Sermon Illustrations on Scripture
Background
Biblical Meditation
Biblical scholar Nahum Sarna (in On the Book of Psalms) points out that the mediation mentioned in Psalm 1 (The man who “meditates on [God’s] law day and night”) is “not engaged in meditation and contemplation, such as required in some mystical systems and traditions.” (38) Instead, the kind of individual study in question is, “reading aloud, rote learning, and constant oral repetition.” (38) Silent reading was uncommon in the ancient world and even the Hebrew word for “to read” also means “to proclaim.” This method of study was common between Egypt, Mesopotamia, and even China. Sarna adds,
Study of the sacred text—torah—was not just an intellectual pursuit or matter of professional training, but a spiritual and moral discipline. It was the authoritative guide to right behavior. Constant repetition and review “day and night,” functioned to incorporate its values within the self so that they became a part of one’s own being, consciously and subconsciously guiding one’s actions. (39)
Sarna concludes that this is why study of Torah was so important—a sacred duty—rather than an “elitist enterprise.” Studying aloud was not only intellectual, but an act of worship.
Summarized by William Rowley
Eat This Book
Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.
Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, Eerdman’s Publishing Company.
The Goal of Reading Scripture
The goal is not for us to get through the Scriptures. The goal is to get the Scriptures through us.
Some churches give people the idea that the only way to transformation is knowledge. There is an assumption that as people’s knowledge of the Bible rises, their level of spiritual maturity rises with it.
… Knowledge about the Bible is an indispensable good. But knowledge does not by itself lead to spiritual transformation. When Paul urged the Christians at Rome to “be transformed by the renewing of your minds,” he was thinking of far more than just the acquisition of information. “Mind” refers to a whole range of perceiving, understanding, valuing, and feeling that in turn determines the way we live.
…While knowledge is vital and should be prized, it also poses some dangers. It often demolishes humility. The sobriquet “know-it-all” is never used as a compliment. The Bible itself contains some warnings: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”
Both human experience and the Bible teach that increased knowledge – even knowledge of the Scriptures – does not automatically produce transformed people.
How not to read the Bible
How may readers … do harm to themselves?
If … they read the Scriptures without sincere prayer and the purpose to obey God, but only to get knowledge, to make a show, and to exercise their curiosity upon them. … If they do not observe what is useful for their edification, but only what they can use for their glory and against others.…If they despise what the Scriptures simply stated and what is easy to comprehend. If, on the contrary, they take up only difficult passages, about which there is much dispute, in order to discover in them something unusual and to make a show before others. If they use what they have learned with pride and for their own glory. If they think they alone are wise, obstinately refuse better instruction, love to quarrel, and receive nothing from others with modesty.
Philipp Spener, The Spiritual Priesthood in Pietests – Selected Writings, Paulist Press, 1983, 58.
The Power of Scripture
Mahatma Gandhi speaking to Christians, “You Christians have in your keeping a document with enough dynamite in it to blow the whole of civilization to bits; to turn society upside down; to bring peace to this war torn world. But you read it as if it were just good literature, and nothing else.”
A Re-Interpreted Life
As we share our story in the context of God’s story there is a transformation that cultivates an openheartedness. God offers us the gift of a reinterpreted life by means of the story of Scripture. This reinterpretation opens us to true-self living, to loving receptivity. We are invited to explore and change our emotional response to early events, our interpretation and the interpretation that others provided and we borrowed as our own.
Taken from The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass and James Cofield, Copyright (c) 2014, p.103 by Richard Plass and James Cofield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Satisfied Only With God’s Word
Take a toy from a child and give him another — he will be satisfied. But if the child is hungry, giving him a toy won’t help. Just like babies, true believers desire the milk of the word of God — the desire of grace is itself grace.
Adapted from John Newton in Charles Spurgeon, Feathers for Arrows (1870)
Scripture Filled with Non-Heroic Figures
One of the first things that strikes us about the men and women in Scripture is that they were disappointingly non- heroic. We do not find splendid moral examples. We do not find impeccably virtuous models. That always comes as a shock to newcomers to Scripture: Abraham lied; Jacob cheated; Moses murdered and complained; David committed adultery; Peter blasphemed. We read on and begin to suspect intention: a consistent strategy to demonstrate that the great, significant figures in the life of faith were fashioned from the same clay as the rest of us.
We find that Scripture is sparing in the information that it gives on people while it is lavish in what it tells us about God. It refuses to feed our lust for hero worship. It will not pander to our adolescent desire to join a fan club.
The reason is, I think, clear enough. Fan clubs encourage secondhand living. Through pictures and memorabilia, autographs and tourist visits, we associate with someone whose life is (we think) more exciting and glamorous than our own. We find diversion from our own humdrum existence by riding on the coattails of someone exotic.
We do it because we are convinced that we are plain and ordinary. The town or city that we live in, the neighborhood we grew up in, the friends we are stuck with, the families or marriages that we have—all seem undramatic. We see no way to be significant in such settings, with such associations, so we surround ourselves with evidence of someone who is.
We stock our fantasies with images of a person who is living more adventurously than we are. And we have enterprising people around who provide us (for a fee, of course) with the material to fuel the fires of this vicarious living. There is something sad and pitiful about the whole business. But it flourishes nonetheless.
Taken from Run with the Horses by Eugene H. Peterson. ©2009, 2019 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426.
Scripture Grounds our Story in Place
Our Scriptures that bring us the story of our salvation ground us in place. Everywhere they insist on this grounding. Everything that is critically important to us takes place on the ground. Mountains and valleys, towns and cities, regions and countries:
Haran, Ur, Canaan, Hebron, Sodom, Machpelah, Bethel, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Samaria, Tekoa, Nazareth, Capernaum, Mt. Sinai, Mt. Of Olives, Mt. Gilboah, Mt. Hermon, Ceasarea, Gath, Ashkelon, Michmash, Gibeon, Azekah, Jericho, Chorizan, Bethsaida Emmaus, the Valley of Jezreel, the Kidron Valley, the Brook of Besor, Anathoth.
Big cities and small towns. Famous landmarks and unvisited obscurities. People who want God or religion as an escape from their place because it is difficult (or maybe just mundane), don’t find this much to their liking. But there it is—there’s no getting around it. But to the man or woman wanting more reality, not less, this insistence that all genuine life, life that is embraced in God’s work of salvation, is grounded, is good news indeed.
Set Aside Your Culture when Reading the Bible
Rather than translating the culture, then, we need to try to enter the culture. When people want to study the Bible seriously, one of the steps they take is to learn the language. As I teach language students, I am still always faced with the challenge of persuading them that they will not succeed simply by learning enough of the language to engage in translation. Truly learning the language requires leaving English behind, entering the world of the text and understanding the language in its Hebrew context without creating English words in their minds. They must understand the Hebrew as Hebrew text. This is the same with culture. We must make every attempt to set our English categories aside, to leave our cultural ideas behind, and try our best (as limited as the attempt might be) to understand the material in its cultural context without translating it.
John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (IVP, 2010).
The Spirit & Temptation
In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey, M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton discuss the poignant insight that it is the Spirit that leads Jesus into the Wildnerness. What does this mean, from a Biblical, theological perspective?:
Isn’t it interesting that the Spirit, the source of Jesus’ empowerment, is also focal in the temptation that follows: “The Spirit led him into the wilderness to be tempted” (Mt 4:1)? We tend to think of temptation as something totally alien to us, something from outside that intrudes into our lives.
We learn from Jesus’ experience, however, that the most critical temptations attach themselves to the call and empowerment of God that defines the meaning, value and purpose of our existence. It was so for Jesus. His first temptation went to the heart of who he was, and it is the temptation our culture has succumbed to.
“If you are the Son of God, speak, that these stones may become bread” (Mt 4:3). Do you see the nature of this temptation? The temptation is for Jesus to use his empowerment by the Spirit to do something that will authenticate God’s call. More significantly, it is a temptation to reverse the roles of being and doing, the temptation our culture has succumbed to. We tend to evaluate our own meaning, value and purpose, as well as those of others, not by the quality of our being but by what we do and how effectively we do it.
Taken from: Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation by M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton. Copyright (c) 2016 by M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
The Survival of Scripture
Nahum Sarna points out in Understanding Genesis that it is a remarkable fact that the Old Testament exists at all. Most ancient texts have not survived. Ancient Israel did not spread its works by military or economic hegemony. We are unlikely to find ancient examples outside of the small region ancient Israel inhabited. Instead, they were produced by a people who “knew independence for but brief interludes, that possessed no political power and that generally encountered nothing but animosity.” (xix)
Of this, he writes,
There is one simple explanation. The books of the Hebrew Bible survived because men firmly and fervently believed them to be the inspired word of God, sacred literature… Sanctity antedated and preconditioned the final act of canonization. (xix)
William Rowley (Please see Sarna, Understanding Genesis, The Jewish Theological Seminary, 2015)
Summoning the People Together
Those of us who assume that the normative image of Scripture reading is the solitary individual poring over a bound volume, one of the great icons of classical Protestantism, may need to be reminded that for most Christians throughout the ages and probably most in the world at present, the norm is listening….
So the Church [reads Scripture publicly] not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together…. Whatever we do in private with our reading of Scripture, we must do in awareness of this public character.
Rowan Williams, “Larkin Student Lecture: The Bible Today, Reading and Hearing,” presented at the University of Toronto, Canada, 16 April 2007.
Which is the Bible Most Like?
What genre of literature is the Bible? How we answer this question will ultimately determine not just how we read scripture, but how it will ultimately shape our lives. One Sunday school teacher, teaching a survey of the Bible, asked just this question at the end of his first class. The question he posed was this:
Which of the following is the Bible most like: (A) Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, (B) The Reader’s Digest Guide to Home Repairs, or (C) The Collected Papers of the American Antislavery Society? What was this teacher looking for? He summarized it this way: “The correct answer is C, although we most often use the Bible like A and expect it to be like B.” Part of his intention in the class was to help the students realize that “the Bible is a series of occasional pieces of various genres that traces the development of a transformational movement.”
Taken from Glenn R. Paauw, Saving the Bible from Ourselves: Learning to Read and Live the Bible Well, InterVarsity Press.
Written for Us, Not to Us
We like to think of the Bible possessively—my Bible, a rare heritage, a holy treasure, a spiritual heirloom. And well we should. The Bible is fresh and speaks to each of us as God’s revelation of himself in a confusing world. It is ours and at times feels quite personal. But we cannot afford to let this idea run away with us.
The Old Testament does communicate to us and it was written for us, and for all humankind. But it was not written to us. It was written to Israel. It is God’s revelation of himself to Israel and secondarily through Israel to everyone else. As obvious as this is, we must be aware of the implications of that simple statement. Since it was written to Israel, it is in a language that most of us do not understand, and therefore it requires translation. But the language is not the only aspect that needs to be translated. Language assumes a culture, operates in a culture, serves a culture, and is designed to communicate into the framework of a culture. Consequently, when we read a text written in another language and addressed to another culture, we must translate the culture as well as the language if we hope to understand the text fully.
John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (IVP, 2010).
Stories
Not Getting the Message
Reading the Bible without applying it to your life can be downright dangerous. On August 3, 1996, Melvin Hitchens, sat on his front porch and read the Bible. After his Bible reading, this 66 year old New Orleans resident went in his house and retrieved a .45 caliber hand gun. He went back outside, and shot his neighbors!
He killed Donna Jett as she swept her sidewalk and injured Darryl Jett while he was mowing. Family members and neighborhood residents testified that Hitchens and the Jett’s had a running feud over the care of their yards and the cleanliness of the gutters. No one, however, had an explanation how a man could put down his Bible, and commit such a violent act! Positive transformation requires the application of God’s Word. (Source: Houston Chronicle, 8/5/96, p.7A)
Writing out our Faith
We all desire to learn from our role models, but some take this ambition to the next level. The writer Hunter S. Thompson was so obsessed with the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and specifically his book, The Great Gatsby, that he began typing out the entire book, just for himself, in order to learn its secrets. His hope was to experience what it was like to write a masterpiece, word for word. What might we learn from Thompson and his dedication to his task?
Might we consider writing, for ourselves, the greatest masterpiece of all time? Might we attempt to experience what it was like for the Holy Spirit to guide the writing of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) or the gospels, Paul’s letters, or the book of revelation? What might we experience if we took the time to manually write out the great books of Holy Scripture? How might we emulate those great saints who came before us, who showed us what it was like to be inspired by God?
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Analogies
Between the Probable and Proved
Between the probable and proved there yawns A gap.
Afraid to jump, we stand absurd, Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse, Our very standpoint crumbling.
Desperate dawns Our only hope: to leap into the Word That opens up the shuttered universe.
Eat This Book
Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.
Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, Eerdman’s Publishing Company.
The Power of Scripture
Mahatma Gandhi speaking to Christians, “You Christians have in your keeping a document with enough dynamite in it to blow the whole of civilization to bits; to turn society upside down; to bring peace to this war torn world. But you read it as if it were just good literature, and nothing else.”
“Remember the Signs” from The Silver Chair
In CS Lewis’ The Silver Chair, Jill meets the lion, Aslan, high atop a mountain before her quest begins to save a prince. Aslan shares four important signs for her to remember along the way. These four signs are the keys to accomplish the purpose for which Aslan has brought her into Narnia. Without following his words, she’ll be lost, so Aslan has a stern warning for her:
But, first, remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs. And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.
In the book there are times when Jill and her companions think they know the way, and in their self-confidence they make their own path rather than pay attention to the signs. It is not even that they are trying to disobey Aslan, rather what they do is often an attempt to complete the mission of saving the prince. But whenever they try to race ahead and go it alone, they fall from the path.
We too may think we know better and will forget the words of Jesus and the call he’s given us in his Word. Even when we try to do what is right, if doing so means we forget his words, is that the way forward? We may want to know more than what God has told us, to see more clearly, or to get the bigger picture. But we must seek to be content with knowing that what he’s told us is enough. The way forward from there is to simply and humbly trust and obey.
Casey Clark
The Value of Headlights on a Dark Road
The rural country roads where I now live are very different from the roads I grew up around in the suburbs. When I lived in the suburbs, the roads I traveled between my house and a friend’s, or the streets I took to go to church or a store were always lined with street lights. Not so with roads out here in Rockbridge County, Virginia. I’ve been living here for 7 years now, and I still often feel discomfort driving at night. When I’ve had to drive on unfamiliar roads in the darkness to attend meetings or make visits, I rely heavily on my GPS to get me where I need to be. This makes me feel both vulnerable and grateful. On a recent drive, navigating the roads as they twisted and turned, I diligently scanned for deer and watched for broken limbs that came down on that windy night.
I realized that the map guiding me was extremely important, but there was something else I was relying on, and without it, I would have never made it home. I would have been utterly lost without my headlights. Even a perfect map would have done me no good if I did not have lights to show me where the turns were, where the dangers were.
Light is a good thing—it exposes the dangers around us that we need to avoid, it shows us where we are headed. Light makes things clearer.
Rachel Clark
Which is the Bible Most Like?
What genre of literature is the Bible? How we answer this question will ultimately determine not just how we read scripture, but how it will ultimately shape our lives. One Sunday school teacher, teaching a survey of the Bible, asked just this question at the end of his first class. The question he posed was this:
Which of the following is the Bible most like: (A) Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, (B) The Reader’s Digest Guide to Home Repairs, or (C) The Collected Papers of the American Antislavery Society? What was this teacher looking for? He summarized it this way: “The correct answer is C, although we most often use the Bible like A and expect it to be like B.” Part of his intention in the class was to help the students realize that “the Bible is a series of occasional pieces of various genres that traces the development of a transformational movement.”
Taken from Glenn R. Paauw, Saving the Bible from Ourselves: Learning to Read and Live the Bible Well, InterVarsity Press.
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