Bible Revival E-Book

Kenneth Berding

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 149

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A passionate plea to make the Bible occupy the central place of a Christians life. It not only explores the current malady of not taking the Bible seriously, but it goes deeper to uncover its reasons. Table of Contents Introduction 1. A Revival of Learning the Word: Confronting Distractions, Priorities, and the Pretext of Being Too Busy 2. A Revival of Valuing the Word: Confronting Haziness, Self-Sufficiency, and the Perception That the Bible Isnt Enough 3. A Revival of Understanding the Word: Confronting Superficiality, Superiority, and the Assumption That It Should Come Easily 4. A Revival of Applying the Word: Confronting Special Interests, Therapeutism, and a Lack of Dependence on the Spirit 5. A Revival of Obeying the Word: Confronting Sentimentality, Avoidance, and the Opinion That I Have the Right to Decide 6. A Revival of Speaking the Word: Confronting Fear, Excuses, and the Idea That Its the Responsibility of the Clergy Appendix A: The Easiest Way to Memorize the Bible Appendix B: A Method for Attaining Bible Fluency

Leseprobe

Bible Revival

Recommitting Ourselves To One Book

Kenneth Berding

Bible Revival: Recommitting Ourselves to One Book

Copyright © 2013 by Kenneth Berding

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

First edition by Weaver Book Company

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781683592020

Digital ISBN 9781683592037

Cover Photo: Joshua Hynes

Copyeditor: Juliana Semione

To my oldest daughter, Lydia, a woman

who loves the Word of God.

CONTENTS

Preface

1A Revival of Learning the Word

Confronting Distractions, Priorities, and the Pretext of Being Too Busy

2A Revival of Valuing the Word

Confronting Haziness, Self-Sufficiency, and the Perception That the Bible Isn’t Enough

3A Revival of Understanding the Word

Confronting Superficiality, Superiority, and the Assumption That It Should Come Easily

4A Revival of Applying the Word

Confronting Special Interests, Therapeutism, and a Lack of Dependence on the Spirit

5A Revival of Obeying the Word

Confronting Sentimentality, Avoidance, and the Opinion That I Have a Right to Decide

6A Revival of Speaking the Word

Confronting Fear, Excuses, and the Idea That It’s the Responsibility of the Clergy

Appendix A: The Easiest Way to Memorize the Bible

Appendix B: A Method for Attaining Bible Fluency

PREFACE

In 1859 and then again in 1904 a deep and penetrating work of the Holy Spirit engulfed the country of Wales. Wales had already seen many other periods when God had moved in revival—perhaps more than any geographical location in the history of Christianity. But these two spiritual awakenings were two of the most significant. In both cases, the Holy Spirit produced a profound increase of love for God among professing Christians and moved in the hearts of tens of thousands of people who did not know Christ, bringing them to repentance and a relationship with God. But there was a striking difference between the two revivals.

Collin Hansen and John Woodbridge compared the two awakenings and commented about Evan Roberts, the best-known preacher of the second: “Roberts, a gifted exhorter who led meetings filled with prayers, singing, and testimonies, did not prioritize Bible teaching. Compared to the 1859 revival, fewer Welsh preachers taught biblical doctrine. Instead, many new converts sought mystical experiences.”1

The positive effects of the first revival both for the church and for society persisted for many years. The second revival, lacking an emphasis on the Bible, was “gone as quickly as it came.” Hansen and Woodbridge remarked about the second awakening: “After several years, Wales returned to its previous state of religious indifference.” The second revival was like a sparkler that spouted brilliant colors for a moment, sputtered, then grew suddenly dark.

The difference between the two revivals was the Bible.

God’s people today talk about the need for revival as they have at other times when love for God and passion for Christ has waned. I deeply long for it myself. In fact, when God grabbed hold of my heart as a teenager, one of my deepest yearnings, and the prayer from which God would not release me, was that God would do a work of revival during my lifetime. Recently I have been reinvigorated in my desire and prayer that God would do this. Who can question that we need a revival of the Holy Spirit? But it is my conviction that we will never see anything that lasts—that is, we will never see anything worth calling a revival of the Holy Spirit—unless we recommit ourselves to the Bible. We need a revival of the Bible.

I started writing this book during the planning stages for a six-week series on the Bible at the church where I serve as an overseer, Whittier Hills Baptist Church. The leaders of the church searched for a book that could augment the preaching and teaching ministry that would take place during the series. We thought that there would be no problem finding such a book; after all, there are scores of books written about the Bible. But it turns out that most of those books fall into one of three categories. They are either books about how to interpret the Bible, or about the doctrine of Scripture, or devotional books that somehow use the Bible. We looked in vain for an appropriate book about learning, living, and loving the Bible that would teach and stir the hearts of our people. Once we realized that such a book didn’t exist (or at least we were unable to find it), I became increasingly concerned and began to pray that God would allow me to write it myself. The result is the book before you.

This book can be used in a church context or as a way to draw in students who are taking an introductory college class on the Bible. It is ideal for use in small groups, women’s and men’s Bible studies, and for the individual who wants to be stirred and guided into a greater commitment to the Bible.

This book answers the question of why we need a revival of the Bible in our generation and what it will take to see it happen. Each chapter addresses one aspect of our present lack of engagement with the Bible. In chapter 1 I lay out how little we actually know about the Bible in our generation and why we will spiritually die if we don’t address this issue soon. In chapter 2 I describe where our underlying distrust of the Bible comes from and why we question its clarity and doubt that it can speak a message to our complex twenty-first century setting. In chapters 3 and 4 I explain why we struggle to understand and apply the Bible and sketch out a framework for how to interpret and apply the Bible well. In chapter 5 I tackle the sensitive subject of obedience to the Bible. Finally, in chapter 6 I issue a call for us to not only read, learn, and obey the Word but also to talk about it regularly with each other. The book closes with two appendices, one describing the easiest way to memorize the Bible and the second on a method for reaching Bible fluency.

What makes this book different from other books is that I make an effort to probe into the underlying spiritual causes of our present predicament. I don’t simply state that we need a revival of the Bible; I also try to uncover the hidden spiritual issues that brought us to this unfortunate place. Accordingly, the last large section of each chapter is called “Digging Deeper.” I will lovingly “meddle” a bit in your spiritual life with the goal of helping you become more God-honoring in your engagement with the Bible.

I pray that a recommitment to the Bible, God’s Holy Word, will lay the foundation for a true and lasting work of the Holy Spirit in our generation.

1

A REVIVAL OF LEARNING THE WORD

Confronting Distractions, Priorities, and the Pretext of Being Too Busy

Stacey Irvine ate almost nothing but chicken nuggets for fifteen years. She never tasted fruits or vegetables. She occasionally supplemented her diet with french fries. One day her tongue started to swell and she couldn’t catch her breath. She was rushed to the hospital, her airway was forced open, and they stuck an IV in her arm to start pumping in the nutrients she needed. After saving her life, the medical staff sent her home, but not before they warned her that she needed to change her diet or prepare herself for an early death.

I’ve heard people call it a famine. A famine of knowing the Bible. During a famine people waste away for lack of sustenance. Some people die. Those who remain need nourishment; they often require someone from the outside to assist them in halting their downward spiral toward the point of no return. They need to be revived. And if they have any hope of remaining alive over time, their life situation has to change in conspicuous ways.

During normal famines people don’t have access to the food they need. But Stacey Irvine could have eaten anything she wanted. She had resources, opportunity, and presumably all the encouragement she needed to eat well. Can you imagine what would happen if all of us decided to follow her example and discontinued eating all but nonnutritious foodstuff? If we happened to beat the odds and live, we undoubtedly would suffer in the long run from nutrition-related chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease.

Like Stacey Irvine, we’re killing ourselves. It’s surely not for lack of resources; nevertheless, we are in fact starving ourselves to death.

We applauded, prayed for, and sent money to support Brother Andrew when he began “smuggling” carloads of Bibles into countries hostile to God’s Word. We have searched out languages that have never been written down and have painstakingly reduced those languages to writing for the single purpose of introducing the Word of God to those who speak other languages. We’ve been zealous about people getting their hands on personal copies of the Bible ever since the fires of the Protestant Reformation were stoked by new translations. Martin Luther dedicated most of the later years of his life to translating the Bible into vernacular German. William Tyndale literally gave his life so people could read God’s Word in English. And all throughout the previous fifteen centuries scores of our predecessors spent countless hours, months, years, and sometimes lifetimes copying by hand thousands upon thousands of biblical manuscripts one line at a time. We Christians are ardent in our conviction that everyone should have access to the Word of God. A growing presence of online resources making the Word available in multiple formats is contemporary evidence of our commitment. So how is it that we’re living in the middle of a famine?

Christians used to be known as “people of one book.”1 Sure, they read, studied, and shared other books. But the book they cared about more than all others combined was the Bible. They memorized it, meditated on it, talked about it, and taught it to others. We don’t do that anymore, and in a very real sense we’re starving ourselves to death.

A FAMINE OF BIBLE KNOWLEDGE

Does this sound overly alarmist to you? People who have studied the trends don’t think so.

Timothy Larsen comments that “it has been demonstrated that biblical literacy has continued to decline.… Gallup polls have tracked this descent to a current ‘record low.’ ”2

In “The 9 Most Important Issues Facing the Evangelical Church,” Michael Vlach cites “Biblical Illiteracy in the Church” as his final concern. He agrees with George Barna’s assessment that “the Christian body in America is immersed in a crisis of biblical illiteracy.”3

The Barna Group gives a brief summary of its conclusions in this area: “Biblical literacy is neither a current reality nor a goal in the U.S.” They then add that

little progress, if any, is being made toward assisting people to become more biblically literate.

There is shockingly little growth evident in people’s understanding of the fundamental themes of the scriptures and amazingly little interest in deepening their knowledge and application of biblical principles.

Our research suggests that this challenge initially emerges in the late adolescent or early teenage years. By the time most Americans reach the age of 13 or 14, they think they pretty much know everything of value the Bible has to teach and they are no longer interested in learning more scriptural content.4

David Nienhuis summarizes his understanding of the situation:

For well over twenty years now, Christian leaders have been lamenting the loss of general biblical literacy in America. No doubt you have read some of the same dire statistics …

… some among us may be tempted to seek odd solace in the recognition that our culture is increasingly post-Christian.… Much to our embarrassment, however, it has become increasingly clear that the situation is really no better among confessing Christians, even those who claim to hold the Bible in high regard.… In each of these questions, evangelical teens fared only slightly better than their non-evangelical counterparts.5

If I sound alarmist, I’m not alone. Recently I was leading a college class discussion about an early church leader named Ignatius (a key leader in the city of Antioch just after the age of the apostles). Ignatius pushed hard for the idea that every Christian should obey their “bishop” as though rendering obedience to Christ himself. Wanting to keep the discussion anchored in the Bible and not just in the opinions of the church fathers, I asked my students, “Does the Bible anywhere specifically teach us to obey our church leaders?” I was, frankly, astonished when confronted with silence from the group. None of the ten students knew the answer to the question—and this group of students was a biblically literate group, at least by modern standards. But this isn’t a difficult biblical question. Do you know the answer?6

I can’t imagine such a thing happening to a group of German Lutherans in the sixteenth century, or to English Puritans in the seventeenth century, or to Wesleyans in the eighteenth century, or to modern Chinese-mainland Christians even if they only have access to a few Bibles in their house church. Or even to our believing great-grandparents in the United States. My paternal grandfather, who never came into personal relationship with Jesus Christ, read his Bible regularly and had many passages committed to memory.

These days many of us don’t even know basic facts about the Bible. I remember a student—not a new believer—who asked a question after class about Saul’s conversion in Acts 9. She wanted to know whether this was the same Saul who was king over Israel. No. King Saul’s story is found in the Old Testament; the Saul of Acts—also known as Paul—is found in the New Testament.

When I was teaching at a college in New York, I assigned each student to write a biographical sketch of an Old Testament character. I came across the following line in a paper about the Old Testament figure Joshua: “Joshua was the son of a nun.” This student clearly didn’t know that Nun was the name of Joshua’s father, nor apparently did he realize that Catholic nuns weren’t around during the time of the Old Testament. But I’m sure it created quite a stir at the convent!

MEDITATING DAY AND NIGHT

In the book of Amos, people who experienced a “famine of hearing the words of the Lord” are portrayed as undergoing divine judgment. Amos paints a picture of people without access to God’s revelation searching for a message from God like desperate people—hungry and dehydrated—in search of food and water (Amos 8:11–12). In Amos they want it, but are not permitted it. In our case, although we have unlimited access, we often don’t want it. The irony is intense. Who would deliberately and knowingly put himself under God’s judgment? Would someone enter an earthquake zone if he knew in advance that the Lord was going to judge that place with an earthquake (Amos 8:8)? Would someone move his family to a land that was soon to suffer drought if he knew ahead of time that God was going to send a judgment of drought to that land (Amos 8:13)? Are we somehow positioning ourselves in the domain of God’s judgment when we spiritually starve ourselves by not “hearing the words of God” (Amos 8:11–12)? Is this what happens when we severely limit our engagement with the Word of God?

You are probably already aware, at least to some degree, of the dilemma that this Christian generation is facing because of its biblical malnutrition. The simple fact that you have picked up this book indicates that you want to do something about it. I am deeply grateful to be on this journey with you! I’m praying that God will use this book to move your affections toward an increasing love of and commitment to learning the Word of God! And I sincerely hope that your influence rubs off on others.

When God commissioned Joshua (the son of Nun), he charged him with these words: “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it” (Josh. 1:8, emphasis added). How often should you meditate on it? Day and night. Why? So that you do what is in it.

The Old Testament book of Psalms leads off with these words:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. (Ps. 1:1–3, emphasis added)

And in another psalm: “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Ps. 119:97, emphasis added).

Have you ever wondered how it could be his meditation all the day? The psalmist didn’t have the Bible on his smart phone. Did he carry around a big scroll under his arm? No, he had memorized the passages he was meditating on and was thinking about them. He had committed large sections of the Bible to memory.