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Thy Word is Truth Part 6 By John McCallum

 1 Timothy chapter 6, we want to read the whole of the chapter from, excuse me, from verse 1 through to verse 21, 1 Timothy chapter 6.
1 Timothy chapter 6, beginning from the first verse.
All who are under the oath of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God's name and our teaching may not be stranded.
Those who have believing masters are not to show less respect to them because they are brothers.
Instead they are to serve them even better because those who benefit from their service are believers and dear to them.
These are the things that you are to teach and urge on them.
If anyone teaches false doctrine and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, he is conceited and understands nothing.
He has an unhealthy interest in controversy and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious thought, evil suspicions and constant friction between men of corrupt minds who have been robbed of the church and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain.
But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out of it.
But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.
People who want to get rich fall into temptation and into a crop and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
Some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
But you, man of God, flee from all this and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness.
Fight the good fight of faith, take hold of the eternal life to which you called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
In the sight of God who gives life to everything and of Christ Jesus who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep this command without spot or blown until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Which God will bring about in his own time.
God the blessed and the only ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who live in unapproachable life, whom no one can see or has seen or can see.
To him be honour and might forever. Amen.
Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth which is so uncertain but to put their hope in God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.
Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds and to be generous and willing to share.
In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.
Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care, turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith.
May grace be with you. Amen.
Well let us turn once again to the second letter of Paul to Timothy and coming back once again to chapter 3.
And turning to the closing verses we have been thinking this morning in these verses 15 and 16 where we saw that the apostle was reminding Timothy of the privileges of having the scriptures.
And we were thinking of the significance of the holy scriptures. They are holy because the author is holy, because the message of the scripture is holy, because the purpose of the scripture is holy and the fruit of reading and obeying the scripture is always holy.
Each of these points is worthy of a sermon in its own right but we can't expand any further.
And then we tried to give you some thoughts concerning the inspiration of scripture and they tried to point out some of the erroneous views and then tried to point out what seems to be the biblical view of organic inspiration.
Where God is the one author through many pen writers and out of the experience of these men they wrote freely, spontaneously and yet God was moving these holy men, the prophets and the apostles and the prophetic and apostolic assistants who actually wrote down the scripture that we have in our hands today.
And we come now finally to the second part of verse 16 and then to the end of verse 17 where Paul is telling us concerning the practice of the scripture. Why has God given us the scripture?
Now we've already touched on this. My voice is a bit crackly actually after so much talking and I do feel a bit jaded in my speaking and you may well be a bit jaded in your hearing and so we'll bear with each other and I won't try and keep you too long this evening, God willing.
But we do want to look finally at the purpose of the scripture and expand it further than we had the opportunity to do this morning.
So let's read again verses 16 and 17.
All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
Now this is a very interesting statement simply because of what it says and it's interesting because indeed of what it says because we may not indeed understand the proper use of the scripture precisely in the way that the apostle here is telling us.
He's telling us as plain as plain can be why it is that God has given us the Bible and you will find that there are multitudes of people who would not view the purpose of the Bible in quite the same way as the apostle is emphasizing it here.
But nonetheless we believe that the Christian church is based upon the teaching of the apostles and the prophets of the New Testament and if we're going to be an apostolic, a true apostolic Christian church then we must be listening very carefully to what the apostles are actually saying.
Because sometimes they say in fact something different to what we might think indeed that they are saying.
So as we come then to think this evening rather more briefly I hope concerning the purpose of the scripture I want to begin first of all with some negatives by pointing out what the purpose of the scripture is not.
And the things that I'm going to mention are some of the things where people think that the purpose of the scripture indeed is given to us.
The first thing I want to emphasize is this. It may seem rather childish to you but I can assure you that there are people who hold to these views that I'm putting aside as reasons why God has not initially indeed given us the Bible.
The first thing I want to mention negatively is that the Bible is not given to us to be simply a history of the world or a history of the Jewish nation or a history of the Christian church.
Now I'm saying that because as far as we know the Bible is indeed the oldest history book.
It goes right back to the beginning of the history of mankind and we accept without demur that the early chapters of Genesis are to be regarded as a soberness and truth, real history.
They're not legends. They're not just the gropings of primitive minds. Rather they are simply the record of what took place in the early history of mankind.
And we say that because the Bible says it. The prophet evidently understood the early chapters of Genesis in this particular way.
And the apostles did and our Lord Jesus Christ indeed understood the early chapters of Genesis as an accurate and authentic record, indeed the only authentic record of the history of the early world.
I think it's interesting to note, I was reading and some of you may have read in the answers in Genesis literature, those of you get it, you may have read somewhere in their literature how they make the point.
I haven't actually checked this out but I don't doubt that they're accurate in their statements.
They say that in the scriptures our Lord Jesus Christ refers to specifically or implicitly every single one of the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis.
And furthermore he refers to the early chapters in the book of Genesis in terms which indicate that he accepted that these early chapters were real history.
He refers for example to the creation, to the ordinance of marriage, he refers to the flood and so on.
And so our Lord Jesus Christ regarded the Bible, the Old Testament record as a history, simply recording what took place in those ancient days.
And furthermore we're told by the answers in Genesis people that every New Testament writer, right through all the New Testament, all the writers, they refer to one or more of those early chapters in Genesis, the first eleven chapters.
And they also refer to these early chapters in Genesis as indeed a sober history.
And so the Bible undoubtedly is presented as a history book.
And furthermore the Jews to this very day, they reject of course the authority and accuracy of the New Testament, but the Jews to this very day, they accept the Old Testament and they will tell you quite plainly face to face that they have an entitlement to the land, to their national uniqueness and so on because they have a history book.
And it is older than any other history book and they are quite right in that.
And in that history book they have the origin of their nation and they as a nation have certain divine rights.
And so they appeal to the Old Testament as a history book which is to be regarded as authenticating their claims to the land of Israel to this very day.
So they are using it as history and they are conscious of a certain divine supervision over the outworking of their history down through the ages and they regard their Bible therefore as a history of God dealing with them.
And then you have some Christian groups and they also regard the Old Testament and the New Testament as being first and foremost a history of how God deals with the world.
And you find sometimes if they are particularly interested in prophecy or in dispensationalism you will find that they major in on the historicity of the Bible.
And they will say this is the way that God deals. Now they don't ignore the other aspects of biblical truth but they are emphasizing and majoring on the historical aspects of the message of the Bible.
And so there is this emphasis upon the historical content of the Bible and there is no question that the Bible does record history.
Not only history in the past and explains the history in the days in which you and I live. It interprets our times but also it foretells certain historical events which are going to come to pass in the good purpose of God.
And so there is this element of a history but the point that I want to make is this that whilst the Bible teaches history and it teaches many other things by the way that is not the prime purpose.
That is incidental. The Bible records history only insofar as the history impinges upon the salvation of God's people.
The history is incidental to what God is doing in terms of saving men from their sins.
We are told in the previous verse you remember how the scripture is given in order to make us wise unto salvation.
So the Bible is interested in history but it is not all that interested in history.
And have you ever noticed how the things that men regard as important are not particularly regarded as important by God?
For example the great kingdoms of the ancient world, the kingdom of Egypt once was as far as we know a great kingdom.
Perhaps the greatest nation upon the earth at one time we don't know but it certainly was a great nation.
And the Bible speaks about Egypt as we know but it doesn't speak in terms of the splendor of Egypt, the splendor of the Pharaohs and their religion and the great contribution that they have made to the architecture of the world.
It's not interested in any of that. It is only interested in Egypt insofar as Egypt affects the well-being for good or for ill, the well-being of the people of God.
And likewise with all the great empires. Once it was that Babylon reigned and the Bible recognizes that Babylon was a great empire.
But it's not particularly interested in Babylon except insofar as Babylon has to do with little Israel.
And then Babylon comes into the story as that great oppressor of Israel.
Apart from that the Bible is not particularly interested in what went on in Babylon.
And it's the same with the Medo-Persian empire and it's the same with the Greek empire which is spoken of in the book of Daniel we would believe and the Roman empire also.
These empires were once strutting the stage and they had their great kings and the archaeologists discovered their names in the stone in the Middle East.
And they tell of their mighty campaigns and the Bible is not interested particularly.
It is interested in the doings and the goings on in the little insignificant land of Israel.
And when you come into the New Testament you find the same thing.
You find that at the height of the Roman empire when the imperial powers was beginning to rise and influence the ancient world.
When there was a certain emperor on the throne, Augustus Caesar, we find that the great interest is in what took place in a little town called Bethlehem.
When an obscure Hebrew maid gave birth to a little baby boy and all the divine heavenly attention is taking place and centered upon the event of a little child being born in a manger in Bethlehem.
And so the Bible's view of history is not the view of history that the great biographies and the great historians write about.
If a secular historian was to write about the early years of the first century of the Christian era he would be speaking about the great goings on in the Roman empire and how they conquered this world or this land and that land and all the diplomatic goings on.
And the Scripture is not interested in any of that. It is interested rather in Jesus born of the Virgin Mary.
Now I'm deliberately drawing this contrast because sometimes the Bible is criticized as being a misrepresentation of history.
And I have read of critical historians who have tried to discount the Bible as accurate history because it doesn't seem to be interested in the great historical personages that ordinary historians would be interested in.
And they are missing the point you see. The Bible is not particularly interested in history at all except in so far as it is salvation history.
The history of the Bible is the history of how does God deal with men? What does God do to bring about the salvation of poor sinners?
That is what the Bible is interested in. And the Bible is a history book but is not primarily a history book.
It is a book of salvation but that salvation is outworked in the history of our world.
And empires are involved and people are involved but always the theme of the message is what God is doing to bring about the salvation of his people.
And so negatively the Bible is not given primarily to be a history book.
And the second negative I would mention is this. The Bible is not given primarily to be a civilizing influence in the world.
Now I'm saying that because there are prophets down through the ages who have said that very thing.
And even Gandhi, you all know of Gandhi I am sure, that Hindu nationalist and indeed he was a very zealot Hindu.
But he accepted that there was a certain divine presence and a divine authority in the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And Gandhi was a great admirer of Jesus. And Gandhi approved and believed and tried to practice in a sense the Sermon on the Mount.
Gandhi said that the Sermon on the Mount is the charter of Christianity.
And he was quite right when he said that if only the nations of the world would implement the Sermon on the Mount then there would be peace on earth.
There is no question that Gandhi was right on that. But Gandhi made a fatal error in understanding the significance of Jesus and the significance of indeed Christianity.
He saw Christianity as a good influence. He saw Christianity as a civilizing influence.
And he recognized that even in India itself, his own native land, that the presence of Christian missionaries had done a mighty good work in the land of India.
But he had imagined falsely that that was all that Christianity was about. He didn't see Jesus necessarily as the savior of the world.
He did not accept that you had to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ exclusively and turn your back upon every other religion in order to be saved.
He saw Christ as a great man, but not the only great man, because he remained a Hindu.
Gandhi never became a Christian. And he saw Christ as being one of the great civilizing influences of the world, but not the only saving religion of the world.
Now Queen Victoria held something similar to this view that I've just mentioned.
Because she lived at a time when there was great mission expansion and the influence of Christianity was spreading abroad throughout the world.
And Queen Victoria said on more than one occasion that the contribution of the Christian nations was the civilizing of the non-Christian nations.
Now she wasn't thinking in terms of the salvation of men and women from sin. She was thinking rather in terms of education and health and those civilizing blessings and benefits.
And so again you see, you have this influential person to whom people would listen and she is saying Christianity is on a mission to civilize the world.
Now of course Christianity is a civilizing nation, a civilizing influence. And everywhere that Christianity goes you do find civilizing influences.
But these are again secondary issues. These are blessings, these are spin-offs if you like. Christianity is a saving religion.
And ultimately the sheer force of Christianity is to be seen not in terms of what it does for the peaceful settlements of wars and the implementation of decent hospitals and rights for women and care for children,
but what does it do in bringing us out of our alienation from God and back into a proper relationship with God once again.
So the Bible is not given by God simply to record history. It's not given by God simply to be an influence for civilizing and taking away the barbarism of the world.
And then there's a third thing I want to mention and it may well surprise you when I say this, that the Bible is not given simply to evangelize the world.
Now we might think that Paul would say here that the Bible is profitable for evangelism and that we are to take the Bible and we are to evangelize the heathen with the Bible,
but that strangely is not something that Paul mentions. He doesn't even mention it there. He mentions things that are much more ordinary and much more prosaic and also things that are much more difficult to implement
because they are much more personal. And I want to emphasize this, if I may, because I believe there is a tremendously misleading emphasis abroad in the Christian church of our day.
And the misleading emphasis is that the primary function of the Christian church in the world is to evangelize the world.
Now I would put to you this, that that is not the primary function of the Christian church. That certainly is one of the functions. It may well be the second function, but that is not the primary function of the Christian church.
The function of the Christian church is not to be a witness to the world, but to have first of all a proper relation and worship of God.
And it is perfectly possible for Christians to be highly and mightily engaged in seeking to save the souls of their fellow men and not even learning the basic principles of Christian worship.
You and I have got to have our priorities right. And before we begin to speak a word to men about God, let us begin to speak to God about ourselves and about our fellow men.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher, he once told his students, this gentleman he said,
Don't ever speak to men about God until first of all you have spoken to God about men. Now Spurgeon was a great evangelist, but he had his priorities right.
And he knew it was possible to be evangelizing and winning souls or seeking to win and ourselves not even having a proper relationship to God.
Now you say, well where does this witness and this worship relate, one to the other? I would put it to you this way.
That proper witness for Christ to the nations of the world or to our neighbors can only come out of a proper relationship to God.
And those who are the best at witnessing in public for the things of Christ are those who first of all privately come apart and worship God.
You and I are not going to be much use at witnessing publicly if we know nothing about secret prayer.
We're not going to be able to speak to others about the great issues of the soul and the nature of sin and the nature of salvation if we haven't even come to terms with the issues of our own salvation.
And what I'm saying therefore is that witness certainly is a biblical mandate, but it's not the primary mandate and it's not even the prime purpose for which God has given us the Bible.
He hasn't given us the Bible primarily for those out there, the heathen. He has given the Bible to his own people in order that they will be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.
And everything else that we will do will be the flowing out of the fullness of the proper relationship that we ourselves have indeed for God.
Now I think that is vitally important and I think it's important for us as preachers particularly for this reason.
I know of preachers who have this misconception that the duty of the church is to bring in all the ungodly and this is their emphasis.
And when the ungodly just happen not to be brought in and they're not being brought in and that's just the fact of the matter, there are far more people it seems to be increasingly outside the church and indifferent than those who are ever coming to the church.
And it seems to me that if we are entering into the mentality where our purpose is to evangelize the world and evangelize people who aren't even interested to come and to hear what we've got to say,
we are either going to do one or the other of two things. We are going to be so discouraged that we are going to actually give up the ministry and imagine that we are failures or we're going to carry on in the ministry disappointed and frustrated
and we're going to berate the people of God who do come and wait upon our ministry. And I've done my share of that and I've had my share of that kind of preaching, dinning in my ears and it is all flowing from a misunderstanding of what we're all about in having the Bible at all.
I minister in the city centre of Sydney. On a good day we might have a hundred people in the morning service, on a bad day we might have sixty or seventy and that's it.
Sydney is a city of over four million people and if I misunderstood the scriptures on this particular issue I could well become mightily discouraged but I'm not discouraged.
And I'm not discouraged because I know something and you've got to know it. And the fact is this, you are not responsible for the salvation of the world.
You are not responsible for all these unbelievers in Warners Bay tonight. You are not responsible for their unbelief. They are responsible.
Now it may well be that we have a responsibility to them and we have. And our responsibility to them is to be the light of the world and to give no offence to men as well as no offence to God.
And our responsibility is to give a good answer to anyone who will ask us a reason for the hope that is in us.
And our responsibility is to treat our enemies even as a Christian by Christ has commanded so to do and to live as Christians.
And the great issue for Christianity always remember is this, it doesn't matter how people treat us, the great issue is how do we treat people.
Now it may well be that there are people in Warners Bay who are not particularly impressed with Christians.
But our task therefore is to be better Christians. And whether they believe in our Christ or whether they do not is ultimately not our responsibility.
Our responsibility is first of all, what is my relationship to God? And before any other consideration that comes first.
And only then does my relationship to my fellow men come into play.
And so what is the relationship then between this worship and witness? It is this.
We are to minister, those of us in the ministry, our primary task is to preach to those who do come.
I know perfectly well, I've said to you, that there are over 4 million people in Sydney and it would never even enter into their heads to come into St. George's.
But there are a hundred people who do. And my great concern is not for those who don't, but for those who do.
And my supreme duty is not for those who have no interest in the Word of God, but for those who do have an interest in the Word of God.
And that is why I say emphatically that there's a negative here. The Bible is not given primarily in order to evangelize the world.
That is a secondary issue, but that's not the primary task of the Christian church.
We are not in the business of witnessing before we are in the business of worshipping God.
And we will best indeed witness to men only insofar as we consistently worship God.
Well these are the negatives. These are just some negatives and I don't find anything in the Scriptures indeed that would contradict what I've said.
So that's the first point, it's in terms of these negatives. Very well then, what are the positives?
Well Paul tells us here that Scripture, he says, it is profitable. This is the positive.
It is profitable and it is profitable for what? And how can it ever become profitable?
We've seen in our morning study that inherently in the Bible the power of words, you remember, the scriptural message has inherently in it the power to make us wise unto salvation.
So there is something that is working in the very message of the Bible. And when the Bible is properly applied, this power is going to work.
Because God has covenanted to work this power when his people properly apply the Scriptures.
And what does it mean to properly? How can the Bible become profitable? Is it going to become profitable just by having it and treating it casually?
No. The Bible is a big book. It says many things about many things.
And if we are going to be made wise unto salvation, we must be made wisdom on the basis of information.
We must have facts in our head. We must know the kinds of things that God does and the kinds of things that God says.
And how he deals with men and has always dealt with men right down through the history. That is why the history is written.
How does God deal with his people? We can know. We can become wise in this ungodly world.
Because the Bible is full of demonstrations and examples of how God does deal with his people in times of prosperity as well as in times of adversity and so on and so on.
So the Bible, Paul says it is profitable. And it is profitable when we read it. It is profitable when we come to it prayerfully and perhaps sometimes tearfully.
And we ask God to shed his holy light upon its sacred pages. And we say like the Psalmist,
O send thy light forth and thy truth. Let them be guides to me.
So it becomes profitable to us. But profitable for what? It becomes profitable first of all for doctrine.
Now this word here doctrine means teaching. And that means that the central core of the Bible message is it is teaching us.
Now it is teaching us about God. It is teaching us about ourselves. It is teaching us about our children.
It is teaching us about the kind of world, the kind of nations in which we live.
It is teaching us how to respond as God-fearing men and women in difficult and different circumstances.
It is full of information. That is what this word doctrine means. It means teaching.
Now we have a duty to teach. And we have a duty to teach in the church. And we have a mandate to go into all the world and to preach the gospel.
And the gospel is to be teaching. We must not imagine that we have taught the nations in obedience to the Great Commission.
If we go and simply preach the gospel in terms of you're a sinner and that you're going to hell and that you must repent and believe and Christ is the Savior.
Now all that is true. It happens all to be true what I said. But is that teaching? Is that explaining the significance of what it means to be a sinner?
To tell someone you're a sinner, he would have a right to say what do you mean? What is sin? What is sin? What does it mean to be a sinner?
What is the difference between original and actual sin? What is it that is inevitably inherent in sin that it deserves the wrath of the Lord?
We've got to explain to people the implications. This word teaching takes all of those kinds of things into consideration.
And when we go into the world to preach the gospel, we do so on the basis that we know what we're talking about.
You see we can't teach others until we've been taught ourselves. I am interested in painting as you probably have gathered.
I mean it's an art. And I read quite a lot of books about it. I mean it's in the techniques of painting.
And I agree wholeheartedly with rather an old fashioned teacher in the noble art of painting, a professor in Germany in the earlier part of this century.
And he was criticizing the slap and dob message where these artists just put on paint in any old way and they sell it for a fortitude.
He says that's not painting. That's not proper painting. And he made this point. He says it is true in every area of life.
It's true in painting as it is in every area of life. You'll never be a master until you've first of all been a pupil.
And if you and I are to go as we are to go to teach the nations and make disciples of the nations, then we first of all indeed must have stood in the presence of God and have been taught ourselves.
You see it's first things first. And that incidentally is one of the reasons why I'm not in favor of young ministers.
Because in the Bible as far as I can see it, ministers are elders. And elders in the Bible, the word elder actually is not a noun. We think of it as a noun but it's not actually in the Greek. It's an adjective.
And it means an older man. And I would say that a pretty good cut off point for elders should be about 30.
Because our Lord was about 30 when he began his ministry and entered into his priestly ministry.
And you know that in the Old Testament the priests had to be 30 years of age before they could minister in the holy place of God.
A man wasn't regarded as mature enough to be handling the things of God until he was about the age of 30.
Now I'm not going to make a hard and fast rule on it because the Bible doesn't. But there does seem to be that age.
The demand for experience. And that is why an elder has to be approved man. He has to be an older man. Why?
For the simple reason that young men have not lived long enough to imbibe all that must be imbibed if they are going to go and teach doctrine to understand the Bible as a lifetime study.
And I've been reading the Bible and studying it for years and years now and I still confess that the more I know the more I don't know.
And the Bible has many things to say that are hard to relate one to the other.
But if we're going to be teachers let us not go with a garbled version. That is the great tragedy of the sects and tragically so much of the Christian church.
They leave all the witnessing as it is called to the young people, to the youth group. What a tragedy. What a travesty.
If there is to be any outreach in a community then it must be by the men who have imbibed the most.
The elders should be leading not the young people. They should be sitting and listening because we will never be masters until we've been pupils.
And where do we learn the craft and the skills and the information? We learn it in the Bible.
And it comes from reading the Bible or from hearing the Bible. Don't ever be tired and weary please of reading the Bible.
Don't ever grow weary and indifferent or hostile under the faithful preaching of the Bible. Your very salvation depends upon it.
And God has given you the Bible and the exposition of it as I've come to towards the end of the sermon.
In order that we might learn the doctrine and understand how the truth, one truth relates to another truth in the Bible.
So the Bible is given not in order that we will go ignorant and unlearned to equally ignorant and unlearned people.
That's not what the Bible is given. The Bible is given that the people of God might be equipped and then they will go out to worship, to witness to their fellow men.
It is given in order to be profitable for doctrine.
And then there is this word for reproof. And this word reproof is an interesting word.
It occurs in chapter 4 at verse 2 also where Paul is exhorting Timothy there.
Preach the word, be instant in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering.
Now this word reproof is a word which in the Greek means proving. It means evidence.
And what Paul has in mind is this, that we often differ over issues as to the Bible's teaching.
And sometimes there are those in the Christian church who say we should do it this way and do it that way.
And others say we should believe this and others say it should be done the other way.
And what Paul is saying is, you go to the Bible for your evidence.
Because there is no practice, there is no belief that will ever come in the Christian church which is not covered by some teaching somewhere in the Word of God.
I have never yet experienced in my life or ever entered into a controversy with other Christians which is not covered in some way by teaching in the Word of God.
Every experience that you and I will ever go through, the Bible has something to say about it.
And an encouragement for us to do the right thing and a warning that we may well do the wrong thing.
So the Bible is the book to go to, to settle all controversies by bringing forth the evidence indeed for our position and the doctrine that we hold.
It means evidencing. It is related to the Word, for example, that is used in Hebrews chapter 11 at verse 1.
Where you remember in the authorized version, now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence, evidence of things not seen.
It's the same word, it's the same root word, evidence, the proof, the putting forth such evidence that there is no further gainsaying or argument in the matter.
The Bible, in other words, settles the issue once and for all amongst Christians and indeed all controversies.
It is for reproof.
And then for correction. This word here, correction is indeed, this is the only place that it occurs in the entire New Testament.
And it means putting right what is wrong, putting straight what is crooked, putting on a firm footing that which is uncertain.
That's what Paul is saying.
And then finally he is this for instruction, for the way in which you bring up a child in the way of righteousness.
The life of righteousness is what God requires of us.
Sometimes, you know, we get ourselves tied up in knots with a basic question that comes up all the time.
How do I know God's will?
And what we really mean is how do I know God's will for me in a particular situation?
That's what we really mean because we want guidance and we want God's Word to come to us or God's voice to come to us to make the issue very clear.
Well, there are times in life, you know, when we quite frankly don't have that kind of detailed guidance,
where sanctified common sense, where the consensus of Christian opinion, where a sense of decency,
even perhaps witnesses to witness our deed may indeed constrain us to live in a way that is righteous.
But the point that I'm saying is this, we need to be instructed in. Why?
Because we don't know what righteousness is.
Supposing you were to go to someone who has no contact with Christianity and you were to say to him or to her,
God requires that you live a righteous life.
Do you know what they would do?
They would begin to live a life of unrighteousness because do you know what they would begin to do?
They would say, well, God requires me to live in a certain way.
Now, that immediately introduces religion.
That means, therefore, ritualism.
In some way it would mean sacrifices or giving money or doing something.
All the religions that men have invented for themselves are all men's attempts to live the life of righteousness.
But the fact is that we don't know apart from God telling us how to live righteousness before him.
And God is gracious. And this is one of the wonderful things about the Bible,
that God not only tells us to repent and believe, but he tells us exactly what believing means.
He tells us what repentance means. He explains it to us.
It's like you and me telling our children to do something.
And we know they can't do it, but we want them to do it.
So we explain to them, look, this is how you do it because we want them to do it.
We don't say to them, do it. And they don't know what to do or what our will in the matter is.
Now, the Bible here is a gracious book. It is full of directives and encouragements.
Do you know something about the Bible?
Look, this Bible is just so full of things.
And sermons about the Bible are so full of things. There's just so much matter here.
Do you know something about the Bible?
You will not find, as far as I can discover, any discouragement.
Not even one text that I ever found in the Bible is a discouragement to a Christian believer's faith or hope and love.
Now, I find in the Bible many hard sayings and many warnings.
And Christ speaks very, very severely, but not against true believers,
not against the broken-hearted and tender-hearted ones.
He has nothing but a soft, encouraging word.
Christ reserves his harshest words in the Gospels.
We read of it in Matthew chapter 23 for these scribes and the Pharisees, hypocrites,
these leaders, these false clergymen who were standing up in front of their fellow men
and telling them the way, not of salvation, but how to be lost.
Christ reserves his harsh judgments for those religious crooks and charlatans who come in
and who would lead the people astray from the ways of God.
But everyone who sincerely wants to follow him, Christ is full of encouragements.
You don't ... destruction as to how we're to live our lives in a manner that is pleasing to God.
I'll come back to that just in a moment.
But the Bible has to do with ethics.
If you were to, if someone were to ask you the question,
of what is the bulk of the Bible composed, how would you answer the question?
Do you know what the bulk of the Bible is made up of? History and ethics.
Most of the texts in the Bible tell us what God is doing, what men are doing, how God rules his world,
and what God wants us to do.
The Psalms, the book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Gospels, most of Christ's teaching, you know,
was taken up with telling men how to live in a life that would exemplify their true faith in him.
The parables, multitudes of the parables are explanations of what it means to live as one who is going to inherit the Kingdom of God.
Most of the Bible is taken up with ethical issues and historical issues.
The practicalities of the life of righteousness.
And the only alternative, of course, is the life of unrighteousness.
And so this is what Paul is saying for instruction, this bringing up in the life of righteousness.
That's the second issue, profitable.
But then, notice how Paul, in the third place, emphasizes this life of righteousness in a particular kind of way.
That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. Good works.
Paul tells us in Ephesians chapter 2 at verse 10, he says,
We are God's workmanship, God's beautiful created poem. Poema.
We get our word poem from it, something that is beautifully structured together, made with harmony and beauty inherent in it.
And Paul says, We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.
Now one of the tragedies of the Christian church, it seems to me, is that it is too easily offended,
or too easily rather intimidated is the word I want to use, intimidated by the world sneering at good works.
And sometimes we are afraid even to mention the word good works.
Because it sometimes smacks to us of Roman Catholicism and meritorious good works for salvation.
As if we are speaking of trying to earn our salvation by doing good works.
Now you and I, if we know our Bibles, know that that is not the way of salvation.
But good works play a large part, because faith without works is dead.
And the Christian doesn't live the life of good works in order to earn salvation.
But we do live the life of good works in order to express our salvation.
We do good works as unto the Lord. But what are good works?
Here is a context. And we say, oh well, good works.
And there are some Christian mentalities, and they would say, ah, that means they are witnessing for the Lord.
And that's a good work too, I suppose, in its place.
And they would say, well, giving out tracts, or giving money to the church.
Yes, these are all good works. And I'm not trying to decry these.
But let us remember the great issues and areas of ethical living.
Where in our homes, husbands love your wife. That's a good work, I think, is it not?
If you're a husband, what does God require of you in your relationship to your wife?
He requires that you love her. And remember this,
that God places a far greater burden upon the husband in a household than he does upon the wife.
Our English word husband is an interesting word. It's an old Anglo-Saxon word.
And it means house band. It means the strong one of the house.
And the Bible presents the man as being responsible to put his arms around his wife and his children
and to wrap them in within the safety and security of his strong arms.
And no one's going to harm them.
And women are surely, in their very constitutional nature, willing to submit to such a man
with such a care for their interests and their protection and the children.
And what's wrong with Australian society? I'm going to have a slam now at Australian society.
Because do you know that Australian society, Australia, is increasingly one of the best pits of the world?
Do you know that Sydney is linked to San Francisco with a homosexual sodomite movement?
And do you know that increasingly our national government is implementing things
that the word of God calls abominations in the sight of the Lord
and increasingly is indeed forbidding things that God demands in terms of writers?
Christianity in Australia is being circumscribed and being ostracised and being, as it were,
closed doors more and more to practical Christianity.
And that's the way Australia is going.
And where does it all begin? Where does it all end?
In the hearts of men, in the homes of men, drunkards.
Australia is in many ways like Scotland. It's a land of drunkards.
And bashed wives and poor, benighted, deprived children where half the marriages break apart.
Why? Is it the women in the large degree who break up homes? No, statistics prove that it's not. It's the men.
It's men who are destroying homes in Australia because of their drunkenness
and their attendance upon the footy when they should be at home looking after their wives and children.
And money that is being spent in the club and the pub and amongst their mates.
Money that would be better spent putting food into their children's bellies and clothes on their backs
and caring for their wives and putting furniture into the homes.
You see, good works. What are good works?
I know of men who have been witnessing for the Lord and their great preachers and their adulterers
and they're not living clean lives in relationship to their wives.
You see, good works are not just religious works.
They are works that are good in the most private and intimate details of our life.
Private prayer, that's a good work, is it not?
When we are commanded by Christ to pray, where are we taught to pray?
Christ, several places in the Gospel, instructs us how to pray, encourages us to pray,
telling us that we ought to pray and not to faint.
That's what the Bible's given for. I don't know how to pray.
I wouldn't know how to begin to pray. I wouldn't even know what God is like to pray.
I wouldn't know if I was speaking to the wall or to God.
But the Bible encourages us to pray. It tells us.
You see, that's what Paul is driving at you. That's why the Bible is given.
When God gave the Scriptures to his people in olden days, to whom did he give the Bible?
Let's remind ourselves of this.
Paul in Romans chapter 3 is speaking of the universal sinfulness of all men, Jews and Gentiles, all under sin.
And then he anticipates some questions and he anticipates some will say,
well, if the Jews are just like the Gentiles in total depravity, what then advantage is the Jew?
Romans chapter 3.
And Paul says the Jew has many advantages over the Gentiles.
The chief advantage is that unto the Jew was given the oracles of God, the words of God.
Psalm 147 puts it this way, that God has given his statutes to Israel, his law and to Jacob,
and he never dealt with any nation like that.
You see, there we have this principle that God hasn't given his word to the heathen
in order that they would trample it under feet as pigs and swine and dogs trampling the pearls.
No, he's given it to his people, Israel.
And look at the New Testament, to whom was Paul writing these epistles?
Was he writing evangelistic tracts?
Every epistle in the New Testament is a pastoral epistle.
We think of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, these are the pastoral epistles, and so they are.
They deal with church issues, but so does 1 Corinthians, so do all the epistles.
They're all pastoral, they're all written for the purpose of the people of God.
And John was writing his gospel that you who believe, that you might believe that Jesus the Christ,
he wrote his first epistle to those who believed that they might know that they were Christians.
The Bible is not given to the world, it's given to the church, that the church might know the Lord.
And this is one of the great things, instruction in righteousness.
Good works, perfectly thoroughly furnished that Christian wives would be faithful mothers, faithful wives.
And by the way, when Paul exhorts Christian wives to submit to their husbands, he's not teaching.
Women submit to men, he doesn't say that, he says wives only to one man, just your husband, that's all.
Not to every man or any man, to one man, your husband.
And not even in everything, only in the things of the Lord.
If a man requires his wife, or asks his wife to do something that is a violation of Christian truth,
she's not obligated to obey him, only insofar as it is pleasing to the Lord.
Is she obligated?
And you can, you see we can work this out in so many ways, I don't want to multiply examples.
Good works, yes they are the good works of religious ritualism,
but they are the good works also that begin in the home and in the privacy of our own hearts,
where we cultivate a proper relationship with God and out of the secret place,
we go forth to be light and soft in the midst of a darkened and corrupted world.
That's why the Bible was given, according to the Apostles' teaching at least, that's why it was given.
But then there's a final point that I want to emphasize concerning this,
and it is this reference to the man of God.
That the man of God may be perfect, and here Paul is saying something that is very significant,
and quite frankly I'm not sure that I understand the full significance of what Paul is saying here,
and I hope to explain why just in a moment.
The man of God, this is a technical expression, we were reading of it in the reading that we had earlier,
in 1 Timothy chapter 6, the only other place in the New Testament where this particular word occurs,
verse 11, where Paul is exhorting Timothy as a preacher of the Gospel,
But thou, O man of God, flee these things, that's lust, and use the lust and so on,
and the love of money and so on,
and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness,
but thou, O man of God, twice in the New Testament,
48 times in the Old Testament, this expression occurs,
and in every single expression in the Old Testament, and in 1 Timothy 6 and verse 11 in the New Testament,
it refers to preachers.
Moses, in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 33 is called Moses, the man of God.
In Joshua chapter 14, he is referred to further by Joshua as Moses, the man of God.
You remember when Samson's birth was going to be about, and the angel appeared to his mother,
and she reported back to her husband a man of what she thought that a prophet had appeared to her,
in the book of Judges chapter 13.
A man of God appeared unto me.
She thought that this man was a prophet.
And you find Elijah, if you go to 1 Kings, for example, just to demonstrate this further,
I won't bore you with all the details.
In 1 Kings chapter 17, you remember Elijah is in the house of the widow at Zarephath,
and it came to pass at verse 17, it says,
It came to pass after these things, that the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick,
and his sickness was so sore that there was no breath left.
And here's her son, and he died.
And she said unto Elijah, What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God?
Art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son?
And then there's the story of Elijah raising the child to life again,
and the woman at verse 24 says this,
And the woman said to Elijah, Now by this I know that thou art a man of God,
and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth.
And right down through the Old Testament, man of God is the preacher of the gospel.
Now when Paul says here that the man of God may be perfect,
is Paul saying, as the Bible would seem to imply, that he's saying that the scripture is given for preachers?
And I think that Paul is actually saying that, for this reason.
Churches can survive without much of the paraphernalia that we associate with churches.
They can exist without buildings, they can exist without money,
they can exist without popularity in a place in society,
but they cannot exist without copies of the scriptures and someone to explain the scriptures to them.
And if you read church history, you will find that when churches grow,
it's when Bibles are produced, and God raises up a generation of preachers
who will preach the word faithfully and fearlessly.
And in that kind of environment, God's word prospers,
and the world is evangelized, missionary societies are set up, and all other things.
But churches diminish and die
when the people are no longer interested in the Bible,
and they're no longer interested in hearing the words of the man of God.
Churches cannot exist without the reading and the exposition of the scriptures.
The Bible says that faith comes by hearing.
It pleases God by the foolishness of preaching, to save and to keep on saving,
to build up in their experience of salvation those whom he is pleased to save.
That's what the Bible teaches.
And what I'm saying therefore is this,
that even if people can't read, they can still be Christians.
And it's not an unknown thing, before the printing press, before the 15th century,
the ordinary people didn't have copies of the Bibles,
but there were multitudes of Christians because there were preachers, there were men of God
who came preaching the word. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word.
That's why the Bible is given.
It's given to God's preachers that they would study it, learn it, immerse themselves in it,
experience it, delight in it, and go forth and speak it to the people.
That's why the Bible was given.
And that's why God says to his prophets in the Old Testament,
I have put my words in your mouth. You go and you speak my word.
Thus saith the Lord, said the prophets.
It's the same principle.
Go and tell Israel their sin.
Go and tell Israel, behold your God.
Go and tell Israel anything that Israel needs to know.
You see the point and the principle.
It hasn't changed because God hasn't changed.
Therefore, you and I who are privileged to have copies of the Scriptures,
God has given them to us.
You are not going to be held responsible for anybody else's action but your own
and for those to whom God has given.
As parents, as a pastor, I'll be held responsible for the people whom God has entrusted to me.
And I'll be held responsible for my children.
Have I brought them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord
or have I neglected them in that spiritual realm?
I'm responsible for that.
But let us not have that guilt conflict.
Christian people are the kindest people, the most tender-hearted people in the world.
And it appalls me at times when you get these preachers leading on these Christians
with conviction and guilt trips.
Because the world is going on and it's mad pleasure and the high road to destruction
and these preachers have the audacity to tell God's people that they are responsible.
You're not responsible.
And I want to enforce that as far as I can to you.
You're responsible to be light and you're responsible to speak adequately and accurately
when the cause or when the opportunity arises.
But we have a primary responsibility to God.
And for that primary role God has given to his people, he has given to his people the Bible.
He has given to his people the man of God.
That he will be our guide and lead us into the life of teaching, reproof,
correction in righteousness, instruction in righteousness
and thoroughly equip the people of God for all those areas of good works
which God requires of those who name his name and who love his name.
Now I better stop there and I thank you for your patient attendance and attention
and I know that in these concentrated sessions there's a strain on your ears
and your understanding and your patience and everything else.
I thank you for listening and may God bless you.