Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (47 page)

“No,” the fellow replies. “In fact I just bought a fresh pack of them yesterday.”

“Well, you’d better do something with them,” the manager warns, “or you won’t be long in the employ of this company.”

That’s the situation James is describing. Every time you study the Word of God but are not changed by it, it’s as if you look in a mirror and see that you’re a mess, yet you walk away and do nothing.

There’s an alternative: “But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man shall be blessed in what he does” (v. 25).

All of us want the blessing of God. But are we responding to the revelation of God? Turn with me to the next chapter, and we’ll look at how God’s truth transforms our lives.

I
ended the previous chapter by mentioning James’s analogy of a mirror to illustrate how the Word of God operates in our lives. That’s an intriguing image because mirrors have an unusual effect on human beings. They confront us with reality.

In fact, it is common in literature for writers to use mirrors to look at things in new ways. Remember the Wicked Queen in
Snow White
? Day after day she comes before her magic mirror and asks, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” Deferring to the Queen’s vanity, the mirror always replies, “You are.” But when Snow White comes of age, the mirror declares something new: “Queen, you’re the fairest where you are, but Snow White is more beautiful by far.”

Or consider Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass
(
Alice in Wonder-land
), where a mirror opens the door to a new world. Likewise, Galadriel’s mirror in
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy “shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be.” And in the
Harry Potter
series, the Mirror of Erised is inscribed with the words, “I show not your face but your heart’s desire.” Clearly, mirrors are associated with power.

So it is with the mirror of God’s Word. In fact, the Word is the ultimate mirror, because it’s the mirror with the power to transform. It not only reveals truth, it activates truth when the Holy Spirit uses it in a person’s life. If you ever look into the Word with sincerity of heart and respond to what it shows you, your life will never be the same. Over time, you will be a changed person.

How does that occur? I want to suggest four means by which the Word transforms our lives. No doubt there are more. But these will get you started as you consider how the Bible reveals transformational truth about God and about ourselves.

First, we come to the Word, just as a person comes to a mirror. We come to the Word by means of the first two steps in our Bible study method, Observation and Interpretation. We look at the Word and ask, What does it say? Then we ask, What does it mean? Those two steps are how we look into the Word.

Now it should be obvious that it’s impossible to apply the Word without completing those steps. Application is based on Interpretation, which in turn is based on Observation. So if you have not observed a passage thoroughly, you are unlikely to interpret it correctly. And if your interpretation is erroneous, your application will likely be erroneous. Conversely, if you’ve done a thorough job of observing a passage, your interpretation is more likely to be correct. In that case you have a greater possibility of having an application that is correct.

By the way, when I talk about a correct application, I am not saying that there is only one way to apply a passage of Scripture. Quite the opposite. Indeed, I want you to keep the following statement frontal in your thinking:
Interpretation is one; application is many
. There is only one ultimate interpretation of a passage of Scripture. The text doesn’t mean one thing today and something else tomorrow. Whatever it means, it means forever. But you will never cease the process of applying that truth to your life. Implication: Be careful how you interpret! You will only multiply error if you start with a faulty interpretation.

A friend of mine once offered to fly me to Canada in his company’s jet. I had a tight schedule to meet, and he wanted to take me. So we climbed into the cockpit, and of course before we could take off we had to set up all the instruments, especially our flight plan.

I asked him, “What happens if you’re off a couple of degrees?”

He said, “Remember Korean Airlines 007?” I nodded as I thought back to that chilling incident. In 1983 a jumbo jet flew hundreds of miles off its intended course, violating Soviet airspace. A Soviet fighter intercepted it and shot it out of the sky. “That’s what happens,” my pilot friend said grimly. “A couple of degrees off here can take us miles away from our destination.”

The same is true in Bible study. It’s what I call “the error of the fork.” Suppose you’re coming down the road in biblical interpretation and you come to a thorny interpretational problem. For illustration’s sake, let’s say that there are two possible interpretations: interpretation A and interpretation B. Suppose that A is actually the correct one; but you choose B. Then the farther down the road you go, the more divergent your application becomes from biblical truth.

In short, the better you understand a passage, the better you’ll be able to use it. Or, to return to the image of the mirror, the clearer you are about what the mirror is showing you, the better you’ll be able to respond to what you are seeing. In other words, you get a better shave if you allow the mirror to cast an accurate reflection. But that won’t happen if you come to the Word and distort its message by neglecting to observe it carefully and interpret it accurately.

Having come to the Word and looked inside it, we are then
convicted
by the Word. Or, to use the terms given in 2 Timothy 3:16, we are reproved and corrected by the truth revealed. That is, Scripture reflects back to us a picture of ourselves, and invariably that initial picture is negative. That’s because the Word highlights our sin and what we need to stop doing.

That’s one reason, by the way, why many people will do anything to avoid studying the Bible. They instinctively know that doing so will point out areas where they are out of bounds.

When Bill was in college, he was having dinner one time with a group of friends. In response to a question one of them asked, Bill grabbed his Bible and began reading a portion of Scripture. He had barely started when one of the guys at the table jumped up and rushed from the room. Later, Bill went and found him and asked why he had left.

“Because you started reading the Bible,” he said. “I’m not good enough to listen to that stuff.” The fellow sincerely believed that the Bible is only for “good” people, and he already knew he wasn’t one of those. Bill had the opportunity to explain to him that the Bible is actually written for sinners in need of a Savior.

Open the Bible anywhere and start reading. It won’t take you long to find someone being shown his sin. Is that because God delights in exposing our sinfulness? Not at all. It’s because diagnosing the disease is the first step in curing it. You can’t be transformed until you first understand what needs transformation.

But that spiritual X-ray is never a pretty picture. Earlier I mentioned David, who not only committed adultery, but murder, as well. Can such a man be transformed? Yes, by God’s grace—but not without first breaking
through his facade of self-righteousness. David had to be convicted of his sin before he could be freed from it. What a painful process! Read Psalm 38, where David agonizes over his sin, as if he is close to dying from it. “There is no health in my bones because of my sin,” he declares (v. 3). “I go mourning all day long” (v. 6). “I groan because of the agitation of my heart” (v. 8). “I am full of anxiety because of my sin” (v. 18). He ends the psalm by crying out for God to restore His presence and bring him salvation.

Granted, not all of our sins will provoke that depth of anguish. But it’s not emotion that God is looking for. He wants repentance—a turning of the heart. By shining a light on our sin, Scripture leads us to that repentance.

Thankfully, the Word does more than just show us the negative. It also reveals God’s provision for what is good, which creates positive motivation that
convinces
us to walk in newness of life. Second Timothy 3:16 describes this positive direction as “training in righteousness.” The Bible tells us what we need to start doing, and in what direction we need to start going.

The applicational sections of Paul’s letters are a good illustration of that. For instance, Colossians 3 describes the lifestyle of a person who is “hidden in Christ” (v. 3). The passage offers plenty of conviction in areas such as immorality, impurity, idolatry, and deception. But it climaxes with a positive vision of a transformed life that is very compelling:

Who would not desire to live that way?

Sometimes Scripture convinces us of the truth through example rather than exhortation. For instance, when you open the book of 1 Samuel, you discover
that Israel’s spiritual life at that time was about as fragrant as an open sewer. The nation was at the end of the period of the judges, when everyone was doing whatever seemed right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25).

Why had matters come to such a sorry state? The first three chapters of 1 Samuel give us a clue: there was an utter lack of leadership. At Shiloh, for example, there was an ineffectual priest named Eli. Eli’s appalling weakness as a leader was displayed in the total lack of accountability of his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas. They treated the sacrificial system as if it were their personal expense account, taking from it the finest cuts of meat and other offerings. What’s worse, they were drinking on the job and committing sexual immorality with the female attendants at the tabernacle. Yet when their elderly father came and challenged them on these points, they just blew him off.

Into this moral morass God brings a little boy named Samuel. His birth takes place in a miraculous way. Then God places the child right into the household of Eli the priest, and you sort of wonder,
What was God thinking?
But if you observe and then interpret 1 Samuel, you begin to see the principle of contrast that I’ve mentioned several times. The author is setting up a vivid contrast between the two wicked sons of Eli on the one hand, and the innocent, righteous boy Samuel on the other. The two are marked for death; the one will lead the people into a brighter future that will culminate in God’s choice of David as king.

Perhaps the crux of this contrast comes in 1 Samuel 3, where Samuel is sleeping one night when he hears a voice calling him. Three times he mistakes the voice for Eli’s. But the next time, little Samuel cries out, “Speak, [Lord,] for Thy servant is listening” (v. 10). What a flash of light in a dark tale! At last someone is listening to God, instead of scoffing at Him.

Samuel’s example is very attractive, isn’t it? Just reading the account makes you want to emulate him. Could we use some people like Samuel today? You bet. Our world is not really that different from his, spiritually speaking. We’ve got people making a mockery of the faith for personal gain and opportunity. And we’ve certainly got a generation of people who are just doing right in their own eyes. “Who needs God?” they often seem to be saying.

But just reading about Samuel inspires us to stand apart and actively seek the voice of God: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” If we’re open to
it, Scripture will convince us to pursue new paths by showing us models like Samuel.