Communion with God is a two-way street, involving both our communication to Him and His communication to us through Scripture. While prayer, thanksgiving, worship, and confession are spontaneous and unscheduled, understanding God's Word requires concentrated, disciplined study. The sermon emphasizes that approaching the Bible like any other book—through regular, systematic engagement—is essential for spiritual maturity, moving beyond superficial understanding to grasp its meaning for our lives and about God. This disciplined approach, rather than fragmented, intermittent study, allows believers to consume the 'meat' of the Word and grow spiritually.
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Greatest hymns of church, isn't it? I like that. Second verse, particularly, the third in the hymn, My sin of the blitz of this glorious thought. My sin, not in part, but the whole. It is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more. And it says, Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. That was great. Thank you. This morning we were talking about the quiet time. the five component part of prayer asking, of thanking God when He answers those prayers, secondly, of worship, and of confession of sin.
And we saw in all of those four ingredients that they are unschedulable. They come to us throughout the course of any given day. And our responses are intermittent. They will not and cannot be packaged into any little package. To do so is to take that little triangle and try to get it through the square. It won't work. And it's bound to frustrate us. Now, the fact of the matter is that emphasis is an emphasis we need to make in our lives in those four ingredients. It may be that that is ninety-five percent of the communion that originates with us to God. And the sorrow and the guilt and the conviction and the terror that we feel because we have not followed somebody else's pattern may be altogether extra-biblical and I am inclined to think that it is.
Sometimes, and I understand how I say this, sometimes we try to be more spiritual than the Bible would have us to be. And in the area of the quiet time, I think we have heard in that direction. If, in fact, we pray with to God throughout the course of the day. And we thank God when he answers throughout the course of the day. And we worship spontaneously throughout the course of the day. And we confess sins when they occur in our thought life or in real life. If we do those things, I think we are doing what God expects us to be doing. And to add a great deal more than that is to add more than God expects of each one of us.
Now there is a fifth ingredient. As I mentioned, all these factors are men originating. They start with us. We ask God. We thank God. We worship God. We confess our sins. That's kind of one-way communication, isn't it? We're doing all the talking there. And the fact of the matter is, God talks to us. And that's the other dimension of communion with God. Communion with God is two-way street. We, to him, him to us. And it is accurate, as our brother Dan has spoken already, that God speaks not through visions and signs and wonders and dreams.
Now, he said all that. He had to do all that when he didn't have the Bible to work with. And that's the way it communicated to us. But that God, who in... various ways and throughout various periods of times, has spoken, has finally spoken in a some kind of revelation that is recorded in the covers of this book. And the way God speaks to us presently is through the book. And that's the only way he speaks to us directly. Now we recognize that the heavens declare the glory of God, but they only declare that as we have come to understand it through the book. And we understand that friends and godly relatives and brothers and sisters in the Lord can give us advice, but it's advice that springs out of the principle of the book.
So Westminster Confession is correct in saying that all that is needed for faith and practice is found in the Word of God. That means all we need to believe is found here, and everything we need to know as to how to live is found here. And we don't really need anything else. Now, it's a help to read the writings of gifted men and women whom God has given to the church, but they're reflecting the principles of Scripture. It's a help to have other people inform us as to the Scripture, but we all come back to the will of God revealed in the Word of God. That's how God speaks to us.
And I look with suspicion to the person and say, you know, The Lord spoke to me this morning and then some crazy thing comes out. Now, he can speak to us out of the Word. So that's all. And I have not heard voices in my ear. I've wanted to. When I've taken exams on the Word of God, I was waiting for God. There's a verse in James that my students like to claim. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all men liberally and afraid is not. But that's for... taking that verse out of context, and it's not a guarantee that we're going to get that answer to the question, is it? The Word of God. That's God's communion with us.
Now, how do we go about hearing and understanding what God has said? He has said it in the form of a piece of literature. The greatest piece of literature, but a book. That's what it is. It's a book. And as I have said earlier, the word that I'd like to put across praying and worshiping and confessing sin and thanksgiving is the word natural. Do it the way we do in all of life. We ask people whenever there's a need. We say thank you when they give it to us. And these ingredients are very naturally done.
I would like to suggest that the way that we come at understanding the word of God is very natural too. We fall into another trap in this kind of formulated quiet time that has become such a dominant thinking in the dominant fact in the thinking of the church. The way we go about it is the fifteen minutes daily kind of a thing which virtually guarantees us biblical ignorance for the rest of our life. It won't work. By the time you've prayed and given thanks and confessed sins and worship and then looked at the book for a bit, you only have a few minutes.
And that's not the way you learn the contents of any book. Let's come at it naturally. About this time of school year, my children have said, Dad, I need some money to buy books. And they come home from high school or college or wherever it was, junior high elementary school with a whole lot of books. Now, how do they go about learning what's in those books? I would be really shocked if I go home and I see my son Jonathan taking his book and cutting it up in the little pieces about an inch high and three inches long and then getting a loaf of something. If you were studying physics, you'd probably want to get a fulcrum and a piece of wood and make that rigid and then have all these little cards lined up and read a card tonight just where he went to fed me or just before the meal he's that would be good we eat every day so let's read a card about physics every day and that's the way i'll master my book on physics you know it doesn't matter what order it's in mix them up and uh maybe we can play games and and i can say uh oh john that's newton second law of motion you just picked out of there wasn't that good oh very good one day right i don't know i don't even know the reference for it okay You never learned that book that way.
You never would. A few minutes a day for the rest of your life. That's not the way we read books. Suppose you want to read these books and you want to find out what they're about. Any one of them. Let's just read one. A little bit in the middle. Let's say a good one. Here it is. It's a good one. And when evening was now come, his disciples went down unto the sea. My life worked. Now let's go to the sea. It won't work. It will not work. We'll never come to learn the book that way. How do you learn the book? How do you learn about any subject? You do it the natural way. You have to take time and sit down and go at it. Just like you see your sons and daughters studying for their tests and mastering botany or zoology or algebra or physics or English or reading Shakespeare or whatever it is.
That's the very same way you have to approach the Bible. Does that sound sacrilegious to you? That's the way we come at it. And that's hard work. And unlike the other things that we've talked about, study of a book is not intermittent. It doesn't come at us a bit at a time. We have to say, oh, hold it. I got to block out time. I'm going to take an hour and sit down and read. this novel. That's the way you read a novel. Or I'm going to take some time on that night, big exam coming up, and I'm going to read that book cover to cover. Find out what it's all about. That's poor study habits, but it takes time, is what I'm saying.
And I'm going to memorize certain parts of it. I'll never get through geometry if I don't memorize the theorems and the axioms and the rules. I have to spend time memorizing it, go over and over and over and over and over it. And finally, I recognize that the straight, assured assistance between two points is a straight line. Can't tell my wife that when she drives, but that's the way it is. That's the way it is. It's the law of God, and it took time to learn all this. And that's the way we have to approach the Bible. The other things are all intermittent as they come in. My communion with God must be concentrated. and time critical.
And that means someplace along the line I have to get into this. Now we'll talk about how that. Now what I'm saying is not just my own philosophical ideas about study, though it is certainly the case. It's exactly what the authors of Scripture say. I'd like for you to turn in your Bibles to Hebrews chapter six. Now we're not going to look at the hard part of Hebrews chapter six. Actually I want to look at what's in five just before that. The author of Hebrews, whoever he is, wants to talk to the recipients of this letter about Melchizedek, verse ten of chapter five, called of God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.
And in verses eleven through fourteen, there's a movement in this whole warning passage that takes place in chapter five and six, the first movement of the warning passage, and what she really talks straight to the recipients of the letter. of whom we have many things to say. Seeing you are dull of hearing. For when for the time he ought to be teachers, he have need that one teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God, nor become such as have need of milk and not of solid food. For everyone that uses milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
Now the author of Hebrews is saying something very straight and very stern. Can you imagine yourselves in an assembly where this letter is read? He says, look, I want to talk about Melchizedek, but you're too dumb. How would that make you feel? It's not very pleasant. I'd get a little irritated with that, wouldn't you? That's what he says in nice King James, you're dull, veering. What's that mean? You can't understand what I want to say, he's saying. I've been wanting to talk about this for years, and you can't understand it. He goes, I'm going to say it's about time you couldn't understand it. Been saved long enough. He says we've all been saved long enough to be eating meat, not baby food.
We had some wonderful food this noon at lunch and had some more as soon as I'm done, I guess. The fact of the matter is, wouldn't you have been disappointed if it was all oatmeal out there? Cream of wheat. What a disappointment. Want something solid to sink your teeth into. Most of us still have teeth. Sink your teeth into. That's the kind of food we want. But the pity when, spiritually, all we can have is baby food. And the author of Hebrews is saying, by now, we should all be grown up spiritually to be able to take meat, and there's still needs for baby food. And then he says something. He says something already.
But he says a little more. Verse fourteen. Solid food, meat of the scripture, belongs to them who are spiritually mature. And this is the process that we go through to come to that root. who by reason of use have exercised, have their senses exercised to discern good and evil. Do you see the word words in that verse? Who by reason of use, they're the word word. We use the mentality that God has given to us to come to understand the word of God. The mind is a terrible thing to waste.
It is especially terrible to waste their mind in relationship to spiritual truth. And he said, who by reason of use, constant use, have their senses, their intellect, the brain that God has given up for his glory, who by reason of use have their exercise, their senses, their intellect. There is no easy way. to come to understand the Word of God. There is no easy way to come to understand any book. It's hard work. We must apply our intellectual senses which God has given to us.
We must apply those with diligence over a long period of time to come to understand the teaching of Scripture. Notice those who are exercised by it. That word exercise is a very in word nowadays, so they tell me. Exercise. I see people involved in exercise all the time. As I drive to school, I see people jogging. They look like they're really enjoying themselves. Some say, oh, I'm enjoying. They tell you they're enjoying this. They look like they're going to die on the spot, but they say they're really enjoying. How many of you enjoy? That's wonderful. There's a hand. But he doesn't tell the truth all that.
No. We enjoy that. But what do you see about that? Day after day, I fancy the same people driving the school. Cold weather, hot weather, doesn't matter. Exercise requires discipline. Time in time out. I go to pick up Jonathan's football practice, and it's always later than he says. The coach says, last, what he calls, last. You're really going to enjoy this activity. And it's ninety degrees and they're wearing all their uniform and they're sweating bullets, you know. And then they start to the five and back, to the ten and back, to the fifteen and back, to the twenty and back, all the way up to the fifteen and back. And the guys are saying, Coach, we enjoyed that so much we really don't have to do it more than.
Hell, lad, that wasn't good enough. Let's do it again. And they go and do the whole thing again. And then it wasn't quite enough so they had shrimp. It was wonderful. I was in there laughing at them. And they're throwing up on the side and I, it's terrific. Wonderful. so that when the time comes they can execute what it's all about. Discipline, exercise, hard work. Whoa. You mean studying the Bible is like that? Or isn't the physics book like that? Isn't the algebra book like that? Isn't all those things that we must conquer intellectually? Are they not all that difficult? Not easy.
Now, how do we go about doing that? That's the problem. There are certain things in the Bible that are absolutely clear, and the youngest child can understand those. And then as we come to understand those, we recognize that none of us understand very much about Scripture, isn't it true? How do we come to understand it? Well, the Apostle Paul talked about one way of doing it, and first Timothy, when he is writing Timothy, he gives some illustration to Timothy, excretation as to what he should do, chapter four of first Timothy. Verse eleven, he says, These things command and teach. Let no man despise thy youth, but be an example of the believer in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, in purity. Till I come, and here is the verse I want, till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine.
Now the word for reading there is the word for the public reading of Scripture. that was carried on in the meetings of the church. The Apostle Paul is saying to Timothy, look Timothy, you've got to find out what the Bible is all about. And one way of doing that is by regular attendance at the meetings of the church where the Word of God is publicly read and proclaimed and taught. Y'all hear that? That's not too complicated. One of the ways we come to understand Scripture is by regular attendance and participation in the meetings of the church where the word is taught and publicly read. And that spread out over a period of time.
It's going to give us a broad exposure to the teaching of the word of God. That means when there is the opening of the word, the scripture being presented, that if I'm going to learn, one of the ways I can go about doing that is by being an active participant in the meetings of the church, the family Bible out. the Sunday school, the midweek prayer meeting, where the Word of God is open. I'll never forget, as a young man, some of my first interest in the Word came by attending those midweek prayer meetings where, in fact, there was a conversational Bible study and there was a participation on the part of the man in the lesson under consideration. I loved that. Came to learn a lot from doing that.
Just regular attendance at the meetings of the church. That's a start. but it's really not enough. We have to do that personally as well. At best, in the meetings of the church, we're dealing with two or three, forty or thirty minute sessions in the course of a week. And we're not going to learn very quickly if that's all we have. We will learn. But we have to do it personally as well. concentrated, hard work, time of Bible study that we conduct ourselves personally.
And how do we do that? Timelines. What is reasonable? What is reasonable in the course of a week for me to put into personal, concentrated, Bible study. I want us all to come to some conclusion on that. What is reasonable for me is simple. I teach about twelve hours of Bible, ten, eleven hours of Bible subjects every week. And in preparation for that, I put in a good amount of time. So what you should do if you want to come to understand the Bible is put about twenty hours of Bible study in, right?
Well, that's what full-time articles tell you. But you ought to invite them to go to work with you. Right? And work forty and fifty hours a week. And then tell me about twelve hours a day. It won't work. I think my life is rather unreasonable to say that that should be the standard for your life. But what I am interested in is finding out what is. A period of time in a given week that I can block out and say this is going to be a time when I study this book. systematically, study this book with all sorts of health, study this book with the commentaries that are available at that bookstore, study this book in a detailed way, making outlines, working through it, trying to figure out what it's saying.
What's reasonable? And I'd like a little bit of participation from some of you men on this. What's a reasonable amount of time, in a given week? What's reasonable? Does anybody give me an idea? That was almost a hand, is it? No. Don't scratch your head or I'll call. That's a reasonable amount of time. I know what mine is. What is yours? Hour to a day. Hour to a day. How many think that's reasonable? Let's see your hand. Hour to a day. Not a lot of hands there. How many think that's too much time? Let's be honest, folks. Come on. We're not trying to be spiritual here.
How many think you can't spare two hours to study the scripture in a day? Let's see your hands. I think that's heavy. I really do think that's kind of heavy. How many think it's heavy now? Let's see your hands. That's better. I know I smoke out some of you, honest, folks. Hour to a day. That's good. Boy, you can do that great. And for you, that might be just right. Let's say it is. How about an hour a week? Is that reasonable? Too short? I would be exceptionally happy if in this whole group of God's people there would be a given hour a week of serious Bible study.
That would be probably a seventy-five or eighty-five percent increase. Do you know that? Wouldn't it be? Let's be honest, folks. Wouldn't that be a good increase? And I'm arguing for something like that. Pick out a night of the week. Or pick out the afternoon when the kids are off to school. And it's off to sleep. And the wash is in the laundry. And nothing's going to happen. Take the phone off the hook. Better still. Rip the phone off the wall. That's right. Because it'll ring then. You just know it was. And say this is going to be my two hours. My regular two hours of Bible study.
Once a week, I'd be exceptionally happy for that. I think that would represent a vast improvement over the dimension of serious Bible study that most of us have in our lives. Most of us, in reading the Bible, have a hit and miss kind of approach to it. We'll read a few verses or we'll take streams in the desert and read a collection of unconnected verses and think we're learning the scriptures that way, and we are not. Serious, concentrated study will do it. Now, as we come to that period of study, I want us to ask ourselves a few questions. First of all, what does it say? That's the first thing we have to deal with.
What does that passage say? And that's interpretation. That's when we'll use the commentary. That's when we'll listen to tapes about that passage. That's when we'll read all the books that we can get our hands on. That's when we'll allow the greatest teacher of all the Holy Spirit to interact with us in the Word of God so that we come and figure out what it says. What does it say? What does it say? That's first step. That's where I have to use Bible dictionaries, concordances, commentaries. helps, taste, anything I can get to figure out what it says.
And then you know what it says. Now the next step, after you know what it says, and there is a next step, some people think that's all there is to Bible study, find out what it says. Well, you can stumble on that in any liberal seminary in the country. They can figure out what it says. But we have to respond to what it says. And I would like to say then, what does it say to me? What is the lesson out of that passage? The application. I first must learn what it says, the interpretation. Then I want to learn what it says to me, how it's going to affect my life.
The word of God is not given to us just to know about. It's different from other books in that way. Second Timothy three tells us that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable with a purpose in view. And the purpose is that the man of God may be thoroughly furnished unto all good works. So that we can live righteous lives for God. That's what the Bible's about. It's not just to give us information. That's what it means. But it means something to me so that I can go and live that truth out in my life. We've learned some of those things today. What does it mean that Paul was the kind of person who would rejoice that Christ was preached no matter what?
It means that I should be that kind of person. That even if there are questionable motives on the part of other creatures, and there are, that I rejoice that Christ is preached. And that means something to me right now. If I have a brother that preaches the word and is trying to make a monkey out of me, and thankfully that's not true at this conference, but conference speakers will admit that we can play games with one another. Isn't that true? And sometimes you sit there and say, oh, that wasn't a nice thing to say. But Christ is preached. And therein, we rejoice. No matter what's the motivation. And I can apply that to my life right now.
Right now. And when Dan's talking about the Holy Spirit, he said the first important thing about the Holy Spirit is it is holy. I said, oh, man. That relates to the way I live my life. And between you and me in the fence, both are parts of my life that aren't holy. And that means the Holy Spirit means to me, clock it on the stick and get holy in this area. See, that's what it means to me. What it means is the Holy Spirit is holy what that means to me. I better be that way, too, if I'm the temple of the Holy Spirit. What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit? So have a holy temple. That's what he's talking about. in first Corinthians six. What does it mean to me?
So I come at scripture and I go through that hard stage of finding out what it means. And then I go through the applicational stage of what it means to me. And then a third and ultimate question, what does it tell me about God? You see, because the whole thing of scripture is that it's a revelation a limited revelation of an exhaustible God. What do I learn about God out of that? Again, the Westminster Confession, and it's a wonderful statement of doctrinal truth, says the chief end of man is to enjoy God and glorify him forever.
And that's right. What do I learn about God? What's it tell me about my Creator? What's it tell me about my Savior? What are the implications of that in real life? And those principles are principles that we must always bring to the study of Scripture. Some people have said that there are two ways to study the Bible. As a textbook, and that is God's Word. That's not true. Now, I understand what they're saying when they say that. In that process that I've just described, we can stop. on what does it mean. And when I do that, it's just a textbook.
It's just like the biology book or the physics book. What does it mean? But true Bible study never stops just at what does it mean. That's the hard step, the understanding. And whenever we come to Scripture, we have to come and say, what does it mean? Because it only means one thing. It can't mean ten things. It means one thing and one thing only. And I have to wrestle with that and find out what that one thing is. And sometimes that's a challenge. It means that one thing. Well, let's not stop there. Let's take it further.
What does it mean to me? What principle for life comes out of this? what to tell me about God, and that will cause me to worship. And that's the way we come in Bible study. And I am suggesting, if I could have the one thing, and this is probably the one thing I'd go for, that we change our lives in, that we all purpose in our lives to seriously, regularly, Study the Bible. What's it mean? What's it mean to me? What's it mean about what to tell me about God? To go through that process in a systematic, concentrated way in a given week with X number of minutes or hours that is reasonable for you.
If we could put that into life practice as a habit, we would be changed because that's the purpose. of God revealing His Word to us. That we be equipped to live righteous lives. In our communion with God, four of the things are spontaneous, are intermittent, unschedulable. Let's not try and schedule those. One of them like any other kind of study, God's communication to us in the book, like any other kind of study of a book, is concentrated, scheduled, and disciplined.
You know what we've done in quiet time? We've sort of turned them backwards. We try to schedule the things that are unschedulable, and the one thing that we can schedule, we break up into such little statements that we're only getting gumdrops, throughout the week when we could be getting full meals. So let's not try to schedule the things that are unschedulable. That'll frustrate us. That's a square peg in a round hole. And let us schedule the things that must be scheduled if we're ever going to come to understand it. A regular, systematic, orderly study of the Word of God. Now, you know, it's nothing profound about all this.
It's so natural, isn't it? We ask intermittently. We confess intermittently. We worship intermittently spontaneously. We give thanks when we receive. We study this book just like we do any book in the sense of concentrated chunk periods of time. It's all so natural. But that's the way the spiritual life is, folks. There's no big mystical experience where we're floating through space like clouds. That's not the kind of people God made. And we simply need to take the natural, normal procedures of life and transform them into spiritual meaningfulness as they become part of our day-by-day experience with God.
Five component parts. Prayer. Thanksgiving. Confession of sin. worship all intermittent study of the word of God God speaking to us where he says this is the way I'd like you to go that must be concentrated must be concentrated and that is purpose to arrange our lives that that which is unscheduled will be part of the day by day throughout the day experience and that other be a concentrated exercise of our mind and will that we may be people who can eat the meat of the word of God and be spiritually mature.
Let's close in prayer. Father God, we pray in our communion with you and your communication to us that we live according to the guidelines of your word and that we not be frustrated in trying to do other than that which is normal and natural in our spiritual experience. Help us in each area to be aware of your working in our lives moment by moment and to be in your word on a regular and systematic schedule that we might hear you speak to us.
We pray this for your glory and for the benefit of your saints. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.