Rev. Ted Strawbridge
Psalm 119
What I Meant to Say
We are spending several weeks looking at the simplest summary of what the church has meant when it says, “The Bible is God’s word.”
Now the biggest issue for you will be not what you believe, or even what you say, but whether your life bares the conviction that God speaks to you through His revelation in scripture.
God’s Lordship is complete. It extends to every area of life, but most importantly for our discussion, He is Lord over all thinking. All human knowledge is dependent knowledge. All human knowledge comes from God by His revelation. In knowing anything, you know it dependently on His nearness and revealing it to you. You don’t know anything apart from true surrender.
People who deny God only do so out of a position of dependence on His kindness and common grace. They can’t escape Him…
When Jesus says, “…Your word is truth.” He means more than that God’s words are genuine or honest… more then the veracity of the words themselves. God’s word is truth-creating. God spoke and by His power the heavens were created. His word is truth. All the earth proclaims it.
All knowledge is perspectival. We know God’s law. We know the world. We know ourselves. We only know these things from our perspective. There is the knowing of things, skills, and people. Each one is a dependent perspective revealed particularly to me. I only know it that way.
What that means is that knowledge can never be far off, or someone elses’. Rather, everything I know is connected to everything else I know and God has ordered the entire world and my own perception just to bring me here. He has good work for me.
When we come to special revelation, the Bible, we believe God by His Spirit immediately illumines our hearts to His truth in our own language.
He teaches me just what I need to know to serve His purpose in the world today. God loves His law. When Jesus calls us friends He also says, “you are my friend if you obey my word.” Jesus claims authority.
The Bible claims to be God’s word. Both in the Old Testament and the New. Jesus said that “… man doesn’t live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
We believe that the Bible is “God-breathed.” II Tim. 3:16 But the most challenging aspect of the revelation of God is the presence of the Spirit communing Christ to us. The spiritual man judges all things. The man without the Spirit cannot know God. But the Bible says, “We have the mind of Christ.”
Dear friends, do you acknowledge the Lordship of Christ in your life by the present work of the Holy Spirit who has renewed your mind so that, “…you have the mind of Christ.”
The Holy Spirit is the one who reveals the authority of the Word of God. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, today. You have the mind of Christ!
Use it somewhere.
Lord, give me knowledge. Open my mind to your wonder.
In His Love,
Ted
