Well we just finished our first
series for this year at Ethos and I thought that I would do an overview of what we said.
We spent 4 weeks looking at how the Bible is
different from any other book ever written.
The Bible does not just contain the words of God it IS the word of God.
The reality is if God never would
have chose to reveal himself we never would have discovered him on our
own. God revealed himself in two ways.
Natural
Revelation – Romans 1:20
Special
Revelation – Hebrew 4:12
The foundation of this series was
this…That ALL scripture is inspired by God.
2 Timothy 3:16, All
Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and
training in righteousness,
2 Peter 1:21, For
prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as
they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
To me I don’t think there is
anything more important to a follower of Christ than to be grounded in the word
of God. Outside of God’s himself His
word to us is most vital. Again, we must
understand that His word is telling His story of Jesus. This series was not about just gaining bible
knowledge it is about us discovering more of Jesus.
Jesus said this in John 5:39, “You diligently study
the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life.
These are the Scriptures that testify about me.” The bible was written so that we may believe that
Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and how His life, death and resurrection
gives us life.
In the bible we see amazing unity
in the scriptures. The bible is composed
of 66 books written by 35-40 different men over a period of 1600 years in three
different languages Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek.
Generally speaking these authors did not know each other. Also, there are over 2000 prophesies that have
been historically verified. This is more than any other religious document
On week three we dealt with the
big questions of life. We dealt with the
questions that define our personal worldview.
Now a world view is simply a basic perspective we use to understand the
world around us and our experience of it.
The questions I think that mostly define our worldview are: Where did I come from, Why am I here, How should
I live, Where am I going? These are some
questions we all have asked in our life.
I decided to answer these
questions not systematically, but rather to tell the story of the bible in 4
major themes.
CREATION
Genesis 1:1-2
Genesis 1:26, declares
that all of humanity was created in the community of Our Image (The
Trinity)
The story of God is
a story of Eternal Love!
FALL
Genesis 3:1-4
Genesis 3:15, (the
thesis of the entire story is found in this one verse)
We are at war; the
bible is not a fairy tale. The war is
against the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness.
REDEMPTION
We all have deep struggles
in our heart and we desperately need a Savior.
Look at how Paul describes
this in Romans 7:18-24
Jesus says that he
has come to heal the broke hearted and to set the captives free.
RESTORATION
Revelation 1:18
The tomb is empty…the
hero has been brought back to life.
All of a sudden
fear begins to be replaced with hope.
John 14:1-3
Revelation 21:5
This week
was a powerful week again as we just told the story of God and let this amazing
story answer life’s deep questions.
We ended this series asking one question “what does a life
look like that is planted in the word?” The
key verses to our last message were:
James
1:18
James
1:21
We looked at a verse in John 8:37, where Jesus looked at a
group of people and said the issues with you are “my word is not found in you.” This paints a picture that you can know the
word but fail to have it alive and active in your life. The problem is we snack on the things of
culture and then when the feast (God’s word) is set in front of us we are
hungry.
We must begin pray that that our souls begin to crave the
Word of God. Then word through the Holy
Spirit will be carried into our dead hearts and then we will experience new
life and we see Christ for really who he is…our redeemer. We will never out grow our need for the good
news of forgiveness…eternal life…and God being for you.
Final thoughts
Get
into the Bible…breathe it in as oxygen to your soul
Read it
with passion and begin to accept what it is calling you to
Ask God
to open your heart to receive what you need from it.
So, to me this was a great series for us to start out this
year. I hope that rough notes here help
you and me remember the importance of God’s word in our life.
