In our last devotional, we looked at why we are without excuse for redeeming the time, and how we can do so starting with prayer. Today, we will be looking at a necessary concurrent spiritual discipline, which relates to the Bible.
When we think of the Bible, we ought to view it as the perfectly sufficient manual for our lives (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The Bible is to be used for every matter of faith and practice, and this includes within its purview every aspect of life. So, the Bible is our comprehensive manual with regards to redeeming the time. Unfortunately, many who read the Bible do not know how to apply its principles to all of life, or they assume that it applies to only a part of their lives (compartmentalizing faith apart from everyday life). This should not be. The Great Commission is clear on this:
18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:18-20).
The Great Commission is for making all believers in Christ disciples, meaning that believers learn the craft of their Master. When disciples are fully trained, then they will be like their Master in everything. What is the craft? The craft entails “teaching [the disciples] to observe all that I have commanded you.” So, the craft taught by the Master for all disciples is to obey all of His commands. Do these commands merely apply to a part of our life, or do they apply to the whole? They apply to the whole! We are commanded to be singularly loyal to God with all our heart, soul, and strength—our whole selves (Deut. 6:5). This loyalty is to the One God (Deut. 6:4), who desires a corresponding oneness of faithfulness to Him in everything. How do we know what God commands? We know this through His special revelation of Himself to us: through the Bible. That is where God’s commands are all recorded. Yet, do we merely do these things on our own? No, because we cannot ever obey God’s commands outside of Christ. Rather, when we are saved, we are given new hearts that strongly desire to obey and please God. Likewise, this obedience must stem from the heart (the whole inner-man), meaning that it is not merely being applied externally, but from our motives and will, as they align with what God desires from His Word. So, we are not like the Pharisees who look clean on the outside of the cup, but are filthy on the inside (Matt. 23:25-26). The obedience that we seek is obedience to God’s commands from the motives and will being directed towards glorifying God, showing that we are increasingly embodying God’s commands from the inside out. This requires guarding our minds (a part of the heart), fighting against every thought that comes from the world, and actively replacing it with the truth (Rom. 12:2). That is our spiritual warfare. Where do we get the fuel and our weapons for fighting in this battle? We get it from the Word of God, which is also aptly called the “sword of the Spirit” (Heb. 4:12; Eph. 6:17; Rev. 1:16; 2:12; 19:15, 21). The only way that we can wage war on the darkness is through the illumination of the Bible. The truth of Scripture is what shines into our hearts and lives, illumination which is used by God to purge the darkness. It is the tool of the Holy Spirit (the “sword of the Spirit”) to vanquish the darkness and renew our minds back to God.
So, how do we use the Bible to redeem the time? We are Jesus’ disciples, and that we therefore need to learn His craft: increasingly obeying His commands from a heart after God. The content of these commands is only found in the Bible, and we have the Holy Spirit to help conform us to embody them. The Bible is the express will of God for us. It was wholly written from God through the personalities of the biblical writers, so that we may know who He is, and what He desires of us. Given that God is its source, the Bible is also without error, breathed-out from God, and therefore perfect in every matter that it addresses, which is, evidently, every matter of our faith and practice. So, in seeking to obey God’s Word to redeem all of life, God’s Word lacks nothing. The Bible is the perfect source and manual for the Christian life, and it is where we learn what the will of God is for us, and therefore both what we are to pray for (to align our wills with God’s), and how we order our lives to redeem the time.
Given that the Bible is our perfect manual for life, it is to be our chief authority in all things. It is true that the Bible is not meant to teach things like mathematics or the scientific method (although, it can give us what we need to properly undergird and frame these disciplines). It is perfect in all that it teaches, which it does for the purpose of making us like Christ, which is a comprehensive purpose. So, we are to consult God’s Word in everything, everywhere, and at all times. It is to be what governs our lives; the book that we live by before anything else. It is the supreme authority that governs all authorities, and we are to obey and submit to its teachings above everything else. There can be no competitors. Our allegiance to God is to be above all principalities and powers, and this is to permeate every fabric of our lives and time.
What all of this means is that we use the Bible as a filter to test every area of our lives. As we learn the Bible, we can better apply its principles to the rest of our life, and we can pray better for our whole life to be conformed to godliness. So, if we are to use the Bible properly, then we will search the Scriptures. Every time we approach a passage, we ought to do two things: (1) we ought to learn what the passage teaches us about God, and (2) how we are then to respond to Him. You may think that you know very little about the Bible. However, through regular reading and study, your knowledge will steadily increase. It compounds through regular use, and quite quickly becomes invaluable for our prayer life and redeeming the time. Likewise, for those who think that they know a lot about the Bible, they need to know that the Bible isn’t as a textbook that just needs to be memorized, but is a living book. This means that we will never reach the end of what God can teach us from its pages—and this to our hearts, to transform us. Like with prayer, we must set aside time explicitly for the purpose of reading and studying the Bible (meditating, or chewing on, and digesting the Word). As with prayer, we ought to jealously guard this time, recognizing that God’s priorities take precedence over everything else, and, in fact, set the course for every area of our lives. The only way to have a well-ordered life (redeeming the time) is for us to regularly and actively be in God’s Word. This also means guarding our hearts from intrusive thoughts, so that we can dedicate this time to learning and receiving instruction from God’s Word. From this, we can learn if that-movie-we-want-to-watch is something that honours God or not; how we can distinctly be salt and light to our co-workers; or if otherwise good hobbies or habits are becoming inordinate (taking the place of God, as first place). (Note: that I will get into more detail on this in a future devotional in this series). The point is that the Bible has proper jurisdiction over every area and facet of life. We do not merely assess what we are doing externally, but also where our heart is in doing such things. As the Bible teaches, every good and evil thing flows first from the heart, and then determines our every action (Luke 6:45). So, we not only look to remove anything that is overtly and apparently evil, but we also assess even what can appear as good, such as playing soccer, or reading a novel. Even good things can be used for evil if they replace the things of God, or if our hearts are inordinately drawn to them.
Before concluding, it is important to know that we ought never to learn the Bible in a vacuum. We must be part of a faithful church that regularly and faithfully teaches from God’s Word. We must be regularly fed by faithful believers who are more mature than we are. We must also be open to faithful believers speaking into our lives with Scripture. We cannot be as an island. The Holy Spirit was also working through church history in the lives of countless thousands of Christians, so we have a great heritage of faithful Christian teaching. Yet, even this is all subject to God’s Word. We ought to only accept a teaching if we can clearly see that it comes from God’s Word. By taking regular part in the church and submitting to the faithful teaching of its elders, we can grow and be discipled to obey every commandment, as taught in the Great Commission. So, we both search the Scriptures to understand and apply it for ourselves, and we are to be students of God’s Word being taught through mature believers. God give us the grace for this.
Next time, we will be looking at another biblical mandate: family worship.