December 22
December 22
In order to commit to consuming the nutrients of God’s wisdom every day, you must be convinced of the trustworthiness of his word.
Your Bible is unlike anything else in your life. It is one of God’s most amazing and important gifts to you. Everything in your Bible has been recorded and preserved for you by your Creator, Sovereign, Savior Lord. Your Bible has been put together and preserved for you as an irreplaceable tool of God’s grace in your life. Through God’s word, you can know him and yourself. You can understand the world you live in, see and confess your sin, rest in the grace of Jesus, understand the life to which you have been called, and embrace the eternal hope that is yours as a child of God. You simply cannot be a Christian without being a person of the word. You cannot make proper sense of your life without the interpretive grid of Scripture. You will not be spiritually healthy or live righteously if you aren’t being shaped by God’s word. The Bible is the soil in which your Christian life is rooted and grows.
Because all of this is true, we have to be persuaded that this essential gift and tool is completely trustworthy. If you stand above Scripture, debating which part is God’s word and which part isn’t, it will never do the work of grace in your life that it was meant to do. Every part of Scripture is completely trustworthy. In his second letter, Peter makes this clear:
We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. . . . And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Pet. 1:16, 19–21)
What is Peter’s answer to the question of the trustworthiness of Scripture? He says God did two things. He revealed his majesty to his human instruments, and by the Holy Spirit he guided every interpretation and prophecy they recorded. You can build your life on the content found in your Bible, because it literally is God’s word. He guided its writing and preserved it as a gift of grace to you.