sermon preached at Ypsilanti Free Methodist Church, April 10, 2022
We’re in the final week of our series on the FM Way. As we have explored the values that make us distinct, I pray you have found these weeks both helpful and challenging to you: helpful as you gain a greater understanding of the denominational movement of which we are a part, and challenging as you consider how the Holy Spirit is inviting you to be part of this way of being.
Let’s review the first 4 values that define our way of life as Free Methodists:
Life-Giving Holiness. God’s call to holiness was never meant to be a burden, but a gift that liberates us for life that is truly life by delivering us from the destructive power of sin. *
Love-Driven Justice. Love is the way we demonstrate God’s heart for justice by valuing the image of God in all men, women, and children, acting with compassion toward the oppressed, resisting oppression, and stewarding Creation.*
Christ-Compelled Multiplication. The Gospel of Jesus Christ—the message He proclaimed, the life He lived, and the ministry He modeled—set into motion a redemptive movement destined to fill the whole earth.*
Cross-Cultural Collaboration. From the beginning, God’s intent was to have a people from every nation, culture and ethnicity, united in Christ and commissioned to carry out His work in the world.*
God-Given Revelation. We hold unwaveringly to our conviction that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and our final authority in all matters of faith and practice.*
When we talk about revelation, we’re talking about how God reveals God’s self to us. In the songs we’ve been singing this morning, we’ve celebrated God’s revelation to us in all people, especially the poor and powerless, and in Jesus Christ, God’s son. Before we get into the specific revelation of Scripture, let’s start by asking the question: How does God reveal God’s self?
First, God reveals God’s self in Creation. Psalm 19:1-4 sings, “Heaven is declaring God’s glory; the sky is proclaiming his handiwork. One day gushes the news to the next, and one night informs another what needs to be known. Of course, there’s no speech, no words—their voices can’t be heard—but their sound extends throughout the world; their words reach the ends of the earth. God has made a tent in heaven for the sun.”
Paul in Romans 1:20 argues, “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
We can look around at the created world and see God.
Second, God reveals God’s self in Jesus, the Word became flesh. The beloved disciple writes in the Gospel of John chapter 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all humankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
Don’t you just love that? Oh my gosh I could go on and on about the incarnation, the way God became like one of us, put on skin and moved into our neighborhood. Jesus knows what it is to be human.
And in Colossians 1:15-20, the Apostle Paul waxes poetic about God revealing God’s self in Jesus. “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
Thirdly, God reveals God’s self to us in the presence of Holy Spirit. In John 14 and John 16, Jesus himself told his followers that they would continue to have fellowship with God through the presence of Holy Spirit. John 14:26: “The Companion, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I told you.” John 16:13, “But when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.”
Fourth, we see God revealing God’s self to us through the Church, the Body of Christ. We – you and me – are to become the love of God for one another! At the end of his diatribe on One Body, Many Parts, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:24-27, “But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the part with less honor so that there won’t be division in the body and so the parts might have mutual concern for each other. If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part gets the glory, all the parts celebrate with it. You are the body of Christ and parts of each other.”
And that brings us to the Holy Scriptures, the God-Given Revelation in our laps. God reveals God’s self to us through the Bible.
What exactly is the Bible?
According to our Free Methodist Book of Discipline, “The Bible is God’s written Word, uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit. It bears unerring witness to Jesus Christ, the living Word. As attested by the Early Church and subsequent councils, it is the trustworthy record of God’s revelation, completely truthful in all it affirms. It has been faithfully preserved and proves itself true in human experience.”
My friends at the Bible Project sum up the Bible this way: The Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. Let’s hear more from them now in this video. Check out this 5 minute video to get a great overview.
Ok so that’s a thousand foot view of what the Bible is. Now the question is:
Who is the Bible for?
From the origin of these parchments, the words of Scripture have been intended for the ears of all of God’s people. Unlike me with my 8 copies of this sacred book on my shelf, most God-followers throughout history never had direct access to the text. This is why gathering together was and will always be essential – the public reading of Scripture is part of our God-life. These living and active words of the Bible are useful to every single person’s life.
In Pastor Eugene Peterson’s work of translating the Bible into a modern-day vernacular (now known as The Message), he came to a new understanding of Biblical reading and study. He was meeting with a group from his congregation, a gathering of average people with no higher education in biblical languages or interpretation: regular church folk. Peterson says, “I shifted my style of teaching. Instead of informing them…I just gathered people together to read the text as we have it…There is a fancy word for what became clear in these gatherings: perspicuity–the conviction that the Bible is basically readable as it is. It is not a body of secret lore accessible only to an academic elite. It is written plainly for plain men and women.” The Bible speaks for itself.
So if the Bible is God-given revelation and the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus and the Bible is for all people, the next question we need to answer is:
Why Read the Bible?
Both as a Free Methodist and as a life-long follower of Jesus I hold a strong conviction that reading and memorizing Scripture are crucial components to life with Jesus. It is through Scripture that we learn who Jesus is and what Jesus did and how we are to live like Him. It is in Scripture that we encounter the never-stopping, never-giving-up love of God. (Shout out to the Jesus Storybook Bible there.) It is through memorizing Scripture that our thoughts come into alignment with God’s thoughts, that our deepest formation is not quotes from movies or lyrics from songs or news heads or family gossip; but our thoughts become formed by the God who is called Love. It changes how we think. It is in reading and studying Scripture that we encounter conviction and challenge to confess and change unhealthy habits. It is in Scripture where we join up with all the followers of Jesus through time and space, knowing we are part of a compelling narrative of abundant life with God. It is in Scripture that we find the reasons for the Hope that we have. I love the Bible.
Our Bishop Matt Whitehead writes in The FM Way: “Biblical illiteracy is a serious issue because anyone not grounded in the foundation of God’s Word begins to interpret societal issues, cultural trends, and even issues of church practice and discipline through views of the very culture and society with which the Bible often clashes. As Wesleyans, we believe that being grounded in God’s Word is essential for life in Christ and service in God’s kingdom.”
If you consider yourself a follower of Jesus, stop and ask yourself right now: Am I biblically literate? How much time do I spend reading the Bible outside of the Sunday morning gathering?
One of my favorite books about the Bible is Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book. Have you heard of the phrase “You are what you eat”? Peterson says, “Readers become what they read. If Holy Scripture is to be something other than mere gossip about God, it must be internalized.” So Peterson starts with this vivid image from Revelation 9:8-10 where we read: “The voice out of Heaven spoke to me again: ‘Go, take the book held open in the hand of the Angel astride sea and earth.’ I went up to the Angel and said, ‘Give me the little book.’ He said, ‘Take it, then eat it. It will taste sweet like honey, but turn sour in your stomach.’ I took the little book from the Angel’s hand and it was sweet honey in my mouth, but when I swallowed, my stomach curdled. Then I was told, ‘You must go back and prophesy again over many peoples and nations and languages and kings.’
The Bible can be sweet and the Bible can be sour. The Bible doesn’t sit well with us until it becomes part of our being and our doing. We must do more than merely listen to the words of Scripture. We must do more than take notes during the sermon. We must do more than one Bible study after another Bible study. We must eat this Book.
Eating the book, the God-given revelation of The Holy Bible, means ingesting it, chewing over it, savoring it, and then allowing it to be digested, to become a part of our being, to change us from the inside.
“Christians feed on Scripture,” Peterson writes. “Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.”
Has your Bible reading been metabolized into acts of love?
Along with Peterson, I believe that Scripture is not just a story to read, but an invitation to be part of the work of God in the world. Scripture is how we learn what it means to be human, to love God, love all people, and follow Jesus together. “This Scripture text,” Peterson writes, “in the course of revealing God, pulls us into the revelation and welcomes us as participants in it. What I want to call attention to is that the Bible, all of it, is livable; it is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole.”
At home and whole? Does that describe you? Do you know your place in this world because of the story of Scripture, the lens through which you see all things?
I’d encourage you to read Bishop Matt’s story about his mother finding her home in the Bible. You can find the full article at Light+Life magazine. Bishop Matt had been given a Bible from his mother after she had read it over the course of a year with her son Matthew in mind. In it she had left notes and prayers over this specific child of hers and then given it to him as a gift. On one of the pages, Matt found her words: “One day after walking with the Lord for many years it occurred to me that our true home on earth is the Bible. Its pages are so familiar, its truth so pure, its light so bright that it illumines every part of our lives. I am glad our home is transportable everywhere.” How beautiful is that?
Friends, we need to be people who are formed by Scripture, by this God-given revelation. We need to go beyond hearing and studying, and start taking and eating. Information is well and good. But the Bible as living and active will change our lives. As Bishop Matt puts it, “Information is acquired as we study the Word of God, but [transformation] happens when we allow the Word of God to study us.”
So what’s next? First, and this will come as a shock to you…(tongue-in-cheek)
Read your Bible every day.
Read Scripture. If you don’t have a Bible take one home with you today. They’re available on the welcome table in the lobby. And if you’re hungry to learn more about what the Bible is and how to read it, explore TheBibleProject.com or download the Bible Project app.
Secondly, and this one is a little different…
Let the Bible read you.
This type of reading sets aside the need for information and instead desires transformation. This can be done by listening to Scripture read aloud. I’m sure there’s many resources for audio Bibles, but I know for sure you can have any passage read to you at www.BibleGateway.com and by using the YouVersion app.
Another great way to let Scripture read you is by letting yourself become engrossed in the narrative of the Bible. I’ve recently discovered The NIV Readers Bible which has been a breath of fresh air for my Bible reading. The Reader’s Bible takes out all of the verses and numbers and headings and two-column format and invites you to read the Bible as story. It’s so cool.
Friends, I hope you will open yourself up to God-Given revelation in a fresh way starting now. Because I agree with Dr. Howard Snyder who writes, “The Bible is a wonderful book. The more we read it, the more we enjoy it. We always find in it something new. It is a field, the fertility of which increases the longer and the more thoroughly it is cultivated. The more there is taken from it, the more it is capable of yielding. It is a mine which grows richer and richer the more it is worked.”
So, friends, in the words of Eugene Peterson:
Come to the Table and eat this book, for every word in the book is intended to do something in us, give us health and wholeness, vitality and holiness to our souls and body.
