let me give you one, maybe a little less tense. Oh, maybe it's more tense. But this is an issue that you're going to ask me about in a few minutes anyway. So let's look at women in authority in the church, right? Women elders. Alright, we're in the Presbyterian Church of America. We do not ordain women to be elders. Okay, so I'm going to go to the Bible. And this is my personal exegesis on it, right? My personal feeling is I would love to have women elders because women are efficient and get things done. And I like that. But as I read the Bible, I see that in the Old Testament, the judges The prophets, the leaders of Israel are always men. In the New Testament, Jesus, though He was followed by women, gave an extremely prominent place in His ministry to women, and was ministered to by women, which probably meant He was financially supported by them. He chose men to be the disciples. He sent out men to be the apostles. and laid hands on them and gave them the keys to the kingdom of the church. And then they lay hands on the Apostle Paul and sent him out. And the Apostle Paul writes in his letters, I do not ordain a woman or give her authority over a man. So in this, my personal exegesis is, no, women should not be in authority in the church. Historically, as I look at the church, Roman Catholic Church has never ordained a woman. Greek Orthodox Church has never ordained a woman. These are 1,200-year-old traditions. And no church had before about 100, maybe at most 125 years ago. So, there's a big no there. Now, if we look over the present community, right, there's an enormous change. Like, we're the only people left who don't. But I have to weigh all three of these. And because there's this division here, and some of my friends disagree with me, and that's fine. We're still friends. That kind of gives the deciding nod to this. What do I see in the Bible? So this is kind of our triangle to figure out what's the authoritative response. And what I want you to see is sometimes I have to say no to what I personally think. That's my great illustration for that. I'll give you one. And it's going to be on camera, so I'll probably get in trouble for it. You know, the doctrine of hell. Endless eternal punishment. The way it's been historically described You know, the present community really, you could say there's a large liberal contingent that doesn't believe in it. But the orthodox, reformed community still believes heavily in it. Historically, there's obviously a very strong message from it. Personally, I think a lot of things that we believe come from Dante and not from the Bible. Come from tradition and not from the Bible. I'm not personally convinced that when most people hear the doctrine of hell, what they think of, I think it's probably wrong. I think there's a big gap, right? A big darkness. But, our church teaches a traditional doctrine of hell. Why? Because it's not Ricky's church. It's a PCA church. I submit to the authority of the scripture. this story of Scripture has been historically interpreted as it's being presently interpreted by my denomination, I submit to that. Whether I like it or not is not... If I only teach the things in the Bible that I like, well, I'm just teaching what I like. You know? This isn't God's Word. This is just kind of Ricky's preferences. I don't, you know... I've got to submit to the Bible just like everybody else. And so, if there's nothing in the Bible that you submit to that you don't like, I would challenge you to ask yourself, do you really believe the Bible is authoritative? If you can't find a single thing, you do it just because the Bible commands you to do it. You know, tithing. That's a big one. But not so much for me, because the people who pay my salary get the checks, and so they would know if I quit tithing. But, you know, for most of y'all, we don't keep those tabs on you. It's an issue of authority. Do you believe the Lord? Do you believe what He commands?