Uh, we're going to begin by looking at Psalm 119, Psalm 119, right about the middle of your Bible. And we're going to begin reading at verse 97 and read down through verse 112. Uh, Psalm 119 and verses 97 through 112. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies for it is ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the agent for I keep your precepts. I hold back my feet from every evil way in order to keep your word. I do not turn aside from your rules for you have taught me. How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth. Through your precepts I get understanding and therefore I hate every false way. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. I have sworn an oath and confirmed it to keep your righteous rules. I am severely afflicted. Give me life, O Lord, according to your word. Accept my freewill offerings of praise, O Lord, and teach me your rules. I hold my life in my hand continually, but I do not forget your law. The wicked have laid a snare for me, but I do not stray from your precepts. Your testimonies are my heritage forever, for they are the joy of my heart. And I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever to the end. Amen so far, God's word. John White in his little book, The Fight, recounts that during his days of teaching psychiatry, he dealt with a number of university students who became Christians. And many of these young men and women became Christians with no Christian background whatsoever. They weren't raised around the church. They knew nothing about the Bible. They had no concept of what the Christian life was. Many of them were international students who really had never even seen Christians until they came to the university. And he noted that while all of these people kind of started out deep in a hole as far as knowing how to live the Christian life, many of them accelerated quickly in their growth and they saw their lives changing dramatically. And he said, it was obvious to me as a professor that these people were not the same people they were when they came to know Christ. And he said, I set out as a university professor would to kind of find out what was going on and what was causing this radical transformation of life in these particular students. And he said, it quickly became obvious to me. He said, the students who spent more time studying the scriptures grew far more rapidly than the students who didn't take Bible study seriously. And he said, I didn't have any kind of scientific proof of that, but he said just the anecdotal evidence was quite strong. The more these people immerse themselves in the word of God, the more their lives changed. And the students who spent less time in the word saw less growth and maturity. And I quickly came to the conclusion, White says, that there is no way to become fruitful in your knowledge of God and in your service of God without hard, disciplined, organized effort at Bible study. R.C. Sproul and his little book on knowing scripture at this point, I think would interject and make sure you understand that there's a great difference between Bible reading and Bible study. Sproul in his book wants students to understand that simply reading a paragraph or two every day is a good thing, but it's no substitute for taking out a notebook and really studying your Bible and looking up words in a concordance to see how they're used in the rest of scripture and perhaps getting a Bible dictionary or even a Bible commentary and using the various tools that are available to really grasp The meaning of the word. I mentioned that because when you come to Psalm 119, which is the longest chapter in all the Bible, and it's a chapter about the Bible. Uh, the Psalmist in this particular section talks about how committed he is to obeying the word of God. He writes about how the word is his meditation and how he keeps God's precepts, verse 100. How he wants to keep your word, verse 101. I do not turn aside from your rules, verse 102. Verse 104, though through your precepts I get understanding and therefore I hate every false way. Verse 106, I've sworn an oath and confirmed it to keep your righteous rules. Verse 108, teach me your rules. Verse 109, I do not forget your law. Verse 110, I do not stray from your precepts. Do you get the idea? The psalmist is here writing that my life is a life that is built on the scriptures. We used to sing in most churches, we still sing it here. A great old hymn, How Firm a Foundation. God has laid for us in the gift of his holy word. We build our lives on the solid foundation of what God has taught us in his word. And the psalmist says, this is what I really live to do. I live to be a faithful servant of the Lord. And to be a servant of the Lord means I have to be a servant of the word of the Lord. Jesus emphasized the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount. He tells us that wisdom is knowing and doing what God tells us in his word. And foolishness is knowing God's word but not doing it. And so the psalmist says, I want to be wise. I want to be wiser than all my teachers. And I know that the source of wisdom is faithfulness to what God has taught me. Now, that implies something else, though, doesn't it? It implies that you know what the Bible says, because you can't keep the word of God if you don't know the word of God. And so we can only assume rightly that the psalmist has devoted himself to learning the scriptures. It's more than a mere assumption, though. Look at verse 97. Oh, how I love your law. And how does the psalmist say that he loves the law of God? I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. My first Hebrew class. was with Dr. Jack B. Scott. Some of you will remember him as the writer of those Sunday school lessons in the Clarion Ledger for nearly 40 years. On Saturday in the paper, there was always a little Sunday school lesson, and Dr. Scott wrote those week after week after week for years. And I can remember in Dr. Scott's Hebrew class, we were trying to learn Hebrew vocabulary, and we came to the Hebrew word for meditation here. And he tried to show us that the root of the word was actually agricultural. It's the same word that a Jewish farmer would have used, Dr. Scott said, to describe his cow chewing its cud. And that's what meditation is. It's constantly rehashing what you've already learned and thinking about it some more and trying to draw out of it every last bit of nutrition you can get, just as a cow chews that cud over and over again and tries to make sure that nothing is left behind. The psalmist says, I love God's law. And I love his law and it causes me to meditate on that law all day long. I'm always thinking about what does God say about this? What does God want me to do? And the psalmist has that kind of attitude because, one, he knows the scripture. He doesn't have to go look up a verse every time something happens. He's already read it and studied it and memorized it and meditated on it and thought it through and tried to figure out all the implications of it. And the psalmist is very much like what they wrote of John Bunyan, the fellow who wrote The Pilgrim's Progress. You know, they said if you cut bunion, he would bleed Bible. I mean, so saturated was he with the scriptures that every word came out sounding like Bible and every thought kind of reproduced the Bible. He was just full of scripture. And that's the kind of attitude that the psalmist has here in Psalm 119. He knows God's word. He wants to obey God's word. And to do this, he loves God's word and meditates on it. He chews the cud of scripture day and day. And because of that, verse 105, your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. We've all heard that verse, haven't we? It's the little verse that Gideon Bibles have printed in the front of them. And it's a verse that most Sunday school classes have somewhere posted on the wall, or at least they used to. And it is a reminder to us that God has given us his word to enlighten those of us with dark minds and dark hearts who live in a dark world. And by the scriptures, God helps us see clearly who he is and who we are and what he has done for us in Christ and what he wants us to be. But it all relates to the Bible. And so it's only appropriate that if we're going to talk about the growing Christian life, that we spend a considerable amount of time talking about growing in our use of the Bible. And that's what we're going to do tonight and, Lord willing, next Tuesday night. Now, if you look at the handout, the first part is on our approach to Bible study. We're going to look at that this evening. And then next week we'll come back and talk about a method for Bible study. A lot of what you're going to get out of Bible study has to do with how you approach the Bible. Approach is serious. I was watching the news for a few minutes before I left home this evening and they were showing all those airports that had been closed from the bad weather. And they were interviewing pilots who were saying that it was still pretty dangerous in places even though they cleared runways because everything just off the runway was still packed feet high in snow. The pilots were talking about how important approach is. You've got to make sure you're coming in at just the right angle and just the right speed, or you're going to find yourself in a snowbank or hitting a snowbank with your wing as the winds come across the runways. Approach is important in aviation, but it's also important in Bible study. And the first thing you have to remember when you look at the Bible is that it is the word of God. It is unique. On the cover of your Bible, it probably says, Holy Bible. And the word holy means separated, to be set apart. And in this case, it means that the Bible is separated or set apart from every other book that we have. And what makes the Bible holy or unique and separate is the fact that it is inspired by the Holy Spirit. The apostle Paul is quite plain in those familiar words of 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, that all scripture is God-breathed or inspired and is profitable for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be mature and thoroughly equipped for every good work. All scripture is God-breathed. It all comes from God. It all bears the imprint of God's authorship. The Holy Spirit has been involved in that. And when we read the gospel of John, we need to remember that this is part of the library of God's revelation of himself to us given by the Holy Spirit. kept by the Holy Spirit, preserved by him, so that even today we can hear the word of God. Peter tells us in 2 Peter 1 that no prophecy ever came by human interpretation or human invention. It is all given to us by men who were carried along by the Holy Spirit. We understand from the Old Testament and the New that the Bible is different. It's different because it comes from God. All scripture is inspired, Paul says. Please remember that. That means that not only is the gospel of John inspired in the book of Romans and Psalm 23, but also that census back there in the book of Numbers and those genealogies that we have in the gospel of Matthew and in the gospel of Luke, those are just as inspired as the rest of scripture. And Paul is quick to add that they are not only inspired, but they're also profitable. And so you need to read those begat passages and you need to wrestle with them and you need to ask why in the world did God give us this and all those strange Levitical laws and sacrifices and worship rituals for Israel. Why did the Holy Spirit so move Moses to write those things that we thousands of years later would have them in our hands? Surely God has something for us here. And it is our duty, our God-given duty to try to find that out. We can't just dismiss it because all scripture is inspired. The Bible is unique. It is the word of God. Second, the Bible is clear. Not everything is equally clear, I understand that. There are some rather difficult questions in the Bible. How many of you understand what Paul meant about praying for the dead in 1 Corinthians 15? Anybody wanna volunteer an answer to that? How many of you understand the passage where Peter talks about Jesus going and preaching to the spirits who were in hell? Do y'all know where you can find that one in the Bible? There are a lot of things in the Bible that are rather complex and complicated. That's not what we mean when we say that the Bible is clear. When theologians talk about the clarity of scripture or the big word they like to use is perspicuity of scripture. Take that one to the coffee shop tomorrow and when they say, what'd you do last night? We can say, well, we talked about the perspicuity of scripture. You'll certainly get their attention. But when we talk about declarative scripture, what we mean is that the basic message of the Bible is so clear that anyone who reads it from Genesis to Revelation is going to quickly see and readily grasp what God wants us to do with the Bible. You can't miss it. It's a book about who God is and what God is like, what his character is. It's a book about how God has made everything and how God ruled everything by his providence. It's a book that describes God as both holy and loving, as both wise and compassionate. But it's also a book about who we are and how God made us to be his image bearers in the world and how he made us to be his kind of superintendents over the creation. And yet it's a book that also reminds us that we forfeited that place of holy status by sinning against God. Adam, our first father sinned and then all of us who have descended from Adam have walked in his ways and we've become sinners too. We've rejected God's authority and we've broken his laws and we are rightfully under his curse. And that sin has left us in what the catechism refers to as a state of misery and a place of death. And we live our lives in fear. because we know that there is a God and we know that we will one day stand before him at the day of judgment. And we readily understand that our lives are such that if God were to cast us into hell, he would have every right in doing so. There will not be anyone who can complain, Lord, I was too good for this because all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And the wages of sin is death. But as we keep reading, what else do we find? We find that from the very beginning after Adam and Eve sinned, God is already promising to send a savior, a seed of the woman who's going to deliver them. And God keeps expanding that promise and he keeps calling people into his mercy and reminding them that he is a God who saves sinners and a God who has great compassion on those who come to him. He tells us very plainly that anyone who repents and comes to him through the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved. Doesn't really matter what our past background was, doesn't matter what we did 10 years ago or 20 years ago or how many terrible things we've done. If we repent of our sins and come to Christ, we will be welcomed with open arms and we'll be forgiven all our sins and adopted into God's family and cared for by God's spirit until Jesus makes all things new. Little children can understand that. People with IQs way down at the bottom end of the scale can understand that. It doesn't take a PhD in Semitic languages or systematic theology to grasp the basic meaning of the Word of God. It is very, very clear. When we read the Bible, we need to read it as a book that God has given to us, not to hide himself, but to reveal himself. We need to read the Bible as a book where we can find who God is and what God is doing and what God says to us and what God wants us to be and do. which leads us to C on the outline, the purpose of the Bible. What is the purpose of scripture? Presbyterians would say to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. And that would be true because that's our purpose in life as well. But the real purpose of the Bible is to teach us who God is, and what God wants us to be as his people. That's the bottom line. The Bible is intended to teach us who God is and what he wants us to be as his people. We teach children in Sunday school. The scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God and what duties God requires of man. It's a good summary. of what the Bible is about. Does the Bible touch every area of life? Yes. You can't read the Bible without realizing it has a lot of things to say about how you use your money, for example. It also has a great deal to say about how you use your money. the legal system and what is justice and how laws ought to be written and administered. It says a lot about family relationships and personal relationships and those kinds of things. But you should never think that God gave you the Bible to be a textbook on every area of life. We find people who are wanting to do that in our time. I don't watch a whole lot of Christian television. Usually it's in very small snippets of 30 seconds or less when I'm going by the channels for something else. But every now and then I'll hear something, it'll make me stop and I'll listen. And I realized that there are people out there who are making a whole living off trying to develop a a view of Christian economics, for example. and how you should not just manage your personal finances, but how the economy should be structured and so forth. And there are others who are trying to form a whole Christian legal society, which enforces biblical laws in every area of American government. They want us to reproduce American government to look like the Bible's form of government. And I appreciate their desire to be biblical, As my former professor Al Foint used to say, you have to be careful that you're not going to be more biblical than the Bible and more pious than Christ. And the Bible, while it has a great deal to say about subjects that touch on chemistry and botany and economics and monetary systems and so forth, please remember that God never gave us any book of the Bible on economics. And he never gave us a book of the Bible to teach us about biology. The Bible is true in everything it teaches about those subjects, and I wanted to emphasize that. There is no error in the Bible, not even in the scientific and historical portions of the word. But it's also equally clear that there's bias whole books of the Bible given to understanding how God saves people from their slavery and how God delivers people from the fear of death and how God justifies people by the work of Christ and how God expects his people in the church to live holy and loving lives. But there is nothing in the Bible that tries to explain how to build a Christian society. In fact, if you look at the New Testament, you'll find that the apostles lived right there under the oppression of the Roman government with all of its ungodly worldly ways. And you don't find the apostles trying to preach a new world order. You don't find them trying to preach revolution against the Roman empire. They tell their people instead to submit to the authorities because God is over all things, even the Romans. And they tell the people to live quiet and peaceable lives and chastity and holiness. And you can see that the purpose of the New Testament epistles isn't to teach you how to change government, but how to live a holy life under whatever government it is you find yourself. Because the purpose of the Bible isn't to build a kingdom in this world as Jesus plainly tells us. His kingdom is not of this world. His kingdom is spiritual and ministerial. And His kingdom is an invisible kingdom in this world and a glorious kingdom only in the world to come. So don't twist the Bible into something that it wasn't meant to be. D, the Bible is sufficient. And what Christians have always meant by this is the Bible is an adequate and complete statement of what God tells you you need to know in order to live a Christian life. The New Testament tells us that God has given us everything necessary for life and godliness. There's nothing missing. The Bible tells us that God's word is able to make us mature and thoroughly equipped for every good work. The apostle Paul is quite plain that we who know Christ are his workmanship and he has created us in Christ Jesus for every good work. And we learn what those good works are in the word of God. Everything you need to know to live a well-equipped mature Christian life is in the scriptures. And We've often heard Christians say for 2000 years that the Bible is therefore the only infallible rule of what we believe and what we do. It's the only inspired book and it contains all the inspired messages that we have. You say, well, how about that? But why is that such a big deal? It's a big deal because in our own generation, we find Bible-believing Christians who are now looking for God's guidance and revelation somewhere other than the Bible. We have people who tell us that God leads them by dreams and visions and that God speaks to them with all kinds of inner hunches and intuitions. and that God works in their minds through various kinds of mystical experiences. And they're putting out fleeces like Gideon and they're doing all kinds of things to try to learn what is the will of God. And you need to understand that Christians with the exception of a kind of mysticism that kind of rose through the middle ages Christians have always taken the position that the only way to be sure of what is the will of God is to look to the Bible. You remember in the book of Acts, when the apostle Paul came to Berea, Luke tells us that the Bereans were more noble than those at Thessalonica. Do you remember why? What made them more noble? Because as they listened to Paul the missionary preach, they searched the scriptures daily to see if everything he said was true. So here is Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles, the great leader of the New Testament church by this time, the best known proclaimer of the gospel, the great theologian of the church, the guy who's going to write a significant portion of the New Testament for us. And the Bereans say, well, that's good, Paul, we like that, it's pretty impressive, we like what you have to say, but first let us check out what you say by the Bible. Let's check the scriptures every day and see if what you say is true. And Luke mentions this, not in some kind of ugly sense as, ah, those Bereans, why didn't they just take Paul's word for what it was, the word of God? No, Luke mentions it in a commending way to say they're more noble because they do this. God's pleased with this. God is pleased when we check things by the scriptures. We need more people like Bereans today. Yesterday, I was doing chapel at Presbyterian Christian School in Hattiesburg. And I walked by one of the classrooms on my way to the chapel service. And I saw the big poster that was up in the room. And it was that verse from Jeremiah where God says, I know my plans for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you. It was kind of paraphrase of it on the poster. And I see that everywhere. I see it on t-shirts and everywhere. Everybody wants to quote that verse from Jeremiah. And I can remember when I was teaching Jeremiah in an Old Testament class at school, students would come in with that verse. And I'd say, have you ever read that verse? No. Have you ever read what God means by that verse? No. What do you think it means? Well, it means that God's will is to make me happy and holy and prosperous and joyful and remove all the complications in my life and to make me successful. And if they were on a soccer team somewhere, it was so that God will give us the win on the soccer field this week. And I said, you might want to go back and read that. Jeremiah didn't preach in days of great victory and happiness and giddiness on behalf of the people of Judah. He preached in dark times. And he was telling them, you're going through very, very dark days. But don't give up hope. because God does have plans to restore you down the road. God does have plans to save you in the end. Don't let go of Christ is the message of the New Testament. Even when you're struggling, even when you feel like you're about to cave in, when it feels like the whole world is falling in on you, don't give up because God has plans to prosper you and to save you, even though you don't see it now. And so I would tell the soccer players, you know, maybe God's plan for you is to go 0 and 26 this year. Oh, they'd say, well, maybe. And the message of the verse is, even if you go 0 and 26, trust in the Lord and wait on Him. But you don't know that if you don't read what the Bible has to say, and if you don't put it in context, and if you don't realize that the Bible is a clear statement of the will of God. I can remember when I was in college, they came out with that little pamphlet called the Four Spiritual Laws, Campus Crusade for Christ. And the first spiritual law was, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. That was the way you were supposed to start sharing the gospel. And students were snatching them up and giving these little pamphlets out all over campus. And I can remember one particular fellow getting that and reading the first law and said, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Hmm. Bet Judas thought that too. How would Judas have responded to God's wonderful plan for his life? Sometimes you have to be a little deeper in your understanding of scripture and you need to realize that the whole Bible is the Word of God and the whole Bible is all you really need to live a life of godliness and holiness. God is not going to tell you in the scriptures who to marry or what college to go to or which mutual fund to invest your retirement in. God is not going to tell you whether to choose the general mill serial or the post brand serial. If you're looking for the Bible for that kind of revelation or knowledge of the will of God, you're not going to get it. But what the Bible does tell you is that you need to grow in wisdom. So that when you have to make choices about, am I going to marry this person or that person, or am I going to major in this or major in that, or am I going to pick this mutual fund over that mutual fund, or this serial over that serial, I can do so well, understanding all the factors that are involved. And the Bible is clear that wisdom comes from God, and that he does not turn away those who seek him, asking for wisdom. And so to live a faithful Christian life, we need to pray every day that the Lord would give us the wisdom to know what to say, what to choose, what to value, what to reject. And then trust that He'll do that, because He's not going to send a ray of sunshine over the right choice every time and leave everything else in darkness. Sometimes you're just going to have to launch out by faith and make a decision. But you're going to have to make that decision trusting that God is going to bless you as you seek to do his will the best you know how. And then E is the power of the Bible. We kind of mentioned this at the beginning when we talked about John White's university students. The Bible transforms. The Bible produces fruit when it's read and learned and loved and obeyed. You remember that Jesus told the parable about the sower who went out to sow his seed. And some of the seed landed on the road and some landed along the roadside and some landed in thorns and thistles and some landed on good ground. Everybody sort of knows the parable. But there are two things about the parable that sometimes get overlooked. One is that Jesus tells us that the seed is the word of God. And so every time the Bible is read, God is sowing seed. Every time you come to a Bible study, every time you listen to a sermon, every time you pick up your Bible and read your daily devotional, every time you tune into a preacher on TV, when the word of God goes out, the seed is being sown. But the second thing Jesus tells us is in Luke's version, the application goes like this. Therefore, be careful how you listen. Because sometimes the problem with the sermon isn't the preacher. I know that sounds sort of self-serving. But sometimes the problem isn't the preacher and isn't the sermon. Sometimes the problem is in the listener, you know, communication. Theory tells us that you've got to have a transmitter, something that sends out the message, and you've got to have a message to be communicated, but you also have to have a receptor, someone who's going to receive the message. And what Jesus is telling us in the parable of the sower is that sometimes we're better receivers than others. I know I have a lot of friends who preach on the parable of the sower and they take it to mean that in every congregation there are four kinds of people. There are those people who just never hear anything. And there are those people who every now and then hear something. And those who sort of hear things every now and then but they forget about it when they go home. And then there are those people who really soak up the Word. And I guess there is an element of truth to that. But the way I understand the parable is this. When Jesus says, be careful how you listen, He is reminding us that We can be any one of those four types of soils anytime we're around the Word of God. And sometimes we can read the Bible and we're so preoccupied with what we're about to do and we're trying to get our daily devotion out of the way that we read that paragraph and if I were to ask you 10 seconds later what you read, you'd say, I don't remember. And then there are other times when we come and we sit in a Bible study and we sort of like it. There's something good there. I get into this. It's interesting to me. And it's interesting until you go out and you get in your car and you pull out your phone and you see the 27 emails and 38 text messages that are waiting on you and you start going through there. And then the real business of life is going again and all of a sudden you've forgotten everything about the Bible study 15 minutes before. And then there are those nights or mornings where you come to church. You sit there and you really feel like God is speaking to you in the scriptures that day. I mean, that's just what I needed. That's the kind of situation I'm going through. This is what I need to do. And you say, I'm going to repent of my sins. I'm going to be more faithful in prayer. Or I'm going to be a better witness to the people at work. Or I'm going to love my next door neighbor that nobody else loves this week, because Jesus requires me to. And you go out and you do it on Monday. And it just doesn't go well. The neighbor cusses you out, or the people at work just really don't appreciate your witness to them, and they tell you to mind your own business. And you become discouraged and rejected. And you just say, I'm not very good at this. And so you do what? You quit. And you never think about it again. And then Jesus says, then there are those times when you are like fertile soil, well-prepared, and you hear the word, and the Spirit of God waters that word, and it changes your life. Jesus says, you understand the difference isn't in the quality of the preaching or the Bible study teaching or the Bible itself. The difference is in you. I mentioned this in one of our earlier studies, but I suppose it bears repeating. When I was growing up, It was good practice in churches that I knew for people when they came in on Sunday mornings, not to chat and to visit and catch up on the news. But once you entered the sanctuary or the worship center or auditorium, whatever it was in the church where you grew up, you were supposed to come in and you were supposed to be quiet and you were supposed to pray. And you were to ask for God's blessing on the minister as he led the worship and preached the word. And you were to ask for God's blessing on the musicians that were gonna help lead the praise. And you were to pray for all the people who were there in the room with you and ask that God would speak to them and minister to them and provide them a blessing in that hour. And you were to pray for the people that weren't there. that you thought about and you were to pray for yourself and ask that you would have a receptive and teachable heart and say, Lord, don't let me sit in judgment on your word. Let me just hear what you have to say today and water the word by the power of the Holy Spirit so that I'll get something that I'll take with me and use well to the glory of your name. That's what the purpose of the prelude was. It was a chance for everybody to sort of pull down the curtain on other things and kind of realize that they were to be focused on the Lord. And preachers would tell us, you know, real preparation starts long before you get here. What were you thinking about and talking about on your way to church this morning? What were you thinking about and talking about while you were getting ready for church this morning? What about last night? Did you give any thought to the fact that you were about to come to the house of God and to worship him? Did you pray that God would give you a good night's sleep so that you'd be well rested and not yawning all during the service today? Did you come because you wanted the word of God to take root in your heart? Did you come ready really to listen? Therefore, Jesus says, be careful how you listen. Because a lot of times the power of the Bible is limited only by our willingness to hear what the Bible says and to receive it and to obey it. Paul writes about it. a particular congregation in the New Testament that he said, when I came and preached to them, they received my message for what it really was, the word of God and not the word of man. And you can almost sense the excitement in Paul's pen as he puts those words to paper. I had a congregation that was really tuned in. I had a congregation that was really prepared. They were expecting to hear from God and to meet with God. And I imagine if you're a believer, you've probably had times like that. We call them mountaintop experiences or revivals or different things. But I think what Paul really wanted us to understand is that this ought not to be a sporadic occasion that happens every now and then. It ought to be something that happens regularly in our lives. And it happens regularly because we are really committed to hearing what God has to say. And we are devoted to the Bible as being holy and clear and sufficient and powerful. Remember that verse in Hebrews that tells you that the word of God is alive and active and sharper than any double-edged sword It's able to penetrate even the deepest parts of who we are. It can get to places that medicines can never get to. I know many a person who's been to counselors and received all kinds of psychiatric drugs and they've done something, but they just can't get to those same places that the Bible can get to. Dividing soul and spirit, bone and marrow because God is able to penetrate by his word into places that we might not even have known existed. And he's able to give us a sensitive conscience where our consciences used to be hard. And he's able to put a rain or a bridle on our tongues that used to be awfully uncontrolled. And he's able to redirect our thoughts and change our lifestyles through the word. And like the sowing of seed, the distribution of the word is rarely ever dramatic. I mean, we don't cast seed by hand much anymore like they did in Jesus's day. We have equipment that does it. But if you can picture a old-fashioned farmer with a seed bag on his shoulder just throwing seed out. And if you were going down the path watching him, I doubt if you probably would ever stop and say, wow, look at his method. I mean, he keeps that elbow tight so that it all goes just the right distance. You know, you can tell he used to cast for brim. Look at how he's got just the right kind of action. Nobody pays any attention to that. And nobody stops when the guy's sowing seed and parks on the side of the road expecting the plants to grow up immediately. And no one is disappointed when the farmer puts out a seed and then you drive by day after day after day and nothing seems to happen. Because you realize that that seed is down there under the ground doing its thing and it's pretty invisible and it's pretty silent. And it's not going to be for a while until it begins to shoot through the ground and establish roots and grow up and become mature and fruitful. That's just something that's going to happen after a while over a period of time. You know, that's the way the Bible tends to work. It rarely ever hits us in the nose with one of those big old family Bible type size things that knocks us back three feet and leaves us bloodied. As Jesus tells us, it tends far more often to work like yeast. And it just does a little bit here and there, silently, imperceptibly, but really and powerfully. It leavens the whole lump and changes us and makes us the kind of people that God has called us to be. And so we just keep going, keep reading, we keep meditating, we keep applying, we keep praying, we keep listening with the assurance that the God who gave us his word We'll also work through that word to make us into mature believers. Let's pray.