I was a little nervous speaking at this, and I also gave a different talk the day before on a different topic, so I felt like my prep time was very short. I only really just finished writing the talk on my way out that morning. What I didn't realise was the printer ran out of paper, so the pile of pages I grabbed on the way out was missing the last page. I didn't notice this till I got to the end of the 7th page. I quickly pulled up my laptop and gave the last page from the screen, but it was a little embarrassing to pause for a laptop (quick as it is) to turn on and open the word doc. Everyone was very gracious about it afterwards, and I did feel encouraged for being there.
Below is more or less what I said:
Welcome and thank you for having me. I have never been to WOT, but I do hear great things from this ministry.
I hope that you are looking forward to this year and what is going to happen in WOT.
I love Life Groups, as I think when I was a younger Christian small groups probably had the most impact on me. Small groups help me to read the Bible for myself and to sit and discuss what it directly says. I am also half Maltese, so I do like a good robust discussion. At one time when I was at uni, I was in at least three sometimes four weekly small groups. I went to a BSF on Mondays, my own church small group on Wednesday nights, Wednesday day I lead one at uni and on Thursday a friend of mine ran a group in Campbelltown.
Now, my brief today was to talk about what is that we do here at WOT? Why is this a good ministry to be a part of and why do we spend so much time in the Bible? And I think this might be an easy sell today. I looked you all up and nearly 30% of you are in another Life Group at St Matt's. And there are probably a number of you who also attend a BSF or some other small group during the week. So there is something already about Life Groups that most of you appreciate.
Now in this talk I am going to focus on the Bible, which makes up just one aspect of our meetings. So please don’t hear me say that the only good reason to come to WOT is that you get to look at the Bible. That is not the case. There are many really important and valuable elements here at WOT. Your friends come along, you have a time of prayer for each other, and many women here I know provide love and support for others who attend here throughout the week. Those things are great and worth coming for.
Christianity isn’t about absorbing all sorts of information; it isn’t an IQ test. WOT shouldn’t be seen as some sort of Bible extension class in at a university. Christianity is more about love, which is informed actions towards others. We do need to know what the Bible says, but we also need to do it. And so in your conversations and morning tea and prayer times, these are moments where you can actually play out Christianity. Those are the living moments.
But it is true, one big chunk of the time at WOT is spent looking at the Bible. Why is that? Is WOT like some one-hit-wonder book club? I hear some book clubs should really be renamed wine clubs, as they are pretence to get together, chat and drink wine and the book of the month they were meant to read is kinda incidental. Is WOT like that?
WOT is a ministry of this church which is an Anglican church. Now I am seeking ordination so I have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole of Anglicanism over the last few years. You may not know, but the Australian Anglican Church has a constitution. It is a long document about governance and stuff like that, but at the beginning, they have three foundational ideas, of which in their own document says they can not be changed. Point number two of these foundational ideas is:
This Church receives all the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as being the ultimate rule and standard of faith given by inspiration of God and containing all things necessary for salvation.The Anglican Church of Australia isn’t allowed to change that statement. So as WOT has inadvertently inherited something of this just by being part of St Matt’s.
Now to be controversial I want to say that this statement doesn’t say enough. It’s good, but I want it to say more. I am very aware that I have a bit of a radical idea about Scripture that makes some people uncomfortable, but I think I have really stolen this position from many other reformers a few hundred years ago.
The categories that the Bible is really on about is the rescue story of God saving people. The Bible won’t help with your law exam or show you how to fix a leaking tap. It doesn’t answer every question that has ever existed. It doesn’t even answer some religious questions we may have about angels and demons, who the man of lawlessness is, or if Jesus had a beard and long hair. But it does deal with salvation and how we are to live. It is in those two areas that we should approach the Bible in seeking an answer for because that is what it is mostly on about.
And another thing, I’m going to be using the Bible to help support my position about the Bible. Some may say this is a circular argument. You can’t say the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true. But whatever we have as an ultimate authority means we can’t appeal to something higher. The person who is driven by their experiences and feelings would say, I know something is true because it feels true. Or a rationalist in practice says “my reason is true because my reason tells me it is true” They can’t show their reason is true without using their own reason. And so we can’t appeal to anything above our ultimate authority. But it should also be said that to be fair, the Bible isn’t just one book, it a collection of books, a biblios, a library. Written over 1500 years, on three different contents in three different languages by about 30 authors. And they all agree, so it is multiple sources. And not only does the Bible say that it is true, I find, in my life and from observing the world around me, it aligns with reality. It explains what is wrong with the world and the solution in Jesus seems to works.
Sufficient – God's Word is Enough
So as we quickly just break down this SCAN thing, we see first up that Scripture is Sufficient for salvation and Christian living.The classic verse about the Bible is 2 Timothy 3:16-17
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.Scripture is from God and is useful for training and equipping someone to build a house? Drive a car? No, for every good work. That is we don’t need another new revelation from heaven to tell us anything more about how to be saved or how we are to live. Scripture is enough because Christ's work is enough. We don’t need to do anything more or know anything more than what Christ has done in the Bible and what instructions there are for us to live.
This means we can expect God’s word to be relevant for us, for it is enough.
This idea can be scary because people want to know how to live in very specific circumstances that the Bible might not address. But that means there is great freedom in Christian living. As long as we are holding to the clear message on how to live, we can choose and exercise our God-given freedoms in what we do. We don’t need the latest Christian living book from Koorong. The Christian church coped for the last 2,000 years before the latest best-seller came along, we don’t need anything else. I’ll talk more about resources at the end.
Clear – God’s Word can be Understood
The Scriptures are also clear.In Psalm 119, it is all about God’s word and how it is helpful. Verse 105 says:
Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.This whole Psalm assumes that one can read God’s word, that they can think about it and know what it says. The main things we need to know, believe, and do - can be clearly seen in the Bible. Someone, with the help of the Spirit, with normal intelligence, can understand the Bible by using ordinary means of study and learning.
Despite what postmodernism tells you about our inability to understand meaning from a text, and despite you knowing your limits and that you can’t know everything there ever is about God, despite all that the Bible can be understood sufficiently to know about salvation in Christ and how to live as a Christian.
God invented language and even more languages after the Tower of Babel, He is competent enough to use this tool to convey meaning for us to understand. As on PhD said, “He has something to say and is very good at saying it.”[1]
This a radical point, and this is what we do in all our Life Groups and at WOT. We don’t need a magisterium, or church leader, to tell us what the Bible means.
Back in 2020, in November I ran a whole session for Life Group leaders on this point. And some didn’t buy it, but I posed the question if this is true what does this mean for our life groups? If it means that scripture is clear, that people can read it for themselves - what does this mean for us? And they listed a bunch of things, here are few:
- We can encourage our members to read their Bibles for themselves every day
- It is not about knowing more than anyone else in the group, it evens the playing field as we are all just looking at the text in front of us
- As leaders we do not have to tell our members what is in the text, the Holy Spirit will help in the process as they read it for themselves.
- We can approach the text with an understanding that it is knowable, and it is going to speak to me
- We do not need commentaries or Ian to tell us what the text means
- Other members in the group (not the leader) can help us confirm our faith from what they read and then share with the group. Everyone in the group can help us to know Jesus more and more.
Authority – God’s Word is Final
The third thing is, because Scripture is breathed by God, it means that the final word goes to God.In 2 Peter 1:20-21 it says:
Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.Scripture was written by people, but it was carried along by the Holy Spirit. We get to hear from God when we read the Bible. This makes it quite an important book. It also means, when push comes to shove - with our ideas or what culture is telling us, no matter how cool or how different we might be, the Bible has the final say. Christians live an alternate lifestyle in the culture because they give the Bible the final word in what they do.
I’m sure you have some flashbacks from years ago about some ideas you once held on to, but now think were silly or immature. You may experience that about yourself when looking back 20 years from now. We all change in our ideas, and so does wider culture. It is tossed two and fro. But God’s word is for keeps. Isaiah [40:8] says:
the grass writher and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures foreverJesus says:
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Mat 24:35)This is huge and is the main reason that Christians are taking heat in culture today. Why believe a 2000-year-old book, written before we had wifi, and literally sliced bread.
Culture thinks it is right and on the winning side of history, that their ideas are grand and the best and a great sign of progress. But society has always thought that. Our culture is true because out culture says it is true. And Christians have always though the Bible was God’s word even in the first generation. Peter calls Paul’s writings scripture in 2 Peter 3[:15-16]
Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
And Paul quotes Luke [10:7] in 1 Timothy [5:18] calling it scripture:
For Scripture says, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”If we do believe that the Bible is from God, and that when we read it, we should place what is says about salvation and how to live as a Christian above our reason and culture and everything else.
Necessary – God’s Word is Needed
The last of this SCAN thing is that God’s word is necessary for salvation and Christian living. No matter how smart we are, we can’t think our way into salvation. Human reason alone would not tell us that Jesus died for our sin on the cross. It needs to be revealed to us, we need to be told by God how to be saved and how He wants us to live.This term you should come across the line where Jesus says:
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6)To be saved, to know God, you need to know Jesus. And we find out about Jesus primarily through the Bible.
I read a book last year written by some cold case detective in America who tried to show that even without the New Testament you could draw out that Jesus was God and came to save us. He did this by looking at the influence Jesus had on art, music and the writings of the church over the years. That was an interesting idea, but not needed. For in the Bible, we are told clearly how we are saved and how we are to live.
Now, when you first became a Christian, someone probably didn’t read out the NIV to you and then you believed. But the message they told you, about Jesus, came from the Bible.
So for us
So this idea about the Bible is quite radical, it has been for more than 400 years. People have died for this position.I tried to fact-check this following story but I couldn’t find some of the details, so I am not sure if all of this is true[2].
In 1415 John Huss was burnt at the stake. He was a buddy of John Wycliffe who was also burnt at the steak a few months earlier in the same trial. Both these men wanted to get a translation of the Bible out to people so that everyone could read it. They were called heretics for doing this. I should also say that “Huss” means goose. So, when John Huss was taken to be burnt he apparently said:
“You are going to burn a goose, but in one hundred years you will have a swan which you can neither roast nor boil.”[3]One historian wished that the bishop presiding over the trial said “over my dead body”. The bishop didn’t say that, but he wants it to be true because 93 years later Martin Luther went to get ordained in Erfurit Cathedral. In those days when you would be ordained, you would lie flat before the alter as a sign of submission. Now apparently the bishop or one of the bishops that condemned Huss to be burned was buried under the alter of Erfruit Cathedral.
And Luther was radical and he got the Bible out to people in the common language, was excommunicated but couldn’t be stopped. His Scripture alone idea spoke back to power and changed Europe.
Just this week someone took offence or questioned a line I wrote in this current Life Group booklet about the use of commentaries (you all want to look it up now). Am I an anti-intellectual? Am I against books and resources written by smart people about the Bible? No, I am not. But I do think in our information age, and the commercialising of books and podcasts we face the opposite issue that the Reformers faced. In those days people didn’t have access to the Bible. Today the Bible is a free app on our phone, but so is Facebook and Spotify; and the professionalisation of the clergy gives the impression that we can’t understand the Bible for ourselves. So since information is so easily accessible, we can quickly jump to find out what Tim Keller or NT Wright has to say about a passage. Our devotions are written by someone else, which means we read other people’s reflections on a passage and not reflect on the passage ourselves. That is why SOAP this year could be of great benefit to us.
I think books and podcasts and commentaries and Ian are good gifts to the church. But they are not sufficient, clear, authoritative or necessary for our salvation. They can be good and helpful resources, packaged well for our contemporary issues of the day. But the measure we should hold up against them is the Bible, so to do that we need to know the Bible.
This idea moves the study of the Bible and its wisdom to everyone, not just the theologians. It reshuffles power and it overthrew the Roman church, they had to have their own counter-reformation to deal with it. And from this idea that everyone can read the Bible, it empowers everyone to know how to live and to love those around them.
De Young has a summary at the end of this book
"Counsellors can counsel meaningfully because Scripture is sufficient. Bible study leaders can lead confidently because Scripture is clear. Preachers can preach with boldness because their biblical text is authoritative. And evangelists can evangelize with urgency because the Scripture is necessary."And if you tuned out in any of this talk, just know that Colin Buccan is right:
The best book to read is the Bible
The best book to read is the Bible
If you read it every day
It will help you on your way
Oh, the best book to read is the Bible
[1] Mark Thompson, A Clear and Present Word: The Clarity of Scripture
[2] The overall story I got from R. C. Sproul in the first talk of Luther and the Reformation. I couldn’t find the name of the Bishop who was presiding over Huss’s trial (as there were multiple cardinals and bishops) and I couldn’t find the name of someone who was buried under the altar in Erfruit Cathedral so I couldn’t cross reference anything.
[3] A reformation prophecy Some people also think this quote is suspect
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