We're turning this morning in our Bibles to
the first chapter of John's Gospel.
The Gospel according to St. John at the
chapter one.
We're reading the first fourteen verses, taking our
time after me.
In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was
God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by Him, and without
Him was not anything made that was made.
In Him was life, and the life was
the light of man.
And the light shineth in darkness, and the
darkness comprehended it not.
There was a man sent from God, whose
name was John.
The same came for a witness, to bear
witness of the light that all men through
him might believe.
He was not that light, but was sent
to bear witness of that light.
That was the true light, which lighteth every
man that cometh into the world.
He was in the world, and the world
was made by Him, and the world knew
Him not.
He came unto His own, and His own
received Him not.
But as many as received Him, to them
gave He power to become the sons of
God, even to them that believe on His
name.
Which were born, not of blood, nor of
the will of the flesh, nor of the
will of man, but of God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt
among us.
And we beheld His glory, the glory as
of the only begotten of the Father, full
of truth and grace.
Amen, and God will seal His Word to
our hearts, and to His name shall all
the praise be.
Open your Bible with me, and turn over
to that portion of Scripture we read together
in the first chapter of the Gospel of
John.
In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was
God.
I want to speak this morning on the
secrets whereby God imparts to us the mysteries
of the Bible.
To know the Scriptures is to know the
highest knowledge in all the world.
Because knowing the Scriptures is knowing God.
It is interesting to note that the second
member in the great co-equal trinity of
God takes as one of its titles, the
Word of God.
The knowledge of the Word of God can
only be ours as we become careful students
of the book.
We live in a day of slackness among
the people of God in regard to their
attitude to the Bible.
The Bible is a Bible that is snatched
up, read quickly, put down just as quickly,
and we have just a very casual knowledge
of it.
We're singing today of the blessed man of
Sam 1, and in God's law he meditates
day and night.
The modern man today sees more of television
screens than he sees of the page.
That's why there's dearth, that's why there's backsliding,
that's why we offer prayers that God doesn't
answer and can't answer them, because of the
sinfulness of our own heart.
This book reveals God.
You will not find the truths about God
anywhere else but in the Bible.
People talk about they never were so near
God as they were when they were in
a garden.
They should remember that Adam and Eve fell
in the garden, and they were sinless, but
they were in the most beautiful garden in
the world, and they fell.
How are you going to do already fallen
with the beauty of the garden?
There's only one place where you can meet
God, and that is in His Word.
This is the only way to God.
It is the only place where we can
find God.
It's the only place where we can continue.
God lives in His living Word.
God breathes in His inspired Word.
God presents Himself in the mirror of His
reflecting Word.
God imparts power by His powerful Word.
God instructs us in the mysteries of Himself
in His instructive Word.
Without the Bible, we have nothing, and we
know nothing about God.
But the Bible can only be opened by
God, the God who wrote it.
And you will remember that it can only
be opened by the Lamb, which it is
all about.
Revelation 5-10, and the apostle John wept
because nobody could open the book and read
thereon.
And suddenly, in the midst of the throne,
there was a Lamb, a newly slain Lamb.
Not lying dead meat on the throne of
God.
At the center of the throne, the Lamb,
the bleeding Lamb, was standing.
For all the power of God's Christ is
in His most powerful blood, as far as
our redemption is concerned.
And the elder, they're all Presbyterians in heaven,
the elder said something to them.
He said, Weep not!
Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah
is revealed to open the book.
And when He opened the book, they sang,
Thou art worthy to take the book and
to open the seals thereof, for Thou wast
slain and hast redeemed us to God by
Thy blood, out of every kindred and town
and people and nation, and hast made unto
us, unto our God, kings and priests.
And we shall reign, our knowing of God
only comes to us when God shows Himself.
And where does God show Himself to us?
Only in His Word, the knowledge of the
Most High God.
In all of our getting, we need to
get that knowledge.
We need to know the wisdom of God.
We need to know the ways of God.
We need to know the works of God.
We need to know the wrath of God.
And this can only come by a careful
study of the Word.
It was old Bishop Wordsworth who remarked, The
Proverbs of Solomon came from above, and they
also make us look upward.
They teach that all true wisdom is the
gift of God.
And all true wisdom is founded on the
fear of God.
They dwell with the strongest emphasis on the
necessity of a careful vigilance over the heart,
which is manifested only to God.
And on the duty of acting in all
daily business and social intercourse of life, with
a vigil reference to the one unerring standard
in all the world, and that is this
book of God.
In respect, the book of Proverbs prepared the
way for the preaching of the gospel.
And we recognize in it an anticipation of
the apostolic precept.
Whatsoever you do, do it heartily, as unto
the Lord.
The great Scotch preacher, Dr. Guthrie, considered that
the high character of Scotsmen in his day
was earned in the bygone years when they
were acquainted in their day schools with the
book of Proverbs.
And young lives were trained to go by
the book.
What Dr. Guthrie states, I would totally commend.
Those that read in the book of Proverbs
are reading in the introduction to God's book
about Himself.
Many, many years ago, too many years for
me to count, I sat in the theological
hall of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland,
and one of the professors, Professor MacFarlane, told
us that for years he carried a book
with him.
It was the book of Proverbs.
And he had a small copy of the
book of Proverbs.
He carried it in his vast pocket.
And he said, gentlemen, the book of Proverbs
was set out in the Bible for reading
every day.
For there's 31 chapters in it.
And when you come to a month with
only 30, he said, read the 31st chapter
as well.
And he held up that little book and
he said, I can't tell you, gentlemen, how
much I owe.
I would recommend that to you.
But above all other reading, we should read
one chapter of the book of Proverbs to
bring us back to the fact that wisdom
alone is found in God's precious Word.
The wisest of all the kings who ever
reigned on this earth, King Solomon learned that
lesson and wrote that book by the power
of the Spirit of God.
An heirloom to the church of divine wisdom.
And we must see to it that nothing
takes us away from constant reading, constant loving,
and constant leading by the Word of God.
God's Word demands seven things.
Make a note of them.
It demands attention.
The Bible would bring us all to a
standstill.
Attention!
Stop your dabbling with the things of this
world.
Stop being caught away by the niceties of
a life of pleasure that leads to sinful
pleasure.
Stop on your journey.
Pay attention.
Give heed to my word.
In the hustle and bustle of this 21st
century, the shock breaks neat of Islam on
every Christian.
He needs to come to attention.
Attention for attention.
So we're going to really study the book.
We must pay it attention.
We must have an open ear to what
it is saying.
Your friends will not talk to you except
you show you're interested in what they say.
This book will be a dumb book by
the attitude you adopt to it.
You can't read this book in haste.
You must have attention.
Secondly, this book demands retention.
That you don't dismiss what it says.
That you retain within your mind and your
heart and your soul what it says.
You all know the story of the seed.
And the seed is the word of God.
You all know what happens.
The seed must be retained in the ground
it falls on.
And if it's not retained thoroughly and perfectly
and lightly, it will bring no blessing to
the soul.
First of all, the devil hates the word
of God.
So he snatches away the seed.
He doesn't want you to retain it.
For that seed has a tremendous effect.
Thank God this seed that fell into my
heart in a gospel message preached by my
dear mother at a children's meeting, I retained
it.
And it brought me to the Savior.
But the word must be retained.
Secondly, some of it fell on stony ground.
And it couldn't be retained.
It brought forth fruit out of season.
And then it died the death.
Some fell among thorns.
And it had the same result.
But some fell on good ground.
A ground that retains the word.
So this book demands attention.
It also demands retention.
God's book, thirdly, demands reflection.
I need to reflect and meditate upon this
book and what it is saying to me.
The Bible is a voice of God.
Over and over again through it we read,
God said, God said, God said.
Is the Bible really the voice of God
to you?
Well, if it is, you will reflect upon
what it said.
You will stop.
You will have attention.
You will have retention.
But you will have reflection.
You will be, it will be as a
nail in a sure place.
A word of God driven into the heart
by the hammer of the Holy Ghost.
For God's word is a hammer.
That drives the nails in and pinches them
on the other side.
God's book demands reflection.
But God's book demands something else.
It demands subjection.
It demands me to subject my life to
its commandments.
To conform, we must hide God's word in
our heart, that we might not sin against
the Lord.
God's word leads us to holiness without which
no man can see the Lord.
The unholy man who claims to see God
as a liar, the only eyes that can
behold the true God is the eyes of
a person made holy by subjection to God's
word.
The commandments are given to be obeyed.
The commandments must be obeyed.
For if we don't obey the commandments, we
cannot know God.
God does not commune with those that shut
their ears to His commandments.
He communes with those that open their ears
to His commandments.
But the Bible demands projection.
Projection means to shoot forward, to demand a
hearing and a verdict, to throw forward.
The Bible must be projected by us.
We must be ready at all times to
tell this world what saith the Scriptures.
We need to be projectors of the word.
We have a duty, and that duty is
to spread the word, to project God's truth
in a day of lying and cheating and
dishonesty, to project the truth of God's word,
especially in the era of religion when we
have much false religion destroying the hearts and
the souls of the people.
But it demands something more than projection.
The Bible demands interjection.
We need to interject God's truth in every
conversation we take part in with ungodly men.
It is a great thing to interject the
truth.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth
shall set you free.
I had the great privilege the other morning
of addressing five of the main grammar schools
in our city.
We had a great congregation of young people.
It was a most interesting gathering, and the
questions were rare, and the answers they got
were rare.
But I had the joy of addressing those
few hundred young people with what made me
what I am, and to relate this story
of my conversion and my acceptance of the
word of God as God's only book.
I was interested after when the principal of
the school we were meeting in, he said
to me, you know I have something interesting
to tell you.
He said, every one of our teachers in
this school who teach religion, every one of
them are born again Christians.
That's a good testimony, isn't it?
It's nice to know that even in the
darkness of our schools, the light does shine,
and there is the interjection of God's word.
Thy word is a hammer that breaketh the
rock in pieces.
It's a fire.
Thy word is a sword that pierces and
divides.
And then something more, and finally, the Bible
demands introspection.
It looks in to inspect your heart, and
our hearts need to be inspected.
We need to open our hearts to God's
truth.
We need the freedom of God's truth to
be let loose in our thoughts and the
intents of our heart.
I was struck this week by a word
in Luke's Gospel.
Luke's Gospel chapter 6 and verse 38.
Christ talks about the measure of God, and
he says it's pressed down.
Every drop of divine truth needs to be
squeezed out of the Bible as we read
it.
It needs to be pressed down.
It needs to be shaken together for every
unifying truth is discovered, and it has a
relation.
The Bible doesn't stand on its own.
Genesis stands with all the other 65 books.
It can't tear the Bible in pieces.
It's shaken together.
And when God shakes His word, He sends
us to another part of the book for
confirmation.
And then it's something else.
It's running over.
Oh, the fullness of God's blessed word.
God, give us a love for the book
and for the truth of the book, and
especially the one who takes His name from
the book.
The word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Let's bow our heads.
Father, we thank Thee for Thy good and
blessed word written on our hearts, we pray
in Jesus' name.
And everybody say, Amen.