A Battle to Fight – The Strategy

What is the battle? The battle is for souls. How many will go God’s way and how many the devil’s way? There is even a battle for your soul – oh you might think you’re safe but how safe are you? And what about doing all that God has planned for you. Well this morning we are entering the battle.

The equipment for the battle is already there, in the spiritual, unseen realm. We don’t see it, but the angels and our enemies do. Start by simply praying through the passage in Ephesians as if suiting up for the arena:

“Therefore put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist.”

‘Lord, I put on the belt of truth. I choose a lifestyle of honesty and integrity. Show me the truths I so desperately need today. Expose the lies I’m not even aware that I’m believing.’

“With the breastplate of righteousness in place…”

‘And yes, Lord, I wear your righteousness today against all condemnation and corruption. Fit me with your holiness and purity – defend me from all assaults against my heart.’

“And with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace…”

‘I do choose to live for the gospel at any moment. Show me where the larger story is unfolding and keep me from being so lax that I think the most important thing today is the soap operas of this world.’

“In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one…”

‘Jesus, I lift against every lie and every assault the confidence that you are good, and that you have good in store for me. Nothing is coming today that can overcome me because you are with me.’

“Take the helmet of salvation…”

‘Thank you, Lord, for my salvation. I receive it in a new and fresh way from you and I declare that nothing can separate me now from the love of Christ and the place I shall ever have in your kingdom.’

“And the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God…”

‘Holy Spirit, show me specifically today the truths of the Word of God that I will need to counter the assaults and the snares of the enemy. Bring them to mind throughout the day.’

“And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.”

Finally, Holy Spirit I agree to walk in step with you in everything – in all prayer as my spirit communes with you throughout the day. (Ephesians 6:13-18)

There is a scene in a film called ‘The Mask of Zorro’ when the old master swordsman saves his young apprentice – who at that moment has had too much to drink – from rushing upon his enemy. “You would have fought bravely, he says, “and died quickly.” This what we have to remember – get dressed in the armour and be ready for the fight but don’t rush in. Be aware of who or what you are dealing with.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus Christ (Matt. 28:18). He tells us this before he gives us the Great Commission, the command to advance his kingdom. We’ve never made the connection. The reason is, if you are going to serve the True King you’re going to need his authority. We dare not take on any angel, let alone a fallen one, in our own strength. That is why Christ extends his authority to us, “and you have been given fullness is Christ, who is the head over every power and authority” (Col. 2:10). Rebuke the Enemy in your own name and he laughs, command him in the name of Christ and he flees.

One more thing: Don’t even think about going into battle alone. Yes, there are times a when you must face the battle alone, in the wee hours of the morn, and fight with all he’s got. But don’t make that a lifestyle of isolation. This may be our weakest point, because principally that is how society teaches us. Be an individual, take up your own rights!!!

Read John 4

It’s a Battle

Will you fight for her? That’s the question Jesus asked me many years ago, right before our tenth anniversary, right at the time I was wondering what had happened to the woman I married. You’re on the fence, John, he said Get in or get out I knew what he was saying-stop being a nice guy and act like a warrior. Play the man. I brought flowers, took her to dinner; and began to move back toward her in my heart. But I knew there was more. That night, before we went to bed, I prayed for Stasi in a way I’d never prayed for her before. Out loud, before all the heavenly hosts, I stepped between her and the forces of darkness that had been coming against her. Honestly, I didn’t really know what I was doing, only that I needed to take on the dragon. All hell broke loose. Everything we’ve learned about spiritual warfare began that night. And you know what happened? Stasi got free, the tower of her depression gave way as I began to truly fight for her.

And it’s not just once, but again and again over time. That’s where the myth really stumps us. Some men are willing to go in once, twice, even three times. But a warrior is in this for good. Oswald Chambers asks, “God spilt the life of his son that the world might be saved, are we prepared to spill out our lives?” Daniel is in the midst of a very hard, very unpromising battle for his wife. It’s been years now without much progress and without much hope. Sitting is a restaurant the other night, tears in his eyes, this is what he said to me: “I’m not going anywhere. This is my place in the battle. This is the hill that I will die on.” He has reached a point that we all must come to, sooner or later, when it’s no longer about winning or losing. His wife may respond and she may not. That’s really no longer the issue. The question is simply this: What kind of man do you want to be? Maximus? Wallace? Or Judah? A young pilot in the RAF wrote just before he went down in 1940, “The universe is so vast and so ageless that the life of one man can only be justified by the measure of his sacrifice.

Life is not a problem to be solved, it is an adventure to be lived. That’s the nature of it and has been since the beginning when God set the dangerous stage for this high-stakes drama and called the whole wild enterprise good. He rigged the world in such a way that it only works when we embrace risk as the theme of our lives, which is to say, only when we live by faith. A man just won’t be happy until he’s got adventure in his work, in his love and in his spiritual life.

Asking the Right Question

Several years ago I was thumbing through the introduction of a book when I ran across a sentence that changed my life. God is intimately personal with us and he speaks in ways that are peculiar to our own quirky hear~not just through the Bible, but through the whole of creation. To Stasi he speaks through movies. To Craig he speaks through rock and roll (he called me the other day after listening to “Running Through the jungle” to say he was fired up to go study the Bible). God’s word to me comes in many way – through sunsets and friends and films and music and wilderness and books. But he’s got an especially humorous thing going with me and books. I’ll be browsing through a second-hand book shop when out of a thousand volumes one will say ,”Pick me up”. In the introduction to the book that I rose to this day, the author (Gil Bailie) shares a piece of advice given to him some years back by a Spiritual mentor:

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

I was struck dumb. It could have been Balaam’s donkey, for all I was concerned. Suddenly my life up till that point made sense in a sickening sort of way, I realised I was living a script written for me by someone else. All my life I had been asking the world to tell me what to do with myself. This is different from seeking counsel or advice; what I wanted was freedom from responsibility and especially freedom from risk. I wanted someone else to tell me who to be. Thank God it didn’t work. The scripts they handed me I simply could not bring myself to play for very long. Like Saul’s armour, they never fit. Can a world of posers tell you to do anything but pose yourself? As Buechner says, we are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, “to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current ~happens to be running the strongest.” Reading the counsel given to Bailie I knew it was God speaking to me. It was an invitation to come out of it I set the volume down without turning another page and walked out of that bookstore to find a life worth living.

I applied to graduate school and got accepted. That program would turn out to be far more than a career move, out of the transformation that took place there I became a writer, counsellor, and speaker. The whole trajectory of my life changed and with it the lives of many, many other people. But I almost didn’t go. You see, when I applied to school I hadn’t a nickel to pay for it. I was married with three children and a mortgage, and that’s the season when most men completely abandon their dreams and back down from jumping off anything. The risk just seems too great. On top of it all, I received a call about that time from a firm back in Washington, D.C., offering me a plum job at an incredible salary. I would be in a prestigious company, flying in some very powerful circles, making great money God was thickening the plot, testing my resolve. Down one road was my dream and desire, which I had no means to pay for; and an absolutely uncertain future after that, down the other was a comfortable step up the ladder of success, a very obvious next career move and the total loss of my soul.

I went to the mountains for the weekend to sort things out. Life makes more sense standing alone by a lake at high elevation with a fly rod in hand. The tentacles of the world and my false self seemed to give way as I climbed up into the Holy Cross Wilderness. On the second day God began to speak. John, you can take that job if you want to. It’s not a sin. But it’ll kill you and you know it. He was right, it had False Self written all over it. If you want to follow Me, he continued, I’m heading that way I knew exactly what he meant-”that way’ headed into wilderness, frontier. The following week three phone calls came in amazing succession. The first was from the Washington firm; I told them I was not their man, to call somebody else. As I hung up the phone my false self was screaming what are you doing?! The next day the phone rang again; it was my wife, telling me that the university had called wanting to know where my first tuition instalment was. On the third day a call came from a long-time friend who had been praying for me and my decision. “We think you ought to go to school,” he said. “And we want to pay your way.”

Two roads diverged in a wood and I,
took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What are you waiting for?

Where would we be today if Abraham had carefully weighed the pros and cons of God’s invitation and decided that he’d rather hang on to his medical benefits, three weeks paid vacation and retirement plan in Ur? What would have happened if Moses had listened to his mother’s advice to “never play with matches” and lived a careful, cautious life steering clear of all burning bushes? You wouldn’t have the gospel if Paul had concluded that the life of a Pharisee, while not everything a man dreams for; was at least predictable and certainly more stable than following a voice he herd on the Damascus road. After all, people hear voices all the time and who really knows whether it’s God or just one’s imagination. Where would we be if Jesus was not fierce and wild and romantic to the core? Come to think of it, we wouldn’t be at all if God hadn’t taken that enormous risk of us in the first place.

Most men spend the energy of their lives trying to eliminate risk, or squeezing it down to a more manageable size. Their children hear “no” far more than they hear “yes”; their employees feel chained up and their wives are equally bound. If it works, if a man succeeds in securing his life against all risk, he’ll wind up in a cocoon of self-protection and wonder all the while why he’s suffocating. If it doesn’t work, he curses God, redoubles his efforts and his blood pressure. when you look at the structure of the false self men tend to create, it always revolves around two themes: seizing upon some sort of competence and rejecting anything that cannot be controlled. As David Whyte says, ‘The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears.’

For murdering his brother, God sentences Cain to the life of a restless wanderer, five verses later Cain is building a city (Genesis. 4:12, 17). That sort of commitment-the refusal to trust God and the reach for control-runs deep in every man. Whyte talks about the difference between the false self’s desire “to have power over experience, to control all events and consequences, and the soul’s wish to have power through experience, no matter what that may be.” You literally sacrifice your soul and your true power when you insist on controlling things, like the guy Jesus talked about who thought he finally pulled it all off, built himself some really nice barns and died the same night. “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Mark 8:36 NKJV). You can lose your soul, by the way, long before you die.

Too many men forsake their dreams because they aren’t willing to risk, or fear they aren’t up to the challenge, or are never told that those desires deep in their heart are good. But the soul of a man, isn’t made for controlling things, he’s made for adventure. Something in us remembers, however faintly, that when God set man on the earth he gave us an incredible mission-a charter to explore, build, conquer; and care for all creation. It was a blank page waiting to be written, a clean canvas waiting to be painted. Well, sir, God never revoked that charter. It’s still there, waiting for a man to seize it.

If you had permission to do what you really want to do, what would you do? Don’t ask how, that will cut your desire off at the knees. How is never the right question, how is a faithless question. It means “unless I can see my way clearly I won’t believe it, won’t venture forth.” When the angel told Zechariah that his ancient wife would bear him a son named John, Zechariah asked how and was struck dumb for it. How is God’s department. He is asking you what is written in your heart? What makes you come alive? If you could do what you’ve always wanted to do, what would it be? You see, a man’s calling is written on his true heart, and he discovers it when he enters the frontier of his deep desires. To paraphrase Bailie, don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive because what the world needs are men who have come alive.

The invitation in the book shop, I must note, was given to me some years into my Christian life when the transformation of my character was at a point that I could hear it without running off and doing something stupid. I’ve met men who’ve used advice like it as permission to leave their wife and run off with their secretary. They are deceived about what it is they really want, what they are made for. There is a design God has woven into the fabric of this world, and if we violate it we cannot hope to find life. Because our hearts have strayed so far from home, he’s given us the Law as a sort of handrail to help us back from the precipice. But the goal of Christian discipleship is the transformed heart, we move from a boy who needs the Law to the man who is able to live by the Spirit of the law. “My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness… Legalism is helpless in bringing this about, it only gets in the way” (Galatians 5 v 16, 23 The Message).

A man’s life becomes an adventure, the whole thing takes on a transcendent purpose when he releases control in exchange for the recovery of the dreams in his heart. Sometimes those dreams are buried deep and it takes some unearthing to get to them. We pay attention to our desire. Often the clues are in our past, in those moments when we found ourselves loving what we were doing. The details and circumstances change as we grow; but the themes remain the same.

To recover his heart’s desire a man needs to get away from the noise and distraction of his daily life for time with his own soul. He needs to head into the wilderness, to silence and solitude. Alone with himself, he allows whatever is there to come to the surface. Sometimes it is grief for so much lost time. There, beneath the grief, are desires long forsaken. Sometimes it even starts with temptation, when a man thinks that what will really make him come alive is something unholy. At that point he should ask himself, “what is the desire beneath this desire? What is it I’m wanting that I think I’ll find there!” However the desire begins to surface, we pick up that trail when we allow a cry to rise from the depths of our soul, a cry, as Whyte says, “for a kind of forgotten courage, one difficult to hear, demanding not a raise, but another life.”

Into the Unknown

“The spiritual life cannot be made suburban,” said Howard Macey. “It is always frontier and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed.” The greatest obstacle to realising our dreams is the false self’s hatred of mystery. That’s a problem, you see, because mystery is essential to adventure. More than that, mystery is the heart of the universe and the God who made it. The most important aspects of any man’s world-his relationship with his God and with the people in his life, his calling, the spiritual battles he’ll face-every one of them is fraught with mystery. But that is not a bad thing, it is a joyful, rich part of reality and essential to our soul’s thirst for adventure. As Oswald chambers says:

Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing.. Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life; gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness, it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation. (My Utmost for His Highest).

There are no formulas with God. Period. So there are no formulas for the man who follows him. God is a Person, not a doctrine. He operates not like a system-not even a theological system-but with all the originality of a truly free and alive person. ‘The realm of God is dangerous,” says Archbishop Anthony Bloom. “You must enter into it and not just seek information about it.” Take Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. The Israelites are staged to make their first military strike into the promised land and there’s a lot hanging on this moment – the morale of the troops, their confidence in Joshua, not to mention their reputation that will precede them to every other enemy that awaits. This is their D-Day, so to speak, and word is going to get around. How does God get the whole thing off to a good start? He has them march around the city blowing trumpets for a week; on the seventh day he has them do it seven times and then give a big holler. It works marvellously, of course. And you know what? It never happens again. Israel never uses that tactic again.

There’s Gideon and his army reduced from thirty-two thousand to three-hundred. What’s their plan of attack? Torches and water pots. It also works splendidly and it also never happens again. You recall Jesus healing the blind, he never does it the same way twice. I hope you’re getting the idea because the church has really been taken in by the world on this one. The Modem Era hated mystery, we desperately wanted a means of controlling our own lives and we seemed to find the ultimate Tower of Babble in the scientific method. Don’t get me wrong, science has given us many wonderful advances in sanitation, medicine, transportation. But we’ve tried to use those methods to tame the wildness of the spiritual frontier. We take the latest marketing methods, the newest business management fad, and we apply it to ministry. The problem with modern Christianity’s obsession with principles is that it removes any real conversation with God. Find the principle, apply the principle -what do you need God for? So Oswald Chambers warns us, “Never make a principle out of your experience, let God be as original with other people as he is with you.”

Originality and creativity are essential to person-hood and to masculine strength. The adventure begins and our real strength is released when we no longer rely on formulas. God is an immensely creative Person and he wants his sons to live that way too. There is a great picture of this in Raiders of the Lost Ark, of all places. Of course Indiana Jones is a swashbuckling hero who can handle ancient history, beautiful women, and a forty-five with ease. But the real test of the man comes when all his resources have failed. He’s finally found the famous ark, but the Germans have stolen it from him and loaded it onto a truck. They’re about to drive off with his dreams under heavy Nazi military protection. Jones and his two companions are watching helplessly as victory slips through their fingers. But Indiana is not finished, oh no, the game has just begun. He says to his friends:

Jones: Get back to Cairo. Get us some transport to England… boat, plane, anything. Meet me at Omars. Be ready for me. I’m going after that truck.
SAULACK: How?
Jones: I don’t know… I’m making this up as I go.

When it comes to living and loving, what’s required is a willingness to jump in with both feet and be creative as you go. A woman doesn’t want to be related to with formulas, and she certainly doesn’t want to be treated like a project that has answers to it. She doesn’t want to be solved, she wants to be known. Mason is absolutely right when he calls marriage the “Wild Frontier.”

The same holds true for the spiritual battles that we face. This is where we are now – in the midst of battle without the training we really need and there are few men around to show us how to do it. We are going to have to figure a lot of this out for ourselves. We know how to attend church, we’ve been taught not to swear or drink or smoke. We know how to be nice. But we don’t really know how to fight, and we’re going to have to learn as we go. That is where our strength will be crystallised, deepened, and revealed. A man is never more a man than when he embraces an adventure beyond his control, or when he walks into a battle he isn’t sure of winning.

From Formula to Relationship

I’m not suggesting that the Christian life is chaotic or that a real man is flagrantly irresponsible. The poser who squanders his pay-cheque at the racetrack or the slot machines is not a man, he’s a fool. The sluggard who quits his job and makes his wife go to work so he can stay home to practice his golf swing, thinking he’ll make the pro tour, is “worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8). What I am saying is that our false self demands a formula before he’ll engage, he wants a guarantee of success, and mister, you aren’t going to get one. So there comes a time in a man’s life when he’s got to break away from all that and head off into the unknown with God. This is a vital part of our journey and if we balk here, the journey ends.

Before the moment of Adam’s greatest trial God provided no step-by-step plan, gave no formula for how he was to handle the whole mess. That was not abandonment; that was the way God honoured Adam. You are a man, you don’t need Me to hold you by the hand through this. You have what it takes. What God did offer Adam was friendship. He wasn’t left alone to face life, he walked with God in the cool of the day and there they talked about love and marriage and creativity, what lessons he was learning and what adventures were to come. This is what God is offering to us as well. As Chambers says,

There comes the baffling call of God in our lives also. The call of God can never be stated explicitly, it is implicit. The call of God is like the call of the sea, no one hears it but the one who has the nature of the sea in him. It cannot be stated definitely what the call of God is to, because his call is to be in comradeship with himself for his own purposes, and the test is to believe that God knows what he is after; (My Utmost for His Highest).

The only way to live in this adventure, with all its danger and unpredictability and immensely high stakes, is in an ongoing, intimate relationship with God. The control we so desperately crave is an illusion. Far better to give it up in exchange for God’s offer of companionship, set aside stale formulas so that we might enter into an informal friendship. Abraham knew this, Moses did as well. Read through the first several chapters of Exodus. It’s filled with a give-and-take between Moses and God, “Then the Lord said to Moses,” “then Moses said to the Lord”. The two act like they know each other, like they really are intimate allies. David, a man after Gods own heart, also walked and warred and loved his way through life in a conversational intimacy with God.

When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed king over Israel, they went up in full force to search for him, but David heard about it and went down to the stronghold. Now the Philistines had come and spread out in the Valley of Rephaim, so David inquired of the Lord, “Shall I go and attack the Philistines? Will you hand them over to me?” The Lord answered him, “Go, for I will surely hand the Philistines over to you.” So David went to BaaI Perarim, and there he defeated them… Once more the Philistines came up and spread out in the Valley of Rephaim, so David inquired of the Lord, and he answered, “Do not go straight up, but circle around behind them and attack them in front of the balsam trees. As soon as you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the balsam trees, move quickly, because that will mean the LORD has gone out in front of you to strike the Philistine army.” So David did as the Lord commanded him, and he struck down the Philistines all the way from Gibeon to Gaer. (2 Sam. 5:17-20, 22-25).

Here again there is no rigid formula for David, it changes as he goes, relying on the counsel of God: This is the way every comrade and close companion of God lives. Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). God calls you his friend: He wants to talk to you, personally, frequently. As Dallas Willard writes, “The ideal for divine guidance is a conversational relationship with God: the sort of relationship suited to friends who are mature personalities in a shared enterprise.” Our whole journey into authentic masculinity centres around those cool-of-the-day talks with God. Simple questions change hassles to adventures, the events of our lives become opportunities for initiation. “What are you teaching me here, God? What are you asking me to do… or to let go of? What in my heart are you speaking to?”

Further Up and Further In

For years now I have wanted to climb one of the great peaks – Denali, perhaps, and after that maybe even Everest. Something calls to my heart every time I see a photo or read an account of another attempt. The allure of the wild places we have left haunts me, but there’s also the desire for a challenge that requires everything I’ve got. Yes, even danger; maybe especially danger. Some people think I’m crazy, and I know that this dream may never be realised in my lifetime, but that does not discourage me, there is something symbolic about the desire and I cannot let it go. This is quite crucial for us to understand. We have desires in our hearts that are core to who and what we are; they are almost mythic in their meaning, waking in us something transcendent and eternal. But we can be mistaken about how those desires will be lived out The way in which God fulfils a desire may be different from what first awakened it.

In the past year or so I’ve made a number of decisions that make no sense unless there is a God and I am his friend. I left my corporate job and struck out on my own, following a dream I’ve long feared. I’ve picked up the shattered pieces of a vision I lost, when my best friend and partner Brent was killed in a climbing accident. What feels most crazy of all, I’ve opened my self to friendship again and a new partner; and we’re heading out where Brent and I left off. The battle has been intense, a steep ascent that’s taking everything I’ve got. The stakes I’m playing at now are immense-financially, sure, but more so spiritually, relationally. It’s requiring a concentration of body, soul, and spirit I’ve never before endured.

What is perhaps the hardest part is the misunderstanding I live with from others on a daily basis. Sometimes the winds howl around me; other times I fear I’ll fall. The other day I was feeling way out on the end of my rope, cutting a path across a sheer face of risk. Out of my heart rose a question.

What are we doing God?
We’re climbing Everest!

A brief overview

We’re going to look at five elements that I believe are key to a Christian’s life. They are the basics – get these right and everything else will follow on!

A disciple is one who follows Christ or the person who follows the teachings of another whom he or she accepts as a leader (imitating).

Assurance

As a Christian we are following the teachings of Jesus and to get our relationship right from the start we need to understand what it means to be a Christian.
Ask “What do you believe?”
In Romans Chapter One we read, “I am proud of the Good News, because it is the power God uses to save everyone who believes…. The Good News shows how God makes people right with Himself – that it begins and ends with faith.”v16-17
What is the good news that Paul talks about, “The Good News is about God’s Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” v 3
The Good News that we all know and love is the fact that Jesus hatched a rescue plan with His Father, he came and lived a holy life, so that we have an example to follow (He didn’t answer every question – He wants a dynamic relationship with us, where we seek Him for wisdom), and then He died, a cruel and wicked death, but then He rose again and now as it says in Romans 1 v 7, God calls us to be His holy people.
This is good news that God calls us to be holy. And that is assurance to know that God calls. However, there is a flip side to that calling. The flip side is that he wants us to be holy. What is the punishment if we’re not holy? “When people sin, they earn what sin pays – death” Romans 6 v 23 or in the NIV it says, “the wages of sin is death”. Unfortunately, many people have taken this verse out of context and quoted it as a verse for non-Christians. Well it is not a verse for non-Christians, it is a verse for Christians. The context, is moral complacency and presumption among believers. “Shall we go on sinning, so that grace may increase?” Paul asks in 6 v 1 and “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” (6 v 15). What Paul is trying to ask and point out to us as Christians is that the wages of continual sin, “not being holy”, is death. I have briefly said it before and I will say it again, watch your salvation and watch your holiness – you can lose it and not even realise you are losing it. Ask God, ask other people, be led by your friends and your Pastor.
Be assured that you are God’s child but don’t get complacent and lose your salvation.

God’s Word

The word has to be read and constantly read so that it becomes part of your life.

66 books
Longest book is the Psalms
Shortest book is 2 John
Longest verse is Esther 8 v 9
Shortest verse is John 11 v 35
Middle verse is Psalm 118 v 9
1,189 chapters, 773,746 words, 3,566,480 letters
Written in three languages – Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek
Written in three continents – Africa, Asia and Europe
Approx. 1,600 years time span between the last and the first books
40 authors over 60 generations
One message – man’s redemption

Authors/backgrounds

Moses – political leader
Peter – fisherman
Amos – herdsman
Joshua – military leader
Luke – Doctor
Nehemiah – battler
Daniel – Prime Minister
Paul – Rabbi
Solomon – King
Matthew – tax collector

1. Little finger – hearing – 5% – “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.” Luke 11 v 28
2. Next finger – reading – 20% – “It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees…” Deuteronomy 17 v 19 (panoramic view). When you look at a beautiful view you don’t need a powerful magnifying glass to examine every part of the view. This is like reading the Bible. Sometimes though it is good to examine a particular flower and then the magnifying glass might be used for a closer focus. Hence…
3. Middle finger – study – 35% – “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.” 2 Timothy 2 v 15 (microscopic view).
4. Index finger – memorise – 100% -
How can a young man keep his way pure?
By living according to your word.
I have hidden your word in my heart;
that I might not sin against you.
Psalm 119 v 9 & 11
The final part is the key. Without a thumb you cannot grip anything. Try holding a book without using your thumb!
5. Thumb – meditation – “Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.” Joshua 1 v 8. Meditation is where the Word of God flows from your head into your heart and becomes your blood. Isaac Newton’s blood was said to be bibling!
The Bible is there for you. Not you for the Bible – don’t get legalistic. The Bible is only a guide – it can’t hope to be specific – girlfriend/wife won’t know name. Sometimes it is a delight to read the Bible, sometimes a duty but always a necessity.

Prayer

Reading the Word and prayer could be called “upward” disciplines. Up to God. And this is what prayer is – up to God.
Prayer in its simplest form is a chat with God. Read the Bible and look up the word prayer in a concordance – go to every verse and get to know how to pray BUT at the end of the day, as I said to a young man once until you commit time, it won’t work. Give God time.

Fellowship and Witness

If the other two disciplines were upward, these two are outward.
Can I get someone to read Acts 2 v 42 – 47. What do you notice from these verses?(Allow folks to call out!)
Well the thing I noticed the most is that in having fellowship, people became believers. What I mean is that as they met together and enjoyed each other, people saw what was happening and wanted some of it themselves.
“Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Philippians 2 v 4
And back to prayer again, but why were originally created, to have fellowship with God.
The witness means to be a witness. Sounds obvious but if I go and see someone who has never met an Englishman, I am being a witness to them. And likewise as a Christian.
“Love your neighbour as yourself.” Whether that neighbour be a Christian or a non-Christian. Love never hurts a neighbour, loving is obeying the Word of God.” Romans 13 v 9b-10
“But clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ and forget about satisfying your sinful self.” Romans 13 v 14

And to conclude, I could never give full justice to these disciplines in such a short talk, that is why you have the Bible but let me conclude with this.

A mature follower of Jesus:-
Is a servant. They expect nothing in return for their service.
Deals with their sin before the Lord.
Is marked by righteousness.
Is honest and open with his dealings with brothers and sisters.
Brings personal difficulties before the Lord.
Is generous (with time and money). Owns nothing.
Teaches others how to live a Godly life.
Manages his area of responsibility well.
Knows how to obey.
Knows how to relate well with brothers and sisters. He knows how to encourage, how to seek forgiveness. Believes the best about his brother and sister.
Has personal spiritual discipline in good order.

All word, you dry up.
All Spirit, you blow up.
Word and Spirit you grow up.

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; for it becomes your destiny!

In Him, we were also chosen, haing been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will. Ephesians 1 v 11

God’s purpose is to offer salvation to the world, just as He planned to do long ago. God is sovereign, He is in charge. When your life seems chaotic, rest in this truth. Jesus is Lord and God is in control. God’s purpose to save you cannot be thwarted, no matter what evil Satan may bring.

We probably all need to hear that one daily, but right now that is refreshment to my spirit.