Introduction I: Why Are We Doing This?
Kurt Katzorke · Oct 5, 2008
How to Study Bible (2008), No. 01
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926113271055

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

In your binder, the first page that we'll be looking at is this nice color handout. We're looking at understanding God's intended message. And there's a couple things that we really want to make clear today with this class. One, that there is one intended meaning or interpretation for each passage. There's not two. There's not a multiplicity. There's one intended message from each passage.

And the way we're going to get there is through objective observations. followed by interpretation, and then application and appropriation. So get those things in your head. Observation, interpretation, application, appropriation. And we'll go through them in more depth. And next week you'll really go through them in more depth. But that's one of the things we really want to pound today is one intended message, not a bunch of them. And as we look at the handout here, Understanding God's intended message from God's deliberate revelation to objective observation, logical interpretation, and biblically profitable application. And you can add to that appropriation. God's message through scripture is from the Holy Spirit. It is inspired. So the Holy Spirit inspired scripture. Can you think of some good passages that would illustrate that? There's one that's my favorite.

And it's 2 Timothy 3.16. And the word that's in there, different Bibles interpret it different ways, excuse me, translate it different ways. That's another distinction we should try and make today is interpretation and translation are two different things.

The word is Theonoustos and it means God breathed. So God breathed through the writers of the Bible all the way from Moses to John who wrote the book of Revelation. Every single one of them, the Holy Spirit inspired it. It's God breathed, it's infallible. Scripture is the final basis for everything.

The next point there is The Holy Spirit preserved Scripture and throughout history there have actually been times where it was illegal, punishable by death, to have a copy of Scripture. Different people over different times have really tried to get rid of the Bible and the Holy Spirit has preserved it and kept it here for us to reveal God to us. And the last point there, guided in recognition of it as scripture. If you look at the Catholic canon, they have some extra books and stuff in there.

And the Holy Spirit guided people who chose the books of the Bible, the one that we read, that these are inspired of me and these ones are not. And that's why we have the Bible that we have today and we don't have the extra writings. All right, so we have scripture in the Hebrew, the Old Testament, and Greek in the New Testament that conveys God's message precisely as he intended for us to receive it.

That's where we get into the, there's not a bunch of different meanings that we're supposed to get from this. God used these languages, and then when you look at Koine Greek, we'll look at this more later. It's such a specific language. that there's really one intended meaning. There's not a multiplicity.

All right, so now we get back to these objective observations regarding the written text, including language, culture, and history. So when you're looking at observations, we're looking at language, culture, and history. These are the three big ones when we start to observe. Now, why is it important that the observations be objective?

Or you don't want to read in, you know, there's a word called exegete. You don't want to read in the scripture with something that's not there. Right. Because people come with, we all come with different backgrounds, and so we can read into something, well, that word to me sounds like this or that. Well, that's why we, you know, go to the original. So we don't want to read in the scripture. You want to, you know. Just get the truth, right? Just get into the truth. Right.

You check it out. And that's hard sometimes. Actually, to be honest, that's hard. Because you come with, you know, you may come from, you know, you heard someone talk about this verse historically in the past and you may find out it didn't really mean that when you start looking at it. And I've had that happen more than once. Is there a place for me to sit? There are multiple places for you to sit. Give you a binder there. Yeah. You must be eating mac and cheese.

You know, and I listened to, Vern taught this message when they taught it last year. And I listened to him and he says, when he said, when you study the Bible, it's somewhat like science. Good science. Empirical science. Things that can be done again. So if I go out on the top of the building and drop a bowling ball and a marble, they both hit the ground at the same time. It's gravity. and you can go out and do the same exact thing and have the same exact findings.

The idea with good hermeneutics, and hermeneutics is a big word for interpretation, which we'll get into that more later, but with good interpretation, everyone can come to the same conclusions. And so studying the Bible should be somewhat like empirical science in that if the observations are objective, you're going to come to the same conclusions. Alright, so observations are objective and we are looking at language, history, and culture. And to stay away from subjective, that's why it has to be objective because even if you look for definitions of words, a lot of times you'll go back to the first use of the word to really see what was intended and then use that throughout all of scripture. And it's amazing, it's always been amazing to me that the Bible and Scripture allows for that type of analytical work. Any other work doesn't. I mean, it's just not there in any other work. Even in Shakespeare, you would never be able to do that to the degree that you can in Scripture. It's just amazing.

And actually, the subjective, if you guys, if you look at a good verse for why we want the observations to be objective is if you go to 1 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 12. And he's talking about the divisions within the Corinthian church. And he's saying, you know, one guy says, I am of Paul and another, I follow Paul, Apollos, and I follow Cephas. But the idea is I follow Christ. And if you come in with these, I follow this guy and not that guy. I'm a Calvinist, not a whatever.

Then you're not looking at scripture objectively. You're coming in with presuppositions. You're coming in with, this is what I want to get out of the text. And if you're looking at the Bible like that, you're looking at it the wrong way. Because you want your observations to be objective. They're not influenced by what Calvin said, or what Luther said, or what the Catholic Church says, or anything like that. You're just going to the pages of scripture and making objective observations. Yeah, that's hard. I mean, you need people around you that say, wait a minute, you're not objective.

Well, and absolutely. Absolutely. One of the things that I've heard Vern say it multiple times, he goes, check me on everything. If you come to a different conclusion, let me know and we'll sit down and look at it. Because absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Check everything. All right. Any other questions about the observation point here? All right. The next thing is logical singular interpretation of the text based on completed or excuse me, based on a complete and objective set of observations regarding the written text.

So here's that singularity again. And we'll look at this a little bit more in depth here in a second, but on a couple pages back, There's multiple listings of passages in the New Testament that refer to the faith with a definite article. So, I mean, we're not talking about loads and loads of doctrine and different doctrines and different faith. It's the faith.

So really place an emphasis on that singular interpretation. So the interpretation is singular. There should be one correct interpretation for each passage. The application, however, may be many, may be multiple. Christ says love one another. So that could be a lot of different things for different people. The interpretation of what Christ says is singular, but the application may be multiple for each of us. Loving one another for me might be something completely different for Roger, just based on what's going on in your life. Does anybody have any thoughts or comments?

Also, what I find when I look at many passages, I may use that passage, and like Stan was saying, to get to understand the definition of a word, I may use multiple passages that have singular definitions, but it tells me something about the overall, what this word is like, love, or whatever. You can say what was used here. 25 times, I learned a little bit more each time I read another passage. So you build up accumulation. So you take those singular interpretations, and you come up with, well here's the breadth of love, and it's much bigger than maybe just one passage by itself. Sure, and that's another thing when we start looking at this more in depth, is context is huge.

When you're looking at a passage, first you're going to look at the, here's the context of this chapter. Maybe even this verse. Here's the context of the chapter, the book. Here's the context of the New Testament. Here's the context of the whole Bible. So, I mean, you never want to take one verse, take it out of context and turn it into something that it's not. And so context is huge when you go to make your interpretations and applications. Absolutely. And that's what's great about the Bible.

I mean, the word Bible is the book. And most people don't, well, most non-believers tend not to look at this as a singular book. No, that's, what is it, 63 books or whatever. That's 66 books. That's just a big collection of a bunch of different books. But it's really, it's not. It's one book. And God breathed this thing from the time over about a period of 1600 years from Moses to John who wrote the book of Revelation. And it's one book. And that's one of the things that's amazing about the Bible is its continuity. It just keeps telling the same story. And it keeps revealing God over and over again and more and more of Him. So that's an amazing thing about the Bible. I would say that there are many believers who, you know, kind of pick and choose out of here. Right. And I've been around believers... I guess we can use that term maybe loosely. I don't know. I've been around people who will...

The Bible is just a bunch of good stories to learn some morals from. That's not the case. The Bible has phenomenal historicity. It's historical value is amazing. It cracked me up. I took some... political, or not political science, but... Philosophy. Well, not even philosophy. The word's not coming to me.

But there are classes that are dealing with human history and things like that. And it cracked me up because you go in there and one of the first things that the university system does is discredit the Bible. It's a bunch of stories, myths, blah, blah, blah. But then, maybe two days later, the professor is using the Bible to tell me about the history of the Jewish people. And I was just, hold on a minute, what's going on here? And the fact of the matter is the Bible has tremendous historical value. And it's just continuous too. The historicity and continuity of the Bible are amazing.

And it's really difficult as you grow older, like you were saying, to go to it with objectiveness. Because in our society, as you get older, you come up with kind of preconceived ideas and you want to make things fit. And I personally think that's why there's so many different churches today.

Because somebody, usually the upper level of the church, has decided that this is the way they're going to teach and this is the way they're going to believe. Well, wouldn't it be nice if it would be like the Marian church? which it talked about in scriptures where whenever they went someplace and somebody taught something, they went home to their scriptures to figure out what actually was intended by the scriptures. And so if you really had one true church, it would be a church that taught specifically from scripture, and you would go there maybe with some preconceived ideas, but your mind would be open to any passage or anything that you saw that may enhance your current beliefs. Just like Roger was saying, you start off with a specific definition of a word, and then you read on through scripture, and it grows, it becomes more intense, it becomes more complete.

And I personally think that's the way a person should become also the more that you study. You may come there with a Calvinistic idea or maybe an Armenian approach, but as you look at more and more scripture and you really look at it in depth, you should be able to grow from that.

So it's really, really difficult not to do that. Because it's human nature to do that. Sure. And that's one of the reasons why we're teaching this class. Get past that. And just come to it objectively. That's good. The next page you guys have starts off with the Holy Spirit is involved. You guys have that? I didn't put these together, so I don't know. So it says up there, and this is going to kind of build on what you were just talking about, Stan.

The Holy Spirit is involved in every part of the right understanding of scripture and our beholding of the Lord Jesus Christ through his word and thereby being changed from glory to glory. So when you come to this objective When you go to make your objective observations and make your interpretation, the Holy Spirit should be wholly involved in that. And if you're a believer and you are letting Him guide you, the singular interpretation should be a given. I know that sometimes it is very hard to dig through a passage in scripture. So if you're going, man, I just scratch my head every time I go there.

That's OK. Well, that's why in scripture it says that you have teachers that are to help you in that process. That's the whole idea of a teacher. Exactly. To make it possible. Yeah, the more you read, also, I think the more gets revealed to you. You become a little bit more bright. I think for me anyway. Well, I think that's sort of what they're saying. The more that you spend time in scripture, the more it becomes easier to understand.

Well, the more you grow, because, you know, I know the first time I ever did a study, you know, in Romans, You know, boy, it was like, whoa, what is this saying, you know? And then, in our Bible study, I think we did Romans 6, 7, and 8 like five different times over like a 15 year period, our study at our house. It was a great book, or great chapter. And we kept doing it because, 6, 7, and 8, because people would, new people would come into the study And if you don't understand 6, 7, and 8 of Romans, it's pretty hard to do the rest of Paul. So we would start back over with 6, 7, and 8.

And every time we did it, it was like, wow, I didn't see that before. It was like a new revelation every time we did it. You can't go through the Bible and say, well, now I've done that. Right. There's always more. I've got it all covered. No way. That glory to glory isn't one reading of the Bible. It's not cliff notes. Isn't it amazing?

You can have a person who maybe doesn't even speak good English and has absolutely no education in some of the countries that it's not offered. And yet, these people can have a salary squared in all kinds of things. And yet they still struggle but they can still grow from the same scriptures that these other people read. It's an, I like to call it an infinite depth. You can, any person at any time can go into the scripture and learn something from it. Again, you can't do that in Shakespeare. I've tried all my life trying to understand Shakespeare and I still can't.

Because it's written for somebody who has a different intellect than I do. But yet you can still go to the Bible and walk away with a wonderful feeling or belief or understanding. So what other book does that? Well, it's because the Holy Spirit is continually revealing. It's not about intellect. It's about revelation by the Holy Spirit, which Shakespeare, you know, Holy Spirit's not working on Shakespeare.

But it's a good example. It is, but that's the reason. Because those are wonderful works of literature. Yeah, but that's the reason. The Bible is revealed by the Holy Spirit and there's nothing else that has that. Yeah, and it's alive. It's living. Exactly. Exactly right.

Well, I've heard it said, and you talk about the big thing now is interactive. I've got an interactive connection. I'm on my webpage. I'm interacting with this. We've got the most God-inspired interactive thing ever. this is his word, and we interact with it, which is like, how can you interact with just words on a page, but you can't? Does that make it even better when it's on the web? I know, right? I'm interacting on the web. Yeah, God had it all worked out before the internet. He was way ahead of the internet. He was way ahead of the internet. He was way ahead of the right click. Right click.

All right. God's word is for individual growth. 1 Peter 2. Like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation. So individual growth. An individual changing of this glory to glory like 2 Corinthians 3.18 talked about it. I didn't read it, but the verse just above it there.

You know, and I always think about that as Bob says all the time, you know, there's no yardstick. Sometimes we're, you know, we're always thinking about other people's growth, you know, or even our own and say, well, you know, we're not as mature as that person or that person, but this is so important for us to remember.

It's for individual growth. It's no yardstick that we have to hold up and say, well, our children are not at this level yet. Why, you know, I mean, you're always praying for your children. Growth is going to come at different paces for different people. And that's just fine.

But now it's for individual growth, but it's also for the growth of the church body as a whole. Ephesians 4, 11 through 13, and he gave some apostles and some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers. for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ, until we attain the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ." So, individual growth, but by growth as well. I mean, the more and more we look at this, the more you just, if you don't come away going, the Bible is amazing, then you're not looking at it right.

Because it just, I mean, God has done so much through it. All right, so now we already talked about this a little bit. So we'll look at it again. Understanding and applying and appropriating God's word in keeping with God's intent for scripture. So our first piece is observation, objective observations, yielding one correct interpretation. 2 Peter 1, verses 20 and 21. But know this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. So observation equaling interpretation.

And then our next two steps, application and appropriation. It's easy to maybe lump those together as one, but I think it's important to separate them. Because if you come to, if you do your observation, you make your interpretation, and then you say, you know, here's how I can apply this in my life. Well, it's great to say it. It's a whole different thing to appropriate it and do it.

So 2nd Timothy 3.16, all scripture is inspired by God, that's that Theonoustos word, that God breathes, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

So there's that, the last, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. That's the appropriation. And then you have a couple more verses that speak to appropriation there. Let a man regard us in this manner as servants of Christ, as stewards of the mysteries of God. And that sort of is also speaking to the man of God being adequate, being able. And the Bible is given to you for that reason. Man or woman, too.

You know, I could use this when I tell my sister that it's not people that wrote the Bible, they were God-inspired, and I don't know how to reach her with that, because she said, well, you know, it's a different time now, and blah, blah, blah. It's pathetic. Well, it's been a different time for 2,000 years, but the profitability of Scripture is still there.

Yeah. I'm going to tell her these verses. Well, actually, when you tell her the verse, there's another neat word here, like the interpretation, where the word moved. You see, I did like a boat. Look at that word up. If you have a concordance, Look the word moved up. It says men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. Look that word up. I'm sorry. That's the second Peter verse under observation and interpretation the word moved. That's a critical word because the question is how did God move? How did he move men? I could tell you, but...

No, let's go for it. Yeah, do it. Okay. It's like a boat. Picture that word, it's like a boat. I've forgotten the Greek word, but it carried them along. It's sort of like, he wants men to write his word, but he doesn't zap them or whatever. He just moves them down. It's just sort of like you're driving, and somehow the wind just keeps He moved them to where he wanted them to go.

So even though they were different personalities, they got to the point where God wanted them to be. It's pretty incredible. And God used the different personalities for good reason. You know, a guy like Paul, who had just unbelievable amounts of training in Hebrew and Greek and everything else, to use Paul just was perfect. He took this guy who was the Jew of Jews and turned him into exactly what he needed him to be. And you can use that with other people too. God used the writer for specific reasons.

They each have a different writing style and the way they use words. That's why it's always interesting to me that Hebrews is such a book that nobody's really sure who wrote Hebrews, but to me, when I read it. I think Paul probably wrote it, just because it's his style. You know, everybody has a style of how they write, and the words they use, and the sentence structure.

I don't know, but to me, it looks a lot like Paul. But other people, you know, have a lot. But you can tell. They all have different personalities. Well, and that's, you know, when you look at the Gospels, there's four different Gospels. Why? Because each writer saw it from a different perspective, and they each give us a different perspective. But they're all moved by God.

And also, if you go back up to 1 Peter 2. And it says, like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation. here, that that kind of stops at the point of salvation. But if you go back to that particular chapter in Peter and you start reading, I just kind of went back and looked at it, but it talks about the royal priesthood and some of the things that are supposed to come from your salvation. And like we said in this class before, if the purpose of God was just to bring people to salvation, well, as soon as you got there, you'd be taken up. whole chapter Peter is very good at should I say feeding the sheep like Jesus told him to do but in his two books he really clearly defines you know how you're supposed to live and your responsibilities you know yeah I know you can't put it all in a text like this but it makes it sound like it kind of stops at salvation you're right well and the other part of that is like we pointed out in the the last class is that so many words in scripture have a past, present, and future aspect.

So salvation, don't think a singular, don't think, in the past I would say, end of story. No, no, no, you're being saved 24-7, and you will be saved in glory. So it's all called, the whole process is called salvation. I mean, if there's anything that really is helpful, because I'll come to that past, and I'll say, it's like, Stan, oh, wait a minute, you scratched your head. How can you grow it? It's already done. How can I grow in it? I did it. Well, if it's just defined narrowly as a past aspect, then you can. But if it's a whole picture, you can't.

So I mean, it's just, once again, it's just careful Bible study. And that's why we have people to interact with and teachers to teach. I mean, just for that very reason. Because you don't want to stumble over something like that and come off as some weirdo interpretation. Which is what the world does. Exactly. Exactly.

Well, have you ever looked at car is not written by Christians in the story to go open this card up and I have some person will say Nothing even apply and you know it the person doesn't understand because they got this verse in that I have some Statement and then I had this verse to back it up and go Holy Spirit wasn't involved And you turn it over to back it says Holy Spirit Yeah. Does our cartoon match up? The Holy Spirit did not draw that cartoon. All right.

So we've taken a pretty good look at gaining some, I think, some good respect for what scripture has for us. Let's do that a little bit more. Your next page says, and we haven't even got to the introduction. We've got 10 minutes to finish and we just did the introduction. The next page is, why are we doing this?

The God of Scripture is the God who intentionally reveals himself. Now, on the left there, there's God is revealed by nature, providence, conscience, Scripture, and Jesus Christ. So, mostly what we're dealing with here is Scripture, and Scripture will dig into the other ones. But Scripture spends little ink on whether there is a God. His existence is simply a given.

Scripture also makes abundantly clear that God intentionally reveals himself in multiple ways, each of which is also revealed in Scripture. And from the earliest pages of Scripture we see that God is a personal being with specific character who from the beginning of Scripture to the very end has an intense interest in relating to humankind and a great concern for the character of that relationship. the character of that relationship. That really cool words. Since God was so intentional, what did he intend?

There's at least a handful of interpretations offered for just about every passage in scripture. And for some, even more than a handful. There's a plethora of personal opinions or personal impressions, but God did not intend that there be a range of interpretations for every passage. Did God have in mind that we remain uncertain about what the Bible says? Does God want us to simply embrace the diversity of opinions and be united anyway, agree to disagree? Or is there absolute truth? Paul gave his apostolic insights into those questions to a deeply divided church at Corinth.

1 Corinthians 1 10 Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree, that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete And that I'm not going to try and butcher the Greek word if somebody else knows how to say it, go for it. But it means it was used for mending nets or setting broken bones in the same mind and in the same judgment. So underline that there be, underline no divisions because how many, how many divisions? Zero.

How many, how many denominations does God have in mind? Paul also wrote to Titus and his personal delegate in a tough assignment on the island of Crete. For this reason I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I direct you. holding fast the faithful word, the, one, which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.

And then again you see 2 Timothy 2.15 accurately handling the word of truth. All those are definite articles. It's the one. Not the many, but the one. So it's amazing we have all these town churches now. I mean, usually when you think about it... Yeah, you could... I think there's... Yeah, there's hundreds of them. The issue that you run into with a lot of...

And I mean, we could have talked about this already when we talked about an objective. It's not... You don't come into it saying tradition is more important. Because if tradition is more important than what the Bible says doesn't matter. The authority of scripture is the bottom line and you have to respect it if you want to come to what God has intended for you. The next page there, there are also many New Testament passages that refer to the faith as a singular set of doctrines and the truth referring to one body of truth. There's just a list of passages there. One of the things that I've seen Vern do with folks, with new believers, is he has a sheet and the first question is, is there absolute truth?

And there's a yes with an underline and a no with an underline. Which one do you check? Is there absolute truth? Yes. You check yes. Can absolute truth be known and understood? Yes. Where do you go to get it? The Apostle John also wrote about the certainty that we are to have about what he wrote and about the resulting certainty of the knowledge of the Son of God and that we are in Him. Can I interject a question? Sure.

So taking in mind that the whole have no divisions, be in agreement, total agreement, so forth. In the process of attaining that, where do you think the breakdown happens and the difficulty? Where the division happens? Yeah. Everybody's coming from the standpoint that we are interpreting the truth. You know, whoever you're talking to out there. Even some of the religions that are way out there. So it's that discernment process somewhere.

Well, if you look at history, and I mean take the Catholic Church for example, what did they do with Christianity? They turned it into a political machine. So it went from being a spiritual machine to being a political machine, and they used it to control people. They used it to govern people. And in the process, they threw the Bible out the window. They said, this is too confusing. I mean, who knows what they said, but they threw it out the window. And they said, what the Pope says is never wrong. Pope can't say anything wrong.

So where's the authority? Is it in God or is it in man? It's in man. What did Adam and Eve decide in the garden? Who needs to have authority here? Does God get the authority over me or do I get to make my own decisions? So that's a hard question to answer but I think if you were to put it in a nutshell you say the division comes the second that man places himself in front of God. So if you place your thoughts, what you have to say, above what God says, you're going to run into bad doctrine.

It probably goes back to some of our opening comments about objectivity. Sure. That's one reason I like the precept studies because she'll spend all kinds of time in a book of the Bible and after you've gone through the chapters numerous times and you've done word studies and all this other sort of thing, then toward the end of that she'll say, okay now you can go to your commentaries and see what they have to say and see if it lines up with what we've learned in the scripture. If it doesn't line up, then maybe we need to get a different commentary. Right.

Because most of the time what you do is you start off with man's interpretation of scripture and you begin there. And then you go into the scripture to justify what this man has said about the scripture. Well that's not using the Holy Spirit to inspire your mind on the meaning of what the scripture is. If everybody, you know, would just go to the scripture and study it But that would take a lifetime and the problem is you're so old by that time you're probably ready to die before you can pass it on in any kind of, you know.

Well, yeah, and absolutely. If you're going to go to study the Bible, if you're going to go to, don't go to a commentary. Go to a word. You know, you want to see what a word is, go there. You want to learn something about history. History or culture, you may have to go to a commentary.

And it's okay to start there. Sure. But when you look at the commentary, you want to look at it objective. Not this is the bottom line. This is the truth. And we'll go into that more later in this class. Absolutely. We've got a couple minutes to finish up here. Um, okay.

So, um, first John 5, 13 and 20, these things I have written to you, um, who believe in the name of the son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life and that we may know that the son of God has come and he has given us an understanding so that you may know him who is true. And we who are in Him who is true is His Son, Jesus Christ. This is the true God and the eternal life.

I'm sorry that I butchered that. Now, do we want to just have a bunch of knowledge? No. Without love, knowledge is a clangy gong. It's not profitable. Um, but you do want to, you want to know who God is and you want to understand his character. You want to understand who he's made us. I mean, we just spent eight months learning about who he's made us, nine months. Um, these are good things to know. But the appropriation, the application, the appropriation with love and through the Holy Spirit is really the key. So what do these passages, among others, tell us?

God intended to convey a singular, unifying body of truth, and to have us clearly understand what is true and what is false, and to have that singular body of truth accumulate in a true and intimate personal knowledge of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. So what does all the knowledge add up to? It adds up to an intimate personal knowledge of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Scripture is God's written word of God, and Jesus Christ is the living word of God. So scripture is the written word, and Jesus Christ is the living word.

And then if you look at the doctrinal statement, there's key points. The Bible, we believe that all the authors of the entire Old and New Testament wrote by guidance of the Holy Spirit, verbal inspiration. Those books are completely inerrant and infallible in their original writings. They are the final authority for faith and practice and the means through which believers behold Christ. The Holy Spirit We believe in the deity and personality of the Holy Spirit.

Certain ministries have been committed to Him in this age. He convicts the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. He is responsible for regeneration, indwelling, enlightening, sealing unto the day of redemption. He baptizes each believer into the body of Christ and into the person and work of Christ. He transforms each believer into the image of Christ as the believer beholds Christ in the word of God.

Dispensational Interpretation We believe that scripture is to be interpreted according to its grammatical and historical context including including that God, who does not change, deals in a different manner with Gentile nations, the people of Israel, and the God-created body of heavenly saints called the Church.

We believe that all who are saved, of all time, are saved entirely by faith in Christ, either looking forward or back to the cross. It's not by works, it's by faith. The Life and Walk of Believers We believe that every believer possesses the life of Christ and grows in the grace and knowledge of Christ through the Holy Spirit, who fills the believer with the things of Christ.

We just spent a long time talking about that. This occurs as the believer beholds Christ and the Word of God, as he walks by faith, moment by moment, abiding in Christ. The believer is to walk and rest in the eternally established identity that he possesses by virtue of his faith in the crucified, buried, resurrected, ascended, and seated person of Christ.

That's your position. And he is identified with Him in these things. Christ's life is then lived in the believer which is evident to those who do not know Christ and to those who share Christ's life. So why are we doing this? To behold Christ so that we can fully know Him. So that we can have that intimate personal knowledge of Jesus Christ.

So Kurt, who wrote this lesson? That's very well-worded. It's very well-worded, and this is Vern's message. Oh, is it? Yes. Wow. I have no idea what sources he has. But Vern put this together. Yeah. The second bell is rung. The second bell is rung. Let's pray, and then hopefully there's some coffee cake or something still left for us. Shall we start that as our prayer? Lord, we pray that there's coffee coming.

Lord, we thank you for letting us understand why you even gave us your word. It's just amazing that you gave it to us so that we could know you. We could be intimate in a personal relationship with you. Just continue to grow our relationship and give us hungry hearts for your word. And just thank you so much for loving us and for wanting to know us. Amen.