Sunday Services
Morning service: 10.45am
Evening service: 6.00pm
I had a conversation recently with a friend who was somewhat annoyed with herself because of a diagnosis her husband had just received. It appears a recent blood test had come back with a result of him being pre-diabetic. When I questioned why this was causing her so much distress her initial response was that “she had taken her eye off the ball!”
Covid changed our lives in many ways, but it has also left varying after-affects. My friend confessed that while trying to get their lives ‘back on track’ after lockdown etc., it had become so easy for her to forgo cooking from scratch and simply dip into the shelves of convenience foods. This reminded me of what can happen to us when we change our Bible reading habits from ‘studying’ to ‘dipping’.
First let’s ask the question, why do we need to study the Bible? The word ‘need’ can be challenging as it can be interpreted that to be a good Christian this is something we have to do; a chore. The truth is, we ‘need’ to know who God is and what He asks of us and the world.
God
The Bible tells us everything we need to know. From the creation of this heaven and earth in Genesis, to the end in Revelation where there are graphic depictions of the events leading to the final and eternal heaven, earth and hell. (Information about the final days are not only found in Revelation but throughout the Bible!)
Between these opening and closing books of the Bible we can find the history of God dealing with His people, sometimes favourably and sometimes using their enemies to rebuke them; His prophecy through His chosen prophets, some of which has already come to fruition and some yet to come; His law to teach His people and to distinguish them from the other nations; and poetry, the most well-known of these I imagine are the Psalms.
However, we need to piece it all together, and this can only be done by constant reading and asking God prayerfully to help us understand. But God is not alone in the Bible, we also meet Jesus there.
Jesus
You may not realise that Jesus can also be found throughout the Bible in the Old and New Testaments.
“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 mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
John 1v1-5
Jesus is the Word these verses talk about as John opens his Gospel, reminding us that Jesus was present at creation. The New Testament (especially the Gospels) chronicles Jesus’ birth, life, ministry and His death. But these events are not recorded as simply history, they also detail the plan of redemption through Jesus the Christ (Messiah). Simply to believe in Jesus as a person who lived misses the point of why; from creation it was deemed He would be the awaited Messiah whose death would pay the price we owe for not being able to live by the standard God wants from us.
To understand the subtleties of the why and the how is where the writings of the New Testament – written by men though revealed to them by the Holy Spirit – helps us.
The Holy Spirit
A quick glimpse of who the Holy Spirit is can be seen in these quotes:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
Genesis 1v1-2
“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father —the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father—He will testify about me.”
John 15v26
“But when He, 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. He will glorify me because it is from me that He will receive what He will make known to you.”
John 16v13-14
I have just given a small and possibly confusing glimpse of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. I am not a Bible teacher; I don’t attend Bible College, but I am a Bible student who learns in a Bible believing Church and at home.
We believe that “God has revealed himself in the Bible, which consists of the Old and New Testaments alone. Every word was inspired by God through human authors, so that the Bible as originally given is in its entirety the word of God, without error and fully reliable in fact and doctrine.” FIEC Doctrinal Basis
To put it another way we believe God’s word is alive. Spending time prayerfully reading the Bible is spending time with God, getting to know Him better, building a personal relationship with Him and learning about His will for our lives. You can find advice about developing a reading plan here.
I need and want to study my Bible so that I can make sense of what God is teaching us about being a child of His. Like my friend, we need to make sure we don’t ‘take our eye off the ball’ by only dipping into the Bible.
“Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day” Acts 17v11