Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Everybody is fascinated with God.
That's why we do drugs and that's why we do hedonism and immorality. Trying to find something above us.
Maybe a climax will give me meaning to life. Maybe lsd, maybe this money. Maybe if I have a Lamborghini, I will have life.
We're always looking for that.
The fountain.
The words that I give to you will become in you a fountain of eternal life springing to eternal life.
And so when you open the Bible, I've never recovered from the Bible.
You can take a text and start explaining it and you run out of time.
I've never, I've read my Bible every year all the way through since 1973. Wow.
And I read Lonesome Dove twice.
That's the most I could do it right.
I read the biography, the biography of Vince Lombardi twice. That was really good.
I've read Bruce Shelley six times.
I read Gombrich about three times.
I can't imagine a book that I would read 50 times. But every time I read it, it's a different book because it's an archaeological dig. It sweeps your life till it gets down to the Garden of Eden. It just keeps digging deep.
And when you start explaining it, sometimes I'll look at 1000, 1500 people sitting in dead silence.
It's like out of body listening to me. And it's out of body.
And I think I have here a copy of what were manuscripts now that are gone of a book written from 1500 BC until 70 AD by 40 authors.
And everyone is sitting spellbound.
And I'm not talking about the book reading and explaining.
And simply the truths are so superlative, resplendent, are terrifying.
The greatest romance novel is the Bible. The greatest horror movie is the Bible. The greatest sci fi thriller is the Bible. The ultimate extraterrestrial is the Bible.
It's beyond the imagination. And I've never ever recovered from the Bible.
I read it morning, noon and evening.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: And do you do Genesis?
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Just starting Genesis, I will do Genesis and Matthew, Exodus and Romans. I will move on two fronts. All right. And within a year I will make commentaries as I'm writing on it. And then I'll take the Bible and give it away to a nephew or a grandchild. Go, yes, I'll give it away.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: How do you prepare your sermons? Has it changed over the years?
[00:03:11] Speaker A: You know, I, on Sunday afternoon, start.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: For the next week.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: For the next week, I'll go home on Sunday afternoon, an hour after I finish, and I'll take the text and I'll Just look at it and just highlight major points. And then I'll keep going down until I get the main idea, and then I'll look at how it unfolds. It's called getting the focus of the text and then backing up and seeing the flow of the text.
Because you want people, when they hear the Bible, you want them to do this.
And they'll move right with you.
And you want them to say, of course.
That's what it says. You don't want to have it so deep that they say, boy, it must be brilliant because it's fuzzy. Right? You want them to say, this begs the question. Of course. Yeah, that's it.
So you focus on the main idea, and then you watch how the idea is presented.
I urge you, brethren, because the mercies of God present your bodies living holy sacrifice pleasing to God. It's your rational service of worship.
Don't be conformed to the world.
That's the prevention. Be transformed by the process of the renewing of your mind that you can test what is the will of God, what's good, what's pleasing, what's biblical, what's perfect. See, that's so sweet. It just flows. The Bible siphons itself.
And so I'll get the focus, I'll get the flow, and then you got to get the flour, otherwise you got soggy cereal. How does that relate to Genesis? Did Jesus say. Yes, he did.
What is a living sacrifice? Howard Hendricks says it's. You got to. It'll keep crawling off the altar. You don't. You got to keep it on the altar. And I'll get what. Hendrick, what my mother said, what my second grade teacher said about this.
You let it flower. You show that in.
I can show you a movie. I can preach my way through the Bible on movies.
You show me a text, I'll find you a movie. Okay, and what movies?
What singers? I can show you Elvis and the Beatles on stuff that relates to this.
What about Huey P. Long Dead down in Louisiana on this?
And so that's called flower. And then your last F word is called friction. That text rubs man wrong.
It's there for a reason. Because humans, left to themselves, think wrong or they do wrong.
And the Bible is meant to cause friction, right? And so you begin explaining the main idea, and you show it how it flows. Then you show how it relates to life in the Bible.
And then you say, hey, if you don't do this, this is going to happen to you.
There's friction. There's nothing like that. You can speak with absolute truth. And to say this is going to make you successful as a human, as the Bible calls success, may not make you rich or famous, but this is going to make you great.
If you don't do this, you're going to wish you had because life will chasten you, because the Bible is inseparable from life.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: So for someone that's listening to this or watching this and they come to this realization, how can they be right with God? What do they do?
[00:06:53] Speaker A: God has provided a means by which you can be right with Him. That he has given you natural revelation and general revelation where you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is there.
And you know that he is not simply a God, but he is a certain kind of God. He is a holy God, he is a good God, and He is a just God. And you know that. And this God has spoken and he has given his word in what is called the book, the Biblion, the Bible.
And in that book, you don't go more than about 20 minutes reading before you see the first religion mentioned that the seed of woman will crush the serpent's head and the serpent will wound his heel.
The seed of woman is the Messiah, born of a virgin, will crush the serpent's head. He will conquer Satan on the cross and the serpent will wound his heel. He will take a body and a death and wounds that he will never lose.
God will become a man so that men can become godlike, they can become divinized and know their God once again.
And so the rest of the Bible is a footnote on that verse in Genesis 3:15.
Who the seed of woman is, who the serpent is, how he crushed him and what it cost him.
All of your Bible is a footnote on that idea.
God has given you that much material on who he is. And every page will say the same thing.
Pick up your Bible and read.
That's what Augustine said. He heard a kid in the next yard singing when he was in despair in the garden. Take up and read. Take up and read. Take up and read. He still didn't understand why the kid was saying take up and read. He had a scroll of Romans, a codex. He picked it up and opened it and it fell on chapter 13 about what was it?
Make no provision for the flesh and its lust.
And he just recognized that he was a lustful man. He needed to repent and he found Christ. So pick up your Bible and read and it will tell you who the Savior is.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: And our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee Is what he said as well. Right.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Amen.
God, Thou has made us for Thyself and our hearts are ever restless until they find their rest in Thee.
