What does the Bible actually say? (Part 1)

       If someone were to ask you what the Bible has to say about a particular topic, word, theme, idea, etc., would you know how to answer them? Would you know how to go about finding out the answer if you didn't already have a solid grasp on it? My dad says that you will never know what the Bible means until you know what it says. Do you know what it says? Do you know how to find out what it says? Do you know what questions to ask to find this out, what tools you'll need to do this? Do you know which resources to pull from and which to avoid? Once you have gathered the information, do you know what is next - what to do with it to arrive at a solid, Biblical conclusion? 

     I'm teaching my way through the spiritual gifts with my ladies on Thursday nights. Part of my heart in teaching them is to equip them to find answers directly from the Word themselves. Part of my teaching is training them what questions to ask, what resources to use, how to weed through "Christianeze" to find what the Bible actually says. When you find that out, how to do you process it, especially when it contradicts what you've been told the Bible says all of your life? This has definitely been a process for them as we have been faced with various truths in the book of Ephesians (our current study) that have either never been communicated to them or have been denied by previous pastor/teachers that they have sat under or heard. For many, many of these truths are either brand new or offensive because they have been conditioned to dismiss or disregard or even seemingly 'Biblically' argue against them. What do you do when faced with the black and white, God-inspired words on the page? What do you do when everything that you've been taught is screaming at you against what you're seeing? How do you process this new information? How do you find out if the Bible talks about these things anywhere else? How do you know that your understanding is correct? 

     These are the sorts of questions I want to equip my fellow believers to ask and to hand them the tools to find the answers out for themselves. There is so much that sounds like it's from the Word that has become a part of the warp and weave of American Christianity that is either blatantly un-Biblical, if not glaringly demonic to those who know what they're looking for. There is so much ignorance of what's actually in the Bible that the enemy has no trouble easily deceiving the masses who assume they're being taught truth. What does the Bible actually say? Does it agree with or contradict what these people (and we) are hearing? What do we do if it does? Where does our loyalty actually lie? How do we respond when we find out that the men under whom we have sat and gleaned from are not teaching the truth of Scripture? On the flip side, when they do teach the truth of Scripture, is our loyalty to them or to the Word? 

     These are hard questions and worthy of our wrestling. I am not attempting the undermine the many solid Bible teachers that we have access to. I want to challenge all of us not to have an attitude of suspicion so much as a discerning spirit. My heart is for so many who are ignorantly being led astray and are completely unaware of it because they are not seeking the whole counsel of God and are not aware that they need to compare what they're hearing with the whole counsel of God. They are not equipped to know how to find out what the Bible actually says. It is a big collection of books and the amount of information in it can seem overwhelming. Given the right training and correct use of the right tools, however, one can break this volume of information down into understandable, 'bite-sized,' pieces of information that can been connected in an accurate manner to facilitate arriving at the correct conclusion. God wrote the Bible to reveal Himself. We will never completely grasp who He is or the magnitude of His holiness, but there are very definite and clear truths He wants us to understand about Himself and how He has set up His world. There are definite things that we can know with absolute certainty. We just have to know how to seek and find them. 

     Do you know how to do that? In my next post, I'll begin to give you some pointers on where to begin and how to process the information you acquire when you do.