October 10
Red Letters: The Bible is Pointless
Saturday, October 10, 2009 @ 10:12 am by Josh Burcham
Now that I have your attention. (Sorry, that I went to such length to get that said attention, but this is that important.) Actually, I’m not sorry. The Bible is pointless… if you don’t do what it says.
As I write these next words, know that I write these to those that call themselves Christians. If you don’t believe in Jesus, this post really doesn’t apply to you. What I want you to hear is that Jesus loves you and that He died for you. Isn’t that an amazing sacrifice, that shows His love for us. He died because of the sin in our lives, the sin that keeps us from God, that sin that holds us down and doesn’t allow us to experience true freedom found in Christ. You’re life could have purpose. Forget this Christian-nonsense; just know Jesus. Email me and I’ll answer your questions.
Let me start with telling you a story:
I served as their junior high pastor awhile back and one Sunday I tried a little experiment. I present the Gospel to this group of students and left out one part.
God created us to be with Him. God wanted to be with His creation, but our sin, the things that all of us have done that went against God’s commands, has separated us from God. Those sins can’t be removed by good deeds; no matter how many good deeds we do, they will never be able to forgive us. But God in His grace and mercy gave us a gift of salvation and if we accept His gift and follow Him, we can be forgive of our sins and live with Him in eternity.
After I presented the Gospel, I then had the students yell what they thought I left out. Their guessing went on for about ten minutes; at that point I filled in the blank that was missing. JESUS! I left out JESUS. And I came to this realization: we’ve so gotten comfortable with Jesus that He has no power in our life and the Bible doesn’t either.
Our focus as Christ-followers should be Jesus… nothing more, nothing less…simply Jesus. We live in a day and age where I believe Christians have forgotten about Jesus and it breaks my heart. We worry more about ourselves and how we do things than we do about Truth that is found in the Bible. The crazy thing is we know our Bible. Most believers can quote Scripture to me till their blue in the face and tell me all about the different tribes of Israel or the stories about the first church. But yet we don’t see movements of God in our communities that change hearts. Instead we stretch to find anything that resembles it. Christian listen to me: the Bible is pointless if you forget about Jesus and not do what it says.
John 14:23-24 Jesus replied, “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.
John 15:6-10 If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.
I write this because I believe the Bible has power, because it is God’s spoken Word to us. Hebrews 4:12-13. I believe that we can see massive movements of God in our daily lives where hearts are changed, because I’ve experience and witnessed them. I believe we have hit a plateau as Christians, because to don’t listen to God’s Word, we just read His book. We read for knowledge, not for heart change. We don’t read as if God is speaking to our souls.
When we seek after Jesus, we allow the Holy Spirit to speak to our souls and see the movements of God. We start to live the life Jesus has called us to live and start to genuinely love God and love people and understand you can’t truly do one without the other. Matthew 25:31-46.
