I’m taking a preaching course this fall with Bryan Chapell. For the last 20 years, he’s been a bit of a guru in the area of Christ-centred preaching. In his book, “Christ-Centered Sermons,” he asks a provocative question. “What is the primary reason that sin has power in our lives?” I wonder how you’d answer that question. I can almost hear people’s answers. “I don’t pray enough.” “I don’t read the Bible enough.” “I don’t try hard enough.” “I’m not disciplined enough.” Do you recognize your own answer yet? In one sense, those answers may be part of the reason why sin has power in our lives, but he argues that the ultimate answer is something else. At the risk of stating the obvious, he says that the ultimate reason that sin has power over us is that we love it. In fact, even if we say that we love Jesus, in the moment that we commit a sin, we love that sin more than we love Jesus.
In one sense the question of whether you should get baptized or not shouldn’t be a question. The fact is that baptism is commanded in Scripture. To ignore a command of God is a rejection of God’s will for your life. If there was anyone who might have been able to say, ‘I don’t think I need to do that,’ it would have been Jesus. When He came to John the Baptist to be baptized, He was refused at first. Understandably, John said that he should be baptized by Jesus instead! But in Matthew 3:15, Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Jesus’ baptism takes away all excuses. Baptism is a non-negotiable for anyone who wants to walk in the will of God. But the Bible actually gives conditions. There are three questions you should ask to see if you’re ready to be baptized.
When I was in university, I tried to tackle some of the Russian classics on my summer break. At first, I found the complexity of them overwhelming. The challenge was that they had so many characters and they all had multiple names and different people used different names to refer to each other depending on the nature of their relationship. I came to the conclusion that you need to be prepared to just spend the first hundred pages trying to figure out who everyone is and how they’re connected. Once you get past that, they’re fascinating stories. Those books showed me the importance of a reading strategy.
Bible reading is a little bit like weight loss, if you could pay someone to get the benefits from it, you probably would. Many people start off reading the Bible with excitement, but discouragement can set in. Most of us aren’t great readers, to begin with. And when we do read books, we usually aren’t reaching for ones that are 1,200 pages long and 2,000 years old! Our motivation for reading the Bible is that God is trying to speak to us through it. And that conviction alone is enough to get you started. But there are three ingredients that I've found to be important in helping someone maintain a regular habit of daily Bible reading. Let me share them with you.
I remember meeting with someone who had begun attending our church. They wanted to know how tolerant our church was. Before I answered their question, I asked them one of my own. “If you became convinced that the Bible didn’t meet your definition of tolerance, would you throw out the Bible or your definition of tolerance?” My point wasn’t that the Bible is intolerant, but before I began the conversation, I needed to understand whether I was trying to defend the Bible or explain the Bible. Was the Bible the authority that helped them evaluate all their other beliefs, or was a certain view of tolerance the standard by which they would evaluate the Bible? After a long pause, they decided that if the Bible didn’t agree with their definition of tolerance, they would abandon a commitment to their definition of tolerance and accept the Bible’s. Sooner or later, everyone who reads the Bible needs to make a similar decision. Will we treat the Bible as a nice book, even one of our favourites? Or will we put it on the top shelf, in a class all by itself, with ultimate authority in our lives?
