As you will be able to tell, this is something I wrote several years ago, in 2008 actually. I was then the pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Newkirk, Oklahoma. I share this with you mainly because I am about to leave to go to Cleveland for a continuing education event but I didn't want to go two weeks in a row without a blog post. Although it is a few years old, the message is really timeless and I think you will find some value in it.
This past Thursday morning I was all alone in our sanctuary, and I sat down in the first pew. As a break from the busy day, I decided to sit for ten minutes in silence. At first all kinds of thoughts came to mind: the dried poinsettia leaves on the carpet, the e-mail I’d forgotten to send to a colleague. Then after three or four minutes my mind had quieted and I was just sitting there, being. All morning I’d been thinking about how I was so frazzled and stressed. The bad thing about taking vacation is that while you are gone little elves don’t break into your office and do all of your work for you. It is always waiting for you when you get back. So I had four days of work to complete in less than two days. I had presbytery business which I needed to finish and Sunday worship to plan. To top it off my office is so messy and disorganized that I can’t find anything when I need it. Everybody has gone on vacation and come back to that. Surely you’ve had one of those days when you feel like you are being drawn and quartered by all the different directions you are being pulled.
As I was sitting in the silence, the scripture passage I had been reading earlier in the day in preparation for this Sunday’s sermon came to mind, Jesus’ response to Satan’s first temptation in the desert. “Man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” I said that over and over again as I breathed in and out. Then I realized that I was so frazzled not necessarily because I had a lot to do, but because I was living “on bread alone.” I’d been on vacation for over a week, and I hadn’t kept up on my praying and scripture reading like I should. I rested but I guess you could say that I didn’t recharge. I was just living on the surface, so when I returned to the church office I just kept on going that way. I was living on bread alone, meaning that I was not gaining my strength from God. Do you ever find yourself trying to live on bread alone?
It is inevitable. When I live on bread alone my life gets out of whack. And one of the ways that I have tried to re-center myself when my life gets out of whack, is to hike. I’ve only had the opportunity a couple of times but I like to hike the trails at the Chaplin Nature Center just west of Arkansas City. There is something about being out in the woods all by myself, listening to the wind blowing through the trees, feeling the sun on my face as it peeks through. I feel relaxed and happy. I feel close to the earth and in a way I feel close to God as though God and I have finally been able to slip away from the crowds to take a walk together. There is a sacredness to my hikes. Some of you may have had that type of experience at the beach or in the mountains. But although those hikes tend to help immensely, usually what I need when the edges begin to fray is sitting on a bookshelf collecting dust.
I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon or the Himalayas or Angel Falls, but I’ve seen enough of nature to know that a person can come away from the majesty of nature with at least an idea that there must be a God and that this God must be good and wise and powerful. But no matter how sacred my hikes seem to be, they are not enough to give the knowledge of God that is really needed, the knowledge of God that Jesus was referring to when he said that we should live “by every word that comes from God’s mouth.”
A few hundred years ago, the folks who wrote the Westminster Confession called this the “knowledge of God and God’s will that is necessary for salvation.” In other words, the general revelation of God in creation, as beautiful and sacred as it is, or really any aspect of life as a whole, needs to be informed and transformed by something more specific: the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the unique and authoritative witness to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To look only to creation without looking to the scriptures in a quest to learn about and encounter God is living only on the surface. It is like living on bread alone.
If you think that a sunrise over the Smoky Mountains or a sunset in the desert is stunning, try looking at it again after reading in the scriptures that the One who created that sunrise and sunset also created you and loves you. It takes the beauty of that moment to a whole new level. God’s self-revelation in creation may be able to bring us to awe, but it won’t bring us into relationship with our creator. Maybe that is why my hikes seem so sacred, because I look at the woods through the lens of the Bible. I walk through the forest in relationship with the One who formed the universe. I guess that is one way to describe a Christian: someone who walks through the forest of life in relationship with the One who formed the universe. And the way we come into that relationship is through encountering God in the Scriptures. The Bible is not just an accessory to Christian faith. It is absolutely essential.
This Tuesday I am going to start teaching an undergraduate class, Introduction to the New Testament, at Southwestern College, which is a Methodist college in Winfield. The other day I had coffee with the head of the Philosophy and Religion Department. I asked if I should assume that all of the students in the class are Christians. He looked at the class roster and said, “I’m pretty sure they are all Christians.” Then just a couple of minutes later I asked for advice in my preparations and teaching. He said, “You should also assume that they no almost nothing about the Bible.” In my mind I thought, “Christians who know almost nothing about the Bible?” After getting over the initial shock I thought about how wonderful it will be to help these students encounter God’s Word and to help them realize that they may have been trying to live on bread alone. Hopefully they will come to see that life can be so much better than that. But surely many of them will come to class on the first day wondering, “Why is the Bible so important?”
As followers of Jesus Christ, we go to the scriptures because the Bible is where we learn of our Lord, of his teachings, his death on the cross, and his resurrection from the dead. It is the Word through which the Holy Spirit teaches us what to believe and how to live. But if any of those students become convinced of scripture’s power to transform I will not be able to take the credit for that. It will have been the Holy Spirit working in their hearts. Those students, just like all of us, must be open to the Holy Spirit working in our lives through scripture, which as I will say on the first day of class, begins with our opening the Bible. The Bible isn’t just important; it is essential for the person of faith. It does not merely inform us like a history book or an encyclopedia, but God uses it to transform us. When we let God in, the scriptures are not just a book but a place where we meet God.
So as Christians, whether we have been a Christian for eighty-five years or if we just came to faith this morning, we can’t neglect the Bible, thinking that hearing the preacher’s sermon on Sunday is enough. As I have found many times, and most recently this past week after I returned from vacation and found myself sitting in that front pew for ten minutes, it is pretty safe to say that the Holy Spirit won’t work through the Bible if it is collecting dust on a shelf all the time. Instead, we must turn to the scriptures, prayerfully asking the Spirit to open us up to God’s transforming work, working through those ancient words to conform us not to the expectations of our culture but to the likeness of Christ Jesus. We do this both as individuals in personal devotional time, but with our families, and in communities like informal study groups or church bible studies or in Sunday School.
This is Lent, a time for getting back to the basics. It is a time to decide that when the world and your busy life tries to keep you living on the surface, that you will respond, both in word and action, with “I do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Lent is a time to decide that this will be the time when you experience God’s wonderful words of life.
