http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16971423/does-the-bible-still-taste-sweet
Solitude is threatening because these voices of various kinds come in and threaten us, like Satan with accusations. And one of the ways to push out those voices is to fill your mind and heart with another voice. And that’s what this session is about.
I honestly didn’t want to talk about COVID-19 anymore. I’m sure you don’t either. But I’m going to do it anyway. And it’s because I think the virus is a good picture of what I want to show you in this session about loving God through daily Bible reading. COVID-19 has a couple trademark symptoms. You know them by now: a cough, shortness of breath, extreme tiredness, and loss of smell and taste. I had COVID-19 (it wasn’t a serious case), and that might have been the most disorienting thing about the virus for me. I’d get hungry, and I’d go to eat something that I’d eaten hundreds, maybe thousands, of times: pasta, pizza, chicken, Chipotle. And it wouldn’t taste right.
In fact, it wouldn’t taste like much at all. It’s the exact same food, the exact same flavors, and yet something changed in me. I did a little bit of research over the last few weeks (and I mean a little — just very little). At least one serious study says that the reason we lose our sense of smell and taste is because the virus disrupts our olfactory cells. It’s the cells that relate to our sense of smell, and 80 percent of our taste comes from what we smell. The virus can’t infect these cells, but when it gets close to them, the brain sends all of these extra immune cells that clog up the olfactory system, in some cases for weeks, or months, or years. People lose their sense of smell or taste. It can happen for years.
Lies That Block Our Spiritual Senses
I suspect something similar happens, at least in seasons, when we resolve to read the Bible. If you’re like me, there are times when you open the Bible, a meal that you’ve enjoyed hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, and yet something doesn’t taste right. Maybe it doesn’t taste like much at all. It’s a symptom, and I believe this happens because our spiritual olfactory senses are under attack. They’ve been disrupted and distracted by a virus, by subtle lies that Satan feeds us about this book. And so, with these few minutes together, I want to expose and confront just four lies that undermine Bible reading.
These aren’t the only four lies, by any means. There are dozens, if not hundreds. But I’ve experienced these four personally, and I suspect that they’re pandemic. I just want you to hear someone say out loud that they’re not true. And I’ve chosen these four in part because I see them all, or at least the shadow of them, in Psalm 19:7–11. If you have a Bible, you can turn there and I’ll or reference verses throughout.
1. The Bible is irrelevant.
The first lie is that the Bible is irrelevant to your real life. Now, right off the bat, we probably wouldn’t say this out loud to anyone. We know that the Bible is theoretically relevant to our situation in some way. But when it comes time to sit down and read it, doubt can begin to creep in, can’t it? The distance between the Bible and me can feel wide — between a book like Ruth and our relationships, between Deuteronomy and the deadlines that we have at school or work, between 1 Peter and the problems that we’re bringing into this new year. Will reading this really old book really make any difference in my job or classes or friendships or future marriage? To which God says in Psalm 19:7, “The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.”
This book makes people wise — genuinely, supernaturally wise. And it’s not just any people, but simple people. People like me. This book can make you wise. It really can. And it makes these simple people wise in every age, from ancient Israel to modern Louisville, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles. And it makes us wise in all kinds of circumstances: school semesters, dating relationships, first jobs, and world missions. God didn’t shoot this book out into the future and hope that it would land a couple thousand years later and be relevant to you. That’s not what happened with this book.
“The Bible is a reviving book, a restoring book. It’s a balm to weary and hurting hearts.”
No, still today, the book that’s in your hands is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (your righteousness), so that the man or woman of God may be complete, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17). This book gives wisdom for every difficult situation and decision you will face. And the testimony of this word is sure.
2. The Bible won’t make sense.
Now, of course, just about anyone can understand some verses, like John 3:16, Romans 8:28, and Psalm 23. I don’t hear anyone saying that they can’t understand any of the Bible, but a lot of us struggle to understand a lot of the Bible. And when we commit to reading the whole Bible over and over year after year, we’re going to walk through strange and difficult passages: Ezekiel, Hebrews, Revelation, and so on. After a while, the exercise can start to feel kind of futile. We may think, “Am I ever going to understand more of this?” To which God says, “The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes” (Psalm 19:8).
Remember, even the apostle Peter had a hard time understanding some passages in the Bible, and he wrote whole books in the Bible. In 2 Peter 3:16, he says that there are some things in Paul’s letters that are hard to understand. To which Paul says, in 2 Timothy 2:7, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” The Lord will enlighten your eyes in everything. That’s what he says. It’s not immediate, of course, but he’ll give you real light now, and then, if you keep looking and looking and looking, that light will grow over months and years and decades.
So, rejoice in what you can see now. It’s a miracle. If you see any beauty, any truth, any worth in this book, it’s a miracle that God has given you. Rejoice in that, and then expect to see more and more and more because this book enlightens our eyes. It doesn’t just give us something to look at, but it actually alters our vision so that it improves the longer that we live in it.
3. The Bible won’t address my pain.
When we look back on these seasons when we’ve struggled to read the Bible, a lot of us can probably point to some heartache or pain where the struggle started, where the Bible lost its taste. That’s not always the case. In fact, for some of us, that’s the very point when the Bible started tasting sweeter. But suffering can become a barrier to hearing God in Scripture. I wonder if you’ve experienced that. It’s a difficult relationship, a chronic pain, or an illness. Some looming uncertainty about your future can become this barrier to hearing God in his words.
You might think, “Will the chapters for today really say anything that will help me through this?” To which God says, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” (Psalm 19:7). This is a reviving book, a restoring book. It’s a balm to weary and hurting hearts. David describes the same reviving power in Psalm 23:1–3, when he says,
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.
This God comes and finds us in our valleys — afflicted, confused, broken — and he leads us into safe pastures and peaceful waters. And his rod for leading us, his rod of peace and comfort and direction, is this book.
Notice that he doesn’t just treat our wounds or our particular suffering, but he revives the soul. He goes deeper than our wounds. He offers a deeper, more meaningful rest and healing than all the things that we might turn to in our suffering.
4. The Bible won’t make me happy.
Some of us don’t even think about the Bible in categories of happiness. Wisdom, yes. Correction, yes. Promises of future happiness in heaven, yes. But meaningful happiness today? Really? Friendship makes us happy. Great food can make us happy. Recognition and praise for our work can make us happy. Sports can make us happy, if the right team wins. Marriage might make us happy. But the Bible? Really? To which God says, at the beginning of Psalm 19:8, “The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.”
God wrote the Bible not merely to give you wisdom in your relationships, or to make you articulate in your theology, or even just to comfort you in your suffering. No, he also wrote the Bible to make you really, really happy. Jesus says of his words in John 15:11, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”
Jesus spoke at the Last Supper, and then in all of Scripture, that his joy might be in you, and that your joy may be full. God gave us a Bible so that we might be as happy as God, infinitely happy through this book — knowing him and loving him through this book. And of all the things that David says about Scripture in these verses here in Psalm 19, this is the piece that he can’t help but say a little bit more about. Consider Psalm 19:9–10:
The rules of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.
This is what the Bible is. It’s more desirable than gold. It just is, no matter how you feel about it in the moment. It is more to be desired than gold. It is sweeter than honey, even when our spiritual taste buds can’t taste it. The Bible is a happy-making book. And so, when Bible reading gets hard, or life gets busy, or you don’t taste what you used to taste in these pages, remember: This book revives the soul. This book gives supernatural wisdom for all of life. This book can be understood. And in understanding it, you’ll begin to understand everything else. And this book is the deepest, richest well for joy.
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How Jesus Knew the Word: His Secret to Scripture Memory
Have you ever considered how Jesus came to know Scripture?
Anyone who reads the Gospels can see that Jesus clearly knew the Hebrew Bible well. He quotes Scripture over and over, and does so with the authority and freshness of someone who hasn’t only memorized God’s words but truly knows God’s heart. Jesus has profound insight into what the words of God mean, and so he is able to put Scripture to use in everyday life. He does not simply recite sentences he put to memory, but he is able to apply Scripture in various situations as he encounters them.
You might think, Well, of course Jesus knew Scripture! Jesus is God! He didn’t need to learn it, or work at it, like we do. But that suspicion betrays a significant misunderstanding in what it means for Jesus to be fully God and fully man in one person.
So, we have a little Christology to do here first. Jesus, as we encounter him in the Gospels — in human flesh and blood, walking this earth with human feet, speaking with a human tongue and mouth — this Jesus quotes and makes use of what Scriptures he has come to know with his human mind. The human Christ didn’t know Scripture simply because he was God. As genuinely human, he had to learn it. What he knew, and quoted, is what he had come to learn. Luke 2 tells us that “the [Christ] child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom,” and then a few verses later: “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature” (Luke 2:40, 52). Born to us as human, Jesus grew not only in his human body but in his human mind.
Jesus is the universe’s unique two-natured person. He is fully God and fully man. Which means he has not only a human body but also a “reasoning soul,” that is, human emotions and a human will, and a human mind.
So, that’s our little Christology lesson. Now, in these few minutes together, let’s look at how Jesus knew Scripture so well.
Jesus’s Relationship with Scripture
In an earlier session this afternoon, we looked at Jesus’s habits of retreating and reentering, of withdrawing from society to commune with his Father and then returning to bless and teach and show compassion to others.
And the major piece we left out there, and now turn to in this session, is Jesus’s relationship with Scripture. It’s a remarkable theme to track in the Gospels. You might think, “Well, he’s God, so he just speaks, and whatever he says is God’s word” — which is true — “so he doesn’t really need to quote previous Scripture.” And then you observe how often, how strikingly often, Jesus says, over and over again, “It is written . . . It is written . . . It is written . . .” Scripture is central and pervasive in his ministry and teaching.
So, I’d like to do two things. First, let’s briefly see it in action and get a taste of the place of Scripture “in the days of his flesh” while among us (Hebrews 5:7). Then let’s address how Jesus knew the word so well. Very practically, how did Scripture come to have such a place in his life and ministry? And I hope that here, as we look at Jesus, you might catch a vision and find encouragement for how Scripture could come to have such a place in your own soul and ministry.
‘It Is Written’
First, then, the taste. Throughout the Gospels, we see in Jesus the evidence of a man utterly captivated by what is written in the text of Scripture.
At the outset of his public ministry, Jesus, led by the Spirit, retreats to the wilderness, and there, in the culminating temptations before the devil himself, he leans, not just once, but three times, on what is written (Matthew 4:4, 6–7, 10; Luke 4:4, 8, 10).
Then, returning from the wilderness to his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus stands up to read, takes the scroll of Isaiah, reads from 61:1–2, and announces, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). He identifies John the Baptist as “he of whom it is written” (Matthew 11:10; Luke 7:27). He rebukes the proud by quoting Scripture (Mark 7:6; Luke 20:17). And when he clears the temple of money-changers, he does so on the grounds of what is written in Isaiah 56:7 (Matthew 21:13; Mark 11:17; Luke 19:46).
At every step on the way to Calvary, he knows that everything will happen, he says, “as it is written” (see especially the Gospel of John, 6:31, 45; 8:17; 10:34; 12:14, 16; 15:25). In Mark 14:21, he says, “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him.” Luke 18:31: “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished.”
His life and ministry turn on the word of God written in Scripture.
How Did Jesus Know the Word?
So, then, how does Jesus know the word so well? If Jesus isn’t simply drawing upon his divinity to quote texts and put to use concepts his human mind had never learned and considered, then how is it that Jesus knows Scripture so well?
The inspiration for this session came from reading Sinclair Ferguson’s chapter on “The Spirit of Christ” (in his book The Holy Spirit). There he addresses our question:
Jesus’s intimate acquaintance with Scripture did not come [magically from heaven] during the period of his public ministry; it was grounded no doubt on his early education, but nourished by long years of personal meditation. Later, in his public ministry, it becomes evident that he was intimately familiar with its contents . . . and also possessed in his human nature a knowledge of God by the Spirit which lent freshness, authority, and a sense of reality to his teaching. (44)
That’s what I want for you wherever God leads you: freshness, authority, and a sense of reality to your teaching.
Now, when Ferguson speaks here about Jesus’s “public ministry,” he implies an important relationship between public and private life: what Jesus says publicly in his three years of ministry reveals what he has learned and come to know in his three decades in private — and what he continues to feed and nurture in secret communion with his Father.
So, there are two parts here to Jesus’s private life, outside his public ministry. First, “his early education.” Before he could even speak, his mother and Joseph and others in Bethlehem, Egypt, and Nazareth would speak to him. Surely Mary quoted Scripture and sang Scripture to her son as he grew. This foundation, this “grounding,” of his early education, was important. Yet Ferguson rightly puts emphasis on the second and longer phase of Jesus’s private life.
He says that “Jesus’s intimate acquaintance with Scripture . . . [was] nourished by long years of personal meditation.” This is the secret to how Jesus knew Scripture so well: long years of personal meditation. Which is what I want to challenge you to this afternoon.
Lost Art of Meditation
What is meditation? It’s important to ask because we don’t do this very well today. This is countercultural. Biblical meditation is a lost art today. We’re not talking Eastern meditation, where you try to empty your mind and repeat a mantra, but biblical meditation, where you fill your mind with God’s words, and his truth, and slow down and seek to more fully understand the meaning of God’s words and feel their significance in your soul.
Biblical meditation pauses and ponders God’s words without hurry. It chews on the truth communicated by the words of God. It doesn’t just keep on reading at the breakneck speed at which our pixelated screens are teaching us to read (or better, skim). Meditation pauses and slows down and seeks to deeply ponder the truth of God’s word, and sense its weight upon the heart. That’s the kind of meditation that nourished “Jesus’s intimate acquaintance with Scripture.”
In other words, Jesus, like us, learned Scripture. He worked at it. Jesus knew Scripture so well, and quoted it so frequently, and spoke with such freshness and authority and a sense of reality because of his “long years of personal meditation.” His public ministry and teaching, with his seemingly effortless familiarity with God’s word, revealed years of personal, private enjoyment of God’s word.
Jesus knew Scripture so well not just because he was God, but because he dedicated his human mind and heart to daily, personal meditation on the word of God — and this even without having his own personal material copy of the Bible, like we do today. He had to remember and rehearse what he had been read and sung and taught. And so he did, to great effect.
Following Jesus into Scripture
I close with a threefold exhortation.
One, become the kind of person now, in God’s word, in private, that you hope to be someday in public ministry. Over time, who you have become in secret over your Bible will be revealed in public ministry.
Two, learn the power of memorizing God’s words. When you come across particular verses, or even phrases, or longer sections that feed and focus your soul in Christ-honoring ways, put them to memory. Try to build them into the folds of your brain, to put to use in sustaining your own soul and the souls of others.
And finally, three, go deeper still — deeper than mere reading, deeper even than mere memory. Make memory serve meditation. Memorize to meditate, and slow down to meditate as you memorize. And memorize, as a side effect, because you meditated. Set a course now for nourishing your “intimate acquaintance with Scripture” with long years of personal meditation, like Jesus, and with the help he purchased for you in the power of his Spirit.
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Sexual Immorality Is Against God and Man: 1 Thessalonians 4:3–8, Part 5
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15681273/sexual-immorality-is-against-god-and-man
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How Does God Lead Us in Daily Decisions?
Audio Transcript
How do I follow God’s lead in my daily decisions? I know he’s my shepherd. He’s leading me. I think so. But how do I know if I am following him?
That’s such an important question we all must answer for ourselves, and it was a question taken up by a very young Pastor John Piper, in his very first summer as a pastor. In fact, just a few weeks into his pastorate, Pastor John preached through some of his favorite Psalms. One of them being, of course, Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (Psalm 23:1–3).
I was 22 before I first saw one of the lines in this psalm. Now I’d seen it, but there is seeing and then there is seeing, right? Verse 3, “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” I’d never seen “for his namesake” until I went to seminary. Well, yes, I’d seen it. I’d read the words, but you can read over phrases in the Bible a hundred times and they never hit you for what they mean.
Open My Eyes to See
I went to visit Mrs. Bromgren just before her surgery on Wednesday. She was getting her eye operated on, and it was all bandaged over, and I read to her this verse from Psalm 119:18,
Deal bountifully with thy servant that I may live and observe thy word, open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.
And I said, “Isn’t it true that one of the best things about having two good eyes is the Bible, being able to read the Bible? But isn’t it true, too, that there is another pair of eyes that God has given us? The apostle Paul calls them the eyes of the heart, and he prays in Ephesians 1 that the eyes of the heart might be enlightened. I think that’s what Psalm 119 is talking about: ‘May the eyes be open that we may behold wondrous things out of thy law.’”
Well, I hadn’t seen that phrase there in Psalm 23 as wondrous. I’d been as deaf to that theme as you could imagine, but there it was, “he leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” The thought that God might have been causing me to do right ever since I was a little boy for his sake just never dawned on me. I just read right over that phrase. It never struck me, though I’d read it hundreds of times.
So I want to zero in on that phrase for a few minutes, but before we get there, we better look at the phrase before it, namely, “he leads me in paths of righteousness,” and ask how God does this.
How Does God Light Our Paths?
The picture, of course, here is a shepherd leading sheep along with his crook, or maybe with his call. “The sheep know my name, and they follow me.” But when we get out of the metaphor of sheep and shepherd into our own experience in our day and ask, “How does God lead in paths of righteousness,” we need to ponder a little bit and poke around in the Scriptures to see how he does it.
“In my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road.”
Now, in my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road. I’ve never seen a cloud of fire or pillar of cloud like they had in the wilderness. That’s not part of my experience, nor have I ever heard an audible word that I know was God speaking. A lot of people talk in that language, and maybe I’m just callous, but that’s never been part of my experience to see God in some clear manifestation showing me it’s this way and not that way, or to hear a voice like my teacher at Wheaton said he heard one day while he was shaving in front of the mirror, “Go to Wheaton from Boston.” He was in Boston. “Go to Wheaton.”
God can do that if he wants. He’s just never done it for me, and he doesn’t do it for most people most of the time. The way he leads us is apparently differently, and I think we can get a clue from what David would say in Psalm 119:105. There, he says, “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” And in that same psalm, verse 9, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to thy word.”
So one answer to the question, “How does God lead his people in paths of righteousness” is: he has revealed a lot about those paths of righteousness. He’s described what sort of paths are righteous paths and told us to walk in them so that we can read and obey. Surely, David did that often because he talked about meditating on the word day and night.
Why the Bible Is Not Enough
But now, that answer is only half the answer, isn’t it? By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track. No matter how wonderful the Bible is, and how we would be utterly lost without it, it is not enough by itself and for two reasons.
“By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track.”
One, we make lots of decisions in life which are not prescribed for us in the Bible — hundreds of little decisions every day and some big ones in which we look in the Bible and there are no sentences about that. How many children to have, where to send your child to school, where to go to work, this, that, just hundreds of little things that we have to decide every day, and we don’t want to bracket those and say, “Well, that’s not part of Christianity. I’ll just make those decisions anyway I please, and then Christianity is something else.” God has to do with all those decisions. But the Bible doesn’t give explicit guidance for every one of those little decisions and, therefore, something more has to be said if we’re to walk in right paths in those decisions, as well as the ones where the Bible is perfectly explicit.
The second reason that the Bible, by itself, is not enough to guide us in those paths of righteousness is this: a path of righteousness is doing the right thing with a right attitude or a right motivation. It’s not just a bodily action. It’s having a right attitude towards your wife as well. But, reading words on a page doesn’t always change attitudes.
You can read over what you ought to feel like in the Bible a hundred times and maybe your attitude is just the same. Something else has to come into play, and I think that’s why David said, “God leads us in paths of righteousness,” and why Paul said, “All who are led by the Spirit are the sons of God.” We need not only revelation coming to us from outside, namely the Bible, we need transformation coming to us inside from the Holy Spirit. The word and the Spirit together are the leadership that we need.
Renewed in the Mind of Christ
Paul says in Romans 12:2 this very familiar word, “Don’t be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” — why? — “so that you can prove — or better, approve of — “the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect.” In other words, you’ve got to have something happen up here on the inside, some changed attitudes, some changed feelings, or when little decisions present alternatives, you won’t know how to prove which one of those is the will of God.
So the Bible is the input into that new mind, and the Spirit takes the word and begins to shape our thinking, mold our emotions, so that even when there’s no explicit command in Scripture for this decision you’re facing, you weigh all the alternatives and you’re weighing those alternatives with the mind of Christ. Paul says, “We have the mind of Christ.” And then when you make the decision, you look back and you don’t say, “My, what a smart fellow was I,” but rather, you say, “Thank you for your word that informed the principles of my life, and thank you for the Spirit that shaped my emotions and my priorities so that I made this decision your way,” and God then gets the credit for the leadership, which means personally, for me, that I have been driven basically for all of life to meditate day and night on the word and to pray continually that the Holy Spirit would work on me.
You can’t over-intellectualize the Bible. You can’t over-spiritualize your private experience with God. It’s both/and, not either/or. It has been in my experience, and I haven’t found the two in conflict but tremendous complements for guidance in life.
