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We are currently in a teaching series called Essentials.
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We're looking at the Essentials of Adult Christian Faith.
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We're going to be in this series for nine weeks over the autumn.
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There are we're not talking about uh boxes to tick, but we are looking at aspects of Christian faith that continually reground and reorient our whole lives towards Jesus.
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And I want to talk to you today about scripture.
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Not everybody owns a Bible, and that's okay.
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But if you do own a Bible, I wonder what your Bible is like.
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Um, when we planted the church, I felt compelled for some reason to buy a new Bible.
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And so uh this is the Bible that I bought.
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And uh I hadn't actually walked into a bookshop and bought a new Bible in maybe 25 years, and so it just marked a significant moment in our lives.
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And um our house is actually full of Bibles.
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This is Naomi's youth bible.
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It says something about her, I think.
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Why does Naomi navigate life with such resilience?
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Probably there's an answer there.
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It's actually full of really cringe-worthy prayers that I would that I would ask her out.
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Um the teenage teenage Naomi has written down.
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Um some of you in school will have been lined up one day and given one of these for free.
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This is uh a Gideon's New Testament and Sam's Naomi and I have a friend in his 90s now.
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He's really passionate about uh the work of Gideon's and um I think Gideon's have a new name now, I don't know what it is.
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But uh he recently surrendered his driving license voluntarily, he's in his 90s, and um every morning and and every afternoon on his way to and from work, he uh evangelizes a Belfast taxi driver with and gives them one of these little Bibles.
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So if you take a taxi around Belfast, you probably find one of these in the back or a hundred of them.
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Um, this Bible is called a CBE Bible, a community Bible experience, published by Zondervan.
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And it's a little bit different to a typical Bible, but this one's really special to me because over a period of about five years with a group of 10 friends, I read this particular Bible cover to cover three times.
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And every Sunday morning we had breakfast together and talked honestly about what we found in there, and I discovered that the Bible is far better experienced in community than on your own.
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And then I thought as a very special treat today, Harbor, I would show you my own personal study Bible from home.
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Um so this is my this is my personal study Bible.
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It was um printed in 1875.
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Um it's magnificent.
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Uh if you want to take a look later, you can see uh where I've gained all of my knowledge from.
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Um this Bible is is actually quite significant in that the church Naomi I grew up in had a very uh sort of set routine on a Sunday morning to communicate to everyone that church was starting.
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The choir would would line up a little bit, like I'm gonna put this down, you've no idea how heavy it is.
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Um the choir would would line up in the tunnel behind uh the vestry, a little bit like teams coming out to play a game of football.
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And in my head, I could hear the Champions League theme tune playing, and then just one minute before kickoff, uh, like like a FIFA official with the World Cup, the caretaker Albert would appear uh with this magnificent Bible and carry it up into the pulpit and thunder it down into the pulpit, and and it would let everybody know that in just a moment church was about to begin.
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And it's funny, some of us on the team haven't seen that Bible for 30 years, but we were talking about it and said, you know, maybe maybe there was something quite significant in that of the very first thing that happens on a Sunday morning is somebody brings out.
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Now, I don't know if there was a need for quite so much drama, um, but there is something really beautiful about it.
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Um for 40,000 pounds.
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If you had 40,000 pounds spare, you can have a wicked Bible.
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The Wicked Bible was a 1631 print run of a thousand Bibles in England.
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Uh, the trouble was every single one of them had the same typo where the sixth commandment in Exodus 20, 14 reads, Thou shalt commit adultery.
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And Charles the King Charles I had most of them burned, but a small number of them survived, and you could find a copy if you wanted at auction for around£40,000.
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Or maybe you experience the Bible uh in in another kind of format.
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Like recently it has become very popular to listen to the Bible being read by the actor David Suchet, who has sort of become the voice of the Bible in some ways in the UK.
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Some people might not know that David Suchet became a Christian at the age of 40 in 1986 when someone had mistakenly left their Bible in his hotel room.
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Uh, he said this, he said, I
Load full transcript
found from somewhere a desire to read the Bible.
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He's talking about that same night.
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I read the book of Romans as if it was personally written to me, and I found a worldview I'd been looking for my whole life.
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If you read with an open mind, God's word will speak to you.
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Because on every page I met God.
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He probably didn't know then that he would go on to become the voice of the Bible, but um, that's how David Suchet came to faith.
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What's your Bible like?
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Let me ask you a much more important question than that.
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What's your relationship with the Bible like?
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Today's reading is a vision for a very particular kind of relationship with the Bible, and it's from Psalm 1.
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Uh, we have uh developed a tradition here at Harbour of standing together to read the Word of God in public aloud.
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So if you're if you're willing and able to, would you stand with me just for a moment as we out of reverence um acknowledge the only part of today's talk that will be perfect?
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So this is Psalm chapter 1, um, the whole psalm.
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It says, Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked, or stand in the way that sinners take, or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.
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That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither.
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Whatever they do prospers.
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Not so the wicked, they are like chaff that the wind blows away.
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Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
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For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction.
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In Jesus' name.
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Amen.
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Grab a seat, guys.
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Um that is Psalm 1.
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We could have used uh much more technical parts of scripture today, or parts of scripture that have something more specific and direct to say about the Bible, but I I wanted to use this passage because it paints a really expansive vision for the role that scripture plays in someone's life.
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And at the heart of Psalm 1, there is quite a bold claim, and the claim is that the defining characteristic of friendship with God is a love for his word.
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The defining characteristic of friendship with God is a love for his word.
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And I want to show you three things in Psalm 1.
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I think we're presented in the text with a choice, a practice, and a promise.
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So let's start with a choice.
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The choice presented in Psalm 1 is this where will you plant your life?
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The text is a poetic crossroads, it paints a picture of two places that you could potentially plant your life.
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And the underlying question that simmers away in the Psalm is which way do you want to go?
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You can go left or right at this crossroads, but they lead to different outcomes and they both grow at compound interest.
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The decision is yours.
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The psalmist describes, first of all, someone who goes left, and they plant their life in cultural trend and in the influence of others, in the competing voices around their life, and in the cynicism of the age.
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And it's represented in the text by um talk of wicked and sinners and mockers, and there's also a progression from walking to standing to then sitting.
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And the author is trying to say that there's a planting down happening in this person's life, like a settling, a kind of familiarity with a way of thinking that doesn't lead to God.
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And the author's trying to say that you can make your home in those places more easily than you think.
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It can happen more quickly than you think, and it won't lead to blessing and fruitfulness.
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And then we're presented with the alternative option: someone who takes a right turn and they plant their life in the word of God, and the result in verse three is really beautiful.
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Deep roots, water available in and out of season, evergreen leaves, someone who's rooted and nourished and full of abundant life.
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And the psalm is inviting us today, harbor, to make scripture integral and consistent and treasured in our lives.
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It's it's an expansive vision for the role that scripture will play.
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So that's the choice.
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Um if we were to make a decision to plant our lives in in scripture, you might ask, well, what would that actually look like?
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And so the Sam goes on to talk about a practice.
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And the practice of planting your life in scripture is sort of illustrated with two words.
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Um, the two words are delight and meditation.
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So let's hold each of them up to the light and see what's there.
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The first word Sam uses is the word delight.
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Blessed is the one who delights in the teaching, the instruction of the Lord day and night.
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It's interesting that delight and meditation, do you notice that in those two words you have both head and heart, you have both attention and affection.
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And um the word delight, Hebrew hefets, it means to find your heart drawn towards something, to lean or incline towards something.
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In other words, it's the opposite of obligation, it's the opposite of guilt.
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A few years ago, I was running the Belfast Marathon for the first time, and I was 20, 25 miles deep in the marathon, probably deeper into a tunnel of emotion than I've ever been in in my whole life.
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And at the top of the Ormo Road, somebody who recognized me from primary school, I still don't know who it was, um, thought it was appropriate to shout, come on, Johnny, don't let yourself down.
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And I summoned up all the strength, all the physical strength that I had left, and I shouted back, guilt is not a motivator.
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Because it isn't.
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It really isn't.
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Um, and the psalmist describing the opposite of guilt or obligation as a motivator for engaging with the Bible.
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The person they just this describes doesn't just read the Bible, they love it, they they value it and listen to it and encounter God in it.
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And I guess a reasonably fair question would be: is that realistic?
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Is that realistic?
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Like, I don't always come to my study Bible with a ton of excitement and anticipation.
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And um, there are other things in life that I maybe find more immediately exciting.
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I've got really good news for you though, because the word delight here doesn't really refer to the emotion that we bring to the Bible, it refers to the value that we see in it.
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In other words, it's possible to delight in scripture on days when you feel quite uninspired and even bored with the practice, because you can still see immense value in it.
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And delight can grow.
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I think delight really begins to grow when you move beyond intellectual exercise and into relational intimacy.
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Delight begins with encountering God personally in scripture and hearing his voice when um a Bible like this becomes a place where God meets with me and loves me and activates purpose in my life and guides me and where I see his wisdom and his insight and his glory.
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And you can be confident that this is from God.
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It can't be proven empirically, but in Christian faith, we can be confident that God inspired this text.
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There are a few ways that we we know that.
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The first way is that the Bible claims to be inspired by God.
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2 Timothy 3 16 says all scripture is God breathed, which is the rather beautiful Greek term, Theo Penustos.
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And what um Paul is saying there is that the Bible was written down by human beings with like a real practical historical reason to write.
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Nobody wrote, nobody sat down to write part of the New Testament, going, I've got a contract to finish this part of the New Testament and a month to do it.
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I need to finish the Bible.
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Um, and for that reason, we read the Bible not literally but literarily.
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We read it according to its genre and we respect where the text came from in a human sense.
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But Paul is saying that mysteriously, although it's of human origin, the words carry the divine authorial inspiration of God Himself.
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His creative intent and will are expressed perfectly in the meaning of the text.
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And so the Bible is both of divine and human origin.
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The best illustration of this would be somewhere like the Sagrata Familia in Barcelona.
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It's one of very few places in the world that has genuinely taken our breath away when we saw it the first time.
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They've been quite clever because the way the underground system works in Barcelona, you come up an escalator out of the underground, and as you hit the top step, the Sagrata Familia just greets you in an almost confrontational kind of way.
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It's stunningly beautiful.
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And um, if you ask anyone in Barcelona who who built the Sagrata Familia, they will tell you that Antoni Gaudi built it.
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But of course, he never laid a single brick.
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Gaudi used people and instruments and lots of other means at his disposal, but his mind and creative intent is the architecture and inspiration behind every single angle and corner of it.
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And that's how Jesus himself handled the Bible.
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He knew what King David had written down, but he believed that the words carried the authority and the inspiration and the breath of God.
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I think the second way we can be confident is that the Bible has remarkable unity.
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Written by 40 authors across 1500 years, most of them had never met.
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They spoke different languages, they were from different cultures, they were from almost entirely different
planets, some of them.
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And yet, when you have everything from kings and nobles to intellectuals to outcasts contributing, astonishingly, the Bible tells one single coherent, unified story that points to the person of Jesus.
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All the unique languages and styles and cultural perspectives come together in a magnificent theological jigsaw that points to one central character, one event, his resurrection from the dead, and one purpose, God's redemptive plan for humanity.
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Jesus on the road to Emmaus explains that the whole story, start to finish, points to him.
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I'm guessing you've probably seen this image before.
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At least I hope you've seen it before because you can't see it very well this morning.
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This image along the bottom of the screen represents every single chapter of the Bible.
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And there's a really, really long one in the middle.
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That's Psalm 119, which is dead center of the Bible, the longest chapter.
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It's a celebration of the majesty of the Word of God, which seems appropriate.
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But across the top then of the screen, you have these sort of beautiful coloured arcs that represent the cross-references and hyperlinks almost, if you like, of the Word of God.
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The way that, you know, 40, 50 odd authors across 1500 years and different cultures, different worlds, different languages, different experiences and genres of writing have spoken to each other within the text to point to one character, one event, and one purpose.
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Christians would say only God could orchestrate something as majestic and beautiful as that.
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Blessed is the one who delights in the word of God, who sees the value in it.
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And I suppose the last reason we could be confident in the relational dimension of scripture that we meet God there is because it really does transform people.
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David Suchet would be one example, but countless other people have been changed and transformed by an encounter with the living God in Scripture.
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I remember growing up when I was younger watching a professional footballer playing in Northern Ireland called Connor Downey.
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Um, Connor played for my team, um and I think through most of his professional football career, he never had any interest in faith or in church.
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But at one point in his career uh ruptured his ACL, spent a year and a half not playing sport, and one of the other lads in the changing room had given all of the guys a Bible at the start of the year, and it was probably a very, very awkward exchange.
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And uh and he don't he didn't really know what had become of those Bibles, and yet halfway through the year that Connor spent in his bedroom with nowhere to go and nothing to do, he um picked out that old Bible and began to read the Gospels and in the Gospels encountered the person of Jesus and became so captivated and compelled by the person of Jesus and uh went on, came to faith, went on to become a church planter on the other side of this city.
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People get transformed by an encounter with God in his word.
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So the first word is delight.
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The second word that um relates to practice of planting your life in the Word of God is meditation.
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Meditate.
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Blessed is the one who meditates day and night.
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And meditate in um in the language, the original language here is uh the word hagah, which is one of my favorite um sort of original Bible words.
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It's fantastic.
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The word haga means to mutter under your breath, to kind of repeat to yourself continually, but it they suspect that it may also relate in some way to the noise that a lion makes when it sort of chews over its prey, when it has that laser-like attention focus on its prey.
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This is the closest that I've ever been to a lion.
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You can't really see him.
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Um, he's under that tree.
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Uh, this was on a little mini safari in Cape Town, South Africa.
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And Naomi and I were introduced to this lion, and we sort of were told that the lion was a bit pathetic because um it had never learned to hunt.
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And so uh they they released an antelope into its enclosure one afternoon, presumably to feed it, and they came back the following day to find the lion had befriended the antelope, and so eventually, somewhere along the way, they figured out if we kill the antelope and like barbecue it over 48 hours in a nice rub and put some barbecue sauce on it and present it to the lion, and you know, the lion will eventually eat the antelope.
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But um, so there wasn't a whole lot of but even then, with this lion that had no idea how to hunt, the noise that a lion makes, that like kind of growl under its breath, slightly terrifying.
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And we reckon that is kind of where that word might relate to.
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Um, guys, we Already ruminate and chew over all kinds of things every day.
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A sense of feeling alone, maybe.
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Um, certain anxieties, certain hypothetical scenarios or insecurities or stories that we tell ourselves.
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And the practice of meditation in a
biblical sense is not to empty your mind.
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It's to go a step further than reading the word of God.
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It's to take the word of God and to fill your mind with the word of God, and also to set in front of you some of the scenarios that you are dealing with in life right now, and to take the word of God and press the truth and the treasure of his word into those circumstances.
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That is the practice of biblical meditation.
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So when I start to ruminate on the idea that I'm completely alone, I'm reminded in Psalm 46 that our God is a refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
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When I'm terrified the future won't work out, I'm reminded that God says in Jeremiah 29, He knows plans that He has for me, plans to prosper me and not to harm me.
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When I feel completely overwhelmed, I hear the voice of Jesus saying, You know, can you really add one hour to your life by worrying?
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Look at the flowers of the field and the sparrows.
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God cares for them and he cares deeply for you.
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But meditation with the Bible can and should extend well beyond a therapeutic sense.
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It can be for wisdom and growth and boldness and insight and study and revelation.
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Meditating on God's word shapes our instincts and our imagination.
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So that's the choice, the practice, and very lastly, then the promise.
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The promise of this kind of relationship with Scripture is abundant life, fruitfulness and growth and direction, and a life that is like an evergreen tree, not avoiding the storms and difficulties, but a capacity to thrive in the midst of them.
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Let me finish by telling you about the Atacama Desert in Chile.
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So my friend Georgia, who I work with, she has recently married a Chilean guy, and for the first time, she has gone over to Chile this week to meet her in-laws and family.
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And she's been very, very fortunate because in Chile you have the Atacama Desert, which is known as the driest place on earth.
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It's rocky and cracked and barren and stark, and it receives virtually zero rainfall.
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Some weather stations in the Atacama Desert have never recorded any rain at all.
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If in the next few months Northern Ireland does what it uh tends to do, and you've absolutely had enough, you know where you could go.
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Once in a decade, or there and thereabouts.
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Given a very, very precise set of meteorological circumstances, just the right amount of rain, just the right amount of cold, and just the right amount of sun, the Atacama Desert, all 15,000 square miles of it, suddenly awakens and enters into a phase known as the superbloom.
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It comes alive with 200 types of wildflower, some of which are only found here, nowhere else on earth.
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And those wildflowers are then joined by every kind of insect and bird and beauty the driest place on earth with a little water is transformed into abundant, flourishing life.
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What dry or painful or difficult places in your life and mine could flourish beautifully a year from now?
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What fears might lose their grip?
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What friendship with Jesus might emerge, what hope or direction or change might happen, what purpose in your life might get activated?
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If our relationship with Scripture was one of delight, seeing the immense value in it, having a vision for its place in my life, and meditation where we move beyond reading and we press the truth and the treasure of it into the circumstances of our own lives.
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Where will you plant your life?
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In Jesus' name.
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Amen.