I don’t know exactly what everyone here believes, but I think I know most of you well enough that I can make a few blanket statements about what most of us believe.
- Most, if not all, of us here believe that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
- Most of us here believe the stories of Abraham, Moses, David & Goliath, and Daniel and all those other old testament characters.
- Most of us here believe that God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.
- Most of us here believe that the little baby Jesus, born in a manger some 2000 years ago, was the Son of God who grew up and lived a sinless life, and was eventually put to death on a cross, but He rose again three days later.
- And most of us here believe that one day Jesus is coming back to judge sin and put an end to death and will usher in those who believe in Him into everlasting, amazing life together with Him.
And for most of us, these beliefs have radically changed our lives. These beliefs have changed how we see our world. They have changed how understand our purpose in existing. They’ve changed how we raise our children. They’ve changed how we work, how we interact with our neighbours, how we manage our money, even how we spend our free time. I mean, these beliefs have changed everything!
And for some of us, holding these beliefs have come with a cost. Some of us have lost friends because of what we believe. Some of us have been openly mocked because of what we believe. Some of us, because of what we believe, have had to make choices that set us back in our careers or cost us financially. And while I don’t think it has happened yet in our group (although we certainly see it in other parts of the world), the day may come when our beliefs may cost us our freedom, our families, or even our lives.
So holding these beliefs come with huge ramifications. These beliefs will change the course of your life forever.
And the issue that I want you to wrestle with today is that all of these beliefs come from one primary source – this book right here – the Bible. As Christians, everything we believe about our world, about God, about Jesus, about our purpose in life, about how to live life, about eternity – all of that is rooted and based on the words we find in this book.
We are risking our friendships, our finances, our family’s future – perhaps one day even our freedom or our very lives based on the words in this book!
How important is it then, that, #1, we know without a doubt that the words in this book are trustworthy, true, and reliable? and #2. that we fully know and accurately understand what this book is saying?
The stakes are so high! We are staking both our present lives and our eternal future on the words in this book.
So I don’t know about you, but I sure want to know with certainty that the words in this book are indeed true. And if I can establish that, if they are true, then I want to know and understand and apply to my life everything it says!
And so to that end, I want to spend the next couple of weeks looking at the issue of the Bible. What is it? How did we get it? Can we trust it? And if we can, then how do we make sense of it all? How do we understand it and live out what it says? How does it make a difference in our lives?
These are super important questions that we need to have answers for, and so I’m pretty excited to go through all this stuff with you over these next couple weeks.
And of course, this is all part of our “Healthy Habits” that we’ve been talking about. Reading and studying and understanding and memorizing and applying the Bible to our lives is one of the cornerstone practices of all healthy, growing Christians. Of all the spiritual disciplines that we’re going to be talking about in this series, if you want to start with just one – this is the one I want you to start with! The Bible lays the foundation for everything else that we do and believe.
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