Well, I'm so delighted this morning to introduce Dr. Mark Minnick as our speaker as we continue our series on Christ's Body, the Church. Pastor Minnick is a member of our seminary faculty. He's one of our favored teachers and speakers. He's the pastor of Mount Calvary Baptist Church here in Greenville. And I've always been so thankful for Pastor Minnick's life and ministry. I appreciate so much his sermons. Fact is, I preach his sermons better than he does. And I'm just so thankful for his love for Christ and especially what he's going to speak on this morning, the word of God and the church. Pastor Minnick. The question that Dr. Pettit has asked that we consider together this morning is one that would be raised if you were a complete stranger to the Christian faith and you visited nearly any one of our churches this coming Lord's Day morning. And as soon as you got out of your car, you would notice that all the people piling out of the vans in the parking lot, the moms and the dads and almost all the kids were carrying the same book. And when you went into the building, they spread themselves among many small rooms, If you visited any one of those, you would find that they were sitting listening to someone talking out of that book. And that most of them had it in their laps or they had a small electronic device on which they were following the same wording. And then a bell would ring, all of those people would rush out of those rooms and very quickly they would converge in a larger room and the same thing would go on all over again. Everybody would sit and listen to one person talking about that book. And you would find yourself wondering, what is these otherwise fairly ordinary people's fixation on that one book? Dr. Pettit has asked that we address today the question of the centrality of the word in the life of the church. Why is it central? I'd like to ask you to open your Bibles, if you would, to the second chapter of the book of Acts. Acts chapter 2, and what I want to call our attention to first of all this morning, is the precedent for this in the life of the church. And there could not be a better passage in which we could find that than this one. Because if you would notice please with me the 41st verse, would you look right at verse 41 and just notice what is happening there. It's giving to us the response of those Jewish hearers to the sermon that was preached by Peter. And it tells us at the conclusion of verse 41 that there were added to the 120 about 3,000 souls. So now you have over 3,000 people. Think, for instance, of the number of people that are in this room this morning. There would be more than that here, but we would be roughly of the size that you had then. So there it is. There's those group of people. Now, what are they going to do? Look at the next verse. Here's the precedent. And they continued steadfastly in four things, the first of which is the apostles' doctrine. The word that is translated continued steadfastly in that text is a word that could be translated literally, they gave their strength to. It has the word power as its root. They gave their power, they gave their strength to the apostles' doctrine and these other three matters. In other words, what you have here is a record right out of the gate As soon as you have the forming of the church at Pentecost, you have the record of four preoccupations on their part. And the first of them was this matter of apostolic doctrine. So I'm going to raise the question this morning. What is it that they were doing with the apostolic doctrine? How did that actually flesh itself out? And if you'll allow me to do this today, I'd like to begin by speaking in the past tense and speaking of them. I know that we're always concerned to find out what a text means to us and to move to the application of that, and we're going to do that, but I want to be sure that we really get the historical and scriptural foundations in place before we make any present applications. So I want to address this subject this morning, and that is keeping the scripture central in the life of the Church and allow these people's practices and their preoccupation to guide us about that. And first of all, in getting at the root of that, I want to ask you to turn back one chapter. And we're going to have to reference several places in the book of Acts and a couple of places in the epistles this morning, and I know it's the middle of the day and you've been in classes all morning and you've got classes this afternoon, and sometimes it's a little hard to even work up the energy to turn in our Bibles. But if you'll do that, I think it'll be worth our while. I want to ask you to turn back to the first chapter. And I want to call your attention to what happened in the upper room previous to Pentecost. If you look at the 15th verse, we're told that the Apostle Peter stood up and spoke to those other believers. And what I'm interested in is what he said at the outset. Verse 16, men and brethren, and note this wording, this scripture must needs have been fulfilled. And that's all we're going to take out of that verse. What he said to them that day was on the premise that there were scriptures that needed to be fulfilled. And he went on and explained, taking as his text two passages from the Psalter, he went on to explain to them that they needed to choose a successor for Judas. So let's start right there. What is it to give the Word of God the central place in our churches? If we just take this in the order in which it's found in this book concerning the early church, we would say, first of all, it is to get our guidance from the Bible. Not just our guidance as individuals, but our guidance for the church as well. People in churches today where the Word is central don't leave the Bible at their church. They walk out of that church and the guidance for their lives is on that same basis. This last Saturday we had a memorial service at our church for a lady who has been a member there for many years. She went to be with the Lord at just a little short of 72 years of age. One of the things that a number of years ago I just sort of stumbled upon was the idea of preaching a person's funeral service out of their own Bible. It's always a tremendously impressive thing to be able to share with a congregation at that point in time, things that a Christian person has marked in his Bible. So I go through those Bibles and I try to extract comments that people have made in the margins or verses that they've underlined and basically allow them to preach their own service from their own Bible. And when I went through this dear lady's Bible, one of the first things that caught my attention was that on the back of the front end paper, excuse me, it was on the title page, on the title page, she had written one line, and the line was this, map to take us safely from earth to glory. The whole thing, evidently in her mind, put it on the title page, this is the map to take us safely, safely now, from earth to glory. And as you went through the margins of her Bible, they were just all marked up with things that she had learned and personally studied that, as far as she were concerned, were part of putting that map together and guiding her steps. Now, what works for an individual is supposed to work for the life of the whole church, that the church gets its guidance that way, just as Peter directed these people. Now, you're in chapter 1, and I want to ask you to drop down to verse 24. Look at the response of these people after Peter explained those texts, after he said to them, there are certain scriptures that need to have been fulfilled. So their response, verse 24 was, and they, what's the next word, what do they do? They prayed. And what they prayed was not general, it was a specific response to those scriptures as they had been explained. So let's extract that from it. What is it that gives the Bible central place in our churches? One, it is to get our guidance from it, both individually and corporately as churches. And secondly, it is to pray in response to those scriptures. That's what those people did on this occasion. When you do that, when our churches do that, when our prayers are scripturally informed that way, we can be confident that we will receive the petitions that we present before the Lord. In fact, one of the ways that is the richest assurance of that is to actually pray the scriptures. Pray scripturally informed prayers, but pray prayers that are filled with scripture expressions. Not expressions that you've just chosen at random and that just fill up the content in a sort of a pious way. But expressions that we have come to understand within their context and we know that what we're doing is the express will of God as we pray those petitions. A couple of weeks ago, the leadership at our church had a retreat at the Wilds, and we looked together at a very fine tool that was put together by the most well-known commentator in the English language. If I was to ask you who is the most well-known English commentator of all time, a lot of you would respond correctly that it is a man named Matthew Henry. who died in the early 1700s. Just four years before he died, Matthew Henry put together for his people a book on prayer. Some of you will be very interested in this, I'm sure. And the title of that book is A Method for Prayer. Now there are lots of books out there with methodology for prayer. But this one is unusual. Listen to the remainder of that title, A Method for Prayer with Scripture Expressions. And the whole point of the book is to teach people to pray, praying the Bible. There are nine chapters to that book. There's a chapter on praying confessionally, praying with adoration, praying the Lord's Prayer, nine chapters. In those nine chapters, there are over 2,300 texts of scripture. Let me just give you an example. We're coming up in three weeks on one of the most anticipated holidays of our calendar year—Thanksgiving. And we all will have so much to be grateful for. There's a whole chapter in this book on praying with thanksgiving. That chapter has over 40 separate points in it, arranged in five layers of subdivisions. And in those over 40 points, there are 338 scripture expressions. What Henry was doing was putting before his people and the churches the idea of, here is a wealthy way to really be assured that your prayers will be heard, just pray God's words back to him. It's not all we do in prayer, but if you're asking the question of the scripture being central in our churches, certainly praying the Bible is a big part of that. And now, if you'll just turn the page again, you've got Acts chapter 2. How do we have the Scripture central in our churches? Let it guide our churches. Pray the Bible in our churches. And then do what Peter is doing, and that would be a big part of what any visitor to our churches would have noticed on any Lord's Day morning or Lord's Day evening, and that would have been that there's the preaching of the Bible. And what I want to call your attention about this first sermon in what we officially would call church history, that very first sermon is this. If you go through and count the verses, the sermon is 25 verses long. And out of those 25 verses, 12 of the verses are quotation of scripture, almost half of it. That doesn't mean that all of our preaching has to be quotation of Scripture to that percentage. It's just a very interesting observation, isn't it, that in that first sermon, Peter has chosen four different Old Testament texts and quoting them to those people takes up a good portion of the sermon. What's the rest of the sermon? explaining those texts and then applying those texts to those people. And that is what we call preaching. Preaching is the teaching plus exhortation. Preaching isn't merely teaching, it's teaching plus. It's teaching with a plus. It's teaching with the plus of exhortation. When a teacher gets done, people say, oh, I see that. When a preacher gets done, people say, all right, I'll do it. And it's the exhortation that pushes on them to come to a verdict. Having the word of God central to our churches is preaching it, not merely teaching it, but preaching it with exhortation. And you'll see that right through the preaching and acts that this is what those sermons consist in. the quotation of Scripture, the explanation of those Scriptures, then the application from those Scriptures. And if you go into the writings of the Apostles, we have 28 books in our New Testament, 21 of them we call epistles or letters, they're written by the Apostles. And they're doing the same thing in those letters. If you take Romans, the Apostle Paul is quoting the previous Scriptures, the Old Testament, he quotes them some 60 times. Read the book of Hebrews. Nearly 35 quotations from the Old Testament. 1 Peter, another 15 quotations from the Old Testament. And what they're writing is on the basis of those scriptures. So what I want to do at this point is ask us to turn to three more passages and all of these are going to be in those writings by the apostles. Would you turn with me please to 1 Timothy 4. And there's something in this passage, the fourth chapter, the thirteenth verse, that sometimes we overlook when it comes to the centrality of the Word in our churches. What do we have so far? We get our guidance from the Scripture. What was the second one? When they got their guidance, how did they respond immediately? They did what? They prayed on the basis of that. And then Peter did what? Then Peter preached. Those three things. But now look at 1 Timothy chapter 4 and the 13th verse. Paul is writing to this young pastor who's overseeing the work at Ephesus, and Paul admonishes him, verse 13, till I come. The idea being, Paul is anticipating that he will come, and when he comes, he evidently will take this over. But until he comes, this is what Timothy is to practice. Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine, or to teaching. The exhortation and the doctrine, the exhortation and the teaching are what we call the preaching. But what is this business of give attendance to reading? What Paul was talking about here, what the Holy Spirit was directing Timothy to do, wasn't merely the personal reading of scripture. You can see that from the whole context. The Spirit of God is directing this young pastor to see to it that the scriptures were read publicly to the people. And that is the fourth thing that gives the scripture centrality in our services. In fact, it may be the thing that more than any other single thing would really be stunning to a visitor completely unacquainted with the Bible and why we give it the place that we do—the public, oral reading of the Scriptures. This is what Peter had been doing personally that caused him to stand up and say these scriptures must be fulfilled, and this is what the entire Church is directed to do at this point—to read those scriptures together. It's very interesting in reading his life that you discover that he was doing what many, many churches have done historically. Our church doesn't do this, though we do try to give a central place to the reading of an extended portion of Scripture every Lord's Day morning. But historically, many churches, including perhaps your church, have read a whole chapter of the Old Testament on Lord's Day mornings, and another whole chapter out of the New Testament on Lord's Day evenings. And very often, historically, the preacher has commented through that reading all the way through it, and that hasn't been his sermon. His sermon comes later. During the years that Matthew Henry pastored in England in a little town named Chester, he was there 25 years, and he took his people all the way through the Old Testament that way, every single chapter of it. And he got them almost through the Pentateuch a second time, and he took his whole church in the evenings through the New Testament twice. And that's what his commentary came out of. Now we might think to ourselves, well I can understand, I've got to spend a moment with this, we might think to ourselves, well I can really understand reading the scripture publicly in those days because not everybody had a Bible, and Bibles were very hard to produce, you had to write them all by hand. But today we all have Bibles. Well, I think there is some validity to that, that there may not be as much necessity of reading lengthy, lengthy portions in all of our services. But I would say this, you've got to remember, number one, that very often in our services there are lost people who have never heard a single chapter of the Bible read. Number two, we've got to remember that many Christian people do not read their Bibles. We've also got to remember that many Christian people who do read their Bibles read them very selectively. They don't have a method that gets them through the entirety of Scripture with regularity. They are very selective in their reading. They go to the same common and very reassuring passages over and over again. And what it does is it distorts their view of God. You've also got to remember that many people who do read the entirety of Scripture don't read it well. and don't understand what they're reading because even the way they read isn't with understanding. But folks, I would also point this out. There probably is nothing that we could do in our services that would more testify to the supremacy of God's Word, and also to its clarity, and most of all, to our humble, quiet acceptance of all of it. There probably is nothing that we could do that would testify to those things more than when we just sit quietly and we reverently listen to someone respectfully read God's words in a totally unedited fashion, leaving nothing out. Reading the Bible is central in the life of the church. Now let me ask you to turn to another text, and this is one with which we perhaps are more familiar. It's in the book of Colossians. If you just turn back to it, you don't have to turn very far. Look at the third chapter, Colossians chapter 3, and look at the 16th verse. which just taps right into what we've been dealing with. And it says, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Give it a rich dwelling. Now just keep reading. Look at what it says as one of the outgrowths of that. If we do that as a church, if we let the word of Christ dwell in us richly, this is going to be one of the manifestations of it. that we end up teaching and admonishing one another, now look at what it says, not in those Sunday school rooms and not just from the pulpit, but we end up doing it in what? In psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing. Preach the Bible, read the Bible, sing the Bible. That's what that's talking about. And you notice that of the three categories, that are mentioned here, the first one, look at it, is the what? Is the Psalms. The very book that Peter had been studying, the book that formed the centrality of his sermon on the day of Pentecost. Singing the scripture, or at least singing paraphrases of the scripture, or at the very least being absolutely certain that whatever we sing is really scripturally informed. And we do that for the purpose, it says, of teaching and admonishing one another. The song service isn't just the feel-good part of the service, although singing is what really engages us emotionally, but this is an instructive, admonishing time that goes on. And this is one of the reasons, of course, that in the history of the church, our very best hymns and gospel songs have been written by mature, very careful students of scripture. And if you read the biographies of those people whose hymns we just continue to read, hymns by John Newton and William Cooper and Fanny Crosby and Francis Ridley Habergel, and the Wesley brothers and so on. These people were really astute, conscientious diggers into the scripture. Now that brings me to this last of all, and I won't even ask you to turn to this text. James says, it's really important that we not do like a man did in a church that I heard a Scottish preacher talk about. This older Scottish preacher said that in his first ministry he took a church and very quickly he noticed that there was a man who sat up front who would come in, sit down in his pew, reach over to a box beside him with a key, unlock the box, and take out of the box a Bible and a hymn book. And when the service was over, he would very carefully replace them in the box, close the lid, lock the key, walk out. And then the preacher noticed that's what nearly everybody was doing. They all had boxes like that in their seats. And as he got to know the people, he discovered that most of those people didn't even know the Lord. He decided it was a little parable. And folks, it's the little parable that I want to put before us this morning. The Apostle James says, don't be a hearer of the word, but not a what? We don't leave the Bible at the church after we hear it preached, and we pray it, and we sing it, and we have it central in this way. We walk out and we're doers of the word. Now I want to say something this morning that really could panic some people in this room, and I don't mean to do that. We have hundreds and hundreds of high school students visiting with us, and we're so glad that you're here. Here's the thing that could panic you. Some of you are seniors. Have you stopped and realized that just four short years from this May, you could be graduating not just from high school, but college? Some of you will be married. Some of you will be married just as soon as you can be after you get that diploma in your hands. And you're going to go out into the churches. And you could be a tremendous help to them in keeping the scripture central. That's what all of us can do, folks, when we leave this place. And this is one tremendous and really constraining reason to get a fully Christian education during your college years. Not to go to a secular school. Go to a school where the Bible is central in that school. Where day after day after day you are being fed the scripture and coming to understand the scripture. So that when you pray and when you teach those Sunday school classes, even if it's to the smallest level of children in those classes, When you pray, and you teach, and if you stand up and preach someday, and when you read the scriptures in those services, and when you give guidance on those church boards, that you are scripturally informed and the scripture is central to that ministry. And you know what, if we'll do that, The Bible will do for our churches what it does for us individually. All the scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for four things in righteousness. For doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. I'm going to change the wording a little bit. That the churches may be perfect. throughly furnished unto all good works. May God help us to keep the scripture central. Let's pray together. Loving Heavenly Father, we thank you for the blessing of owning Bibles. And we ask that you would help us to give it the place, not only in our lives, but in our churches, that you appoint. And we will praise you for that grace. We ask in Christ's precious name, amen.