Dr. Roger Parrott - Belhaven University Chapel Series

Well, we've been talking about the essentials, because Christianity, if it's false, it doesn't matter if it's true.

It matters everything.

The only thing it can't be is moderately important.

Last week we talked about the amazing nature of grace, the linchpin of our joy and our eternity.

How Christ came, sent by God as God, to be a sacrifice for our sins on the cross so we could be reconciled with a holy Father.

And in that, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

The way he saves us from our sin, he gives us a path for a full life, the life he gives us eternal life, a free gift.

We can't do anything to earn it.

There's nothing we can do to make God love us more.

And there's nothing we can do to make God love us less because of his grace.

And he's the truth.

The truth.

And that's what we want to talk about today.

We've been working through a series on the essentials through the Fall Chapel series, the essential issues of Faith.

And today we come to the question of true or false.

What's true?

You know, truth is kind of in short supply in our world, especially during political season.

If you watch much of what's going on, it just.

Everybody's got their own truth.

Nothing feels solid.

There just feels like there's not any shifting ground everywhere.

Opinions and feelings matter more than facts.

My values matter the most.

My perspective matters the most.

I want to justify what I think is true in order to try to manipulate you.

And we come up, even with people talk about alternative facts, which is kind of amazing.

Truth is a statement of unquestionable facts.

When it comes to Jesus, Jesus says, I am the truth.

That is a fact.

Facts.

Truth is always grounded in real life, hard, unquestionable facts.

That's a piano.

That's a fact.

It's true.

It's a piano.

Because it can't be anything else.

That's what it is.

Jesus said, I'm the truth.

That is a fact.

Jesus is not just teaching about the truth.

He is the truth.

You see, because truth is in his nature.

Just as we talked the first week about how goodness is in his nature and holiness and justice and love, truth is also in the nature of God.

God can't be anything but true.

It is impossible for God to tell a lie because his core, his nature, his character is truth.

The truth is what we want to talk about today.

The truth or my truth?

You know, my truth is Kind of a common language that we hear a lot now, and especially for those whose voices have not been heard and not been valued.

And I understand why they're saying that.

But if you really mean by that truth.

Truth, not just my opinion.

If you mean by that truth, your truth is not as valid as the truth of God because it's not stable.

It's not based in fact.

It's based in your perception, your outlook, your personality of who you are, but not in the fact of truth as God is.

And it's great for us to have our perceptions and our opinions and our hopes and our convictions.

And often people confuse that with truth.

So that is my truth.

What I really mean by that, and shorthand for it, those are my opinions, my perceptions, my hopes, my convictions, and we call it my truth.

Don't get confused.

That is not truth.

Truth according to what source?

Who do you trust for truth?

Do you trust your opinions and your perceptions and your hopes and your convictions?

Or do you trust that God, who created you and loves you more than anybody in the world, is the truth?

We have to understand that God is the truth.

Not just a truth, not just an opinion, not just an option.

He is the truth.

When our viewpoints become substitutes for.

For the truth, our truth is not a fact.

God's truth is because our truth can too easily be manipulated by sin.

And we start to make our truth into what makes us comfortable and justifies what we want to do.

So it may sound really noble.

I'm going to follow my truth.

Wherever my truth leads me, I'm going to follow.

That works really well.

Until your dad says his truth is he's going to run off with somebody 15 years younger and leave your mom and the family because he's following his truth.

It works really well.

Until your greed pushes you for trying to strive for so much money and fame and power that you make it impossible for anybody to love you.

Following your truth sounds really good until your pursuit of happiness crashes and burns.

Because you followed your truth, you wanted to believe instead of the truth that comes from the source of truth, truth.

And you found that all that you thought was your truth was really a lie.

Your truth is not a fact.

My truth is not a fact.

God's truth is a fact.

Just like that is a fact that that piano is sitting there.

That is true.

But sadly, history is littered with broken lives of people settling for the pursuit of their own truth rather than building their life on the truth.

It's always happened and it will always continue to happen.

That's what the psalmist was saying a long time ago when he said, teach me your ways, O Lord, that I may live according to your truth.

Why do you.

You only get one life.

Why do you want to risk that and your purposes and your priorities and your talents and your energy and everything else on your truth?

Why do you want to risk your eternity on your truth, your perceptions, your opinions, your hopes, your convictions, instead of finding God's timeless truth, which is given to us freely, just as grace is given to us freely.

And I tell you, in the culture we live, with all the bombardment and messages around us, we need to be going back to that truth over and over again because the world around us tries to dilute the truth of God.

And in that, we fall further away from him and don't get the fullness of his truth in our lives.

Your truth or my truth apart from God is not trustworthy because the core of our truth alone will always, always, always be selfish.

You know, Eve.

Eve didn't decide if the serpent was more trustworthy than God because of his credentials.

It was because the snake said what she wanted to hear.

That's why she trusted the snake.

Our sinful self will always be drawn to what we want to hear.

But what we wish was true doesn't make it true because truth is grounded in facts that don't change.

God's truth never changes.

How's that possible?

It's grounded in virtues and values and vision.

That's why God's truth never changes.

Virtues of goodness and love and justice and grace and truth and values of kindness and generosity and faithfulness and patience and vision of seeing the world as people who are made in the image of God, who loves God, loves so much that he died for every one of them.

And.

And once we see people that way, we see the world in a whole different way.

Teach me your ways, O Lord, that I may live according to your truth.

That's what we want to do.

So the fundamental decision we've got to make in our life and our faith is do we believe that God has given us a truth that applies to all of us in every circumstance, in every culture, and that truth is based on facts of how he created us?

Or is truth different for everybody, depending on your place and your time and your culture and your personality and your needs?

And our truth is built on our best understanding, but it's clouded by sin.

You see, that's what Hebrews 13 was getting at when they read Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.

God's truth does not Change throughout all time.

The Bible is not a textbook of science or math or physics or art.

It gives us a worldview that ultimately makes all those other things possible.

In other words, the Bible not only teaches us the ultimate truths about people, the world and salvation and the future and a bunch of other subjects that make up our worldview, it also gives us the principles by which we can know what's true and what's not true that are facts designed by God the Creator.

The truth of Scriptures is timeless.

The truth of Scriptures is not bedtime reading.

Don't put it on your shelf and hope somehow through osmosis, you're going to pick it up.

It's not going to help you.

It's a free gift given to you.

The proof of truthfulness is that God is true.

And it applies to ancient people and same as it does to us who enjoy the height of technology, of civilization, because the virtues and the values and the vision are timeless.

So how do we learn the truth?

How do we learn this truth that God has for us?

The Bible is where we learn it.

The life of Christ is how we learn it.

Christ was God sent to live among us, to live out the truth.

He said, I am the truth.

How he lived is a living example of the truth.

God does not hide his truth.

He's made it very clear.

He wrote it down in the book inspired by people who he inspired to write those Scriptures for us.

And he sent His Son to live it out.

God doesn't hide his truth.

But see, the Bible is the word of God.

And so don't get hung up on what you might misunderstand about the Bible.

Yeah, there's some things that are puzzling, but some things you may not figure out all the way.

And that's okay.

It's an old book written a long time ago to specific cultures at specific times, although the truths are timeless.

So you have to work at it to get it to understand.

But you know it was written.

A lot of it was written before the Iliad.

You all read the Iliad in your literature class.

You don't understand every bit of it, but you don't throw the whole thing out because you don't understand, understand every single line.

Or Shakespeare.

You may not understand all that that was written some 400 years ago.

You don't throw it all out just because you don't understand a certain part.

Don't dismiss the Bible because you don't understand some little section you pull out and say, well, if I can't figure out this, I'm not going to do the whole.

No.

How do we know the Bible is true?

Is central to our lives.

And as we look at the big issues of the truth of the Bible, they are very, very, very clear.

God does not hide his truth.

But it does raise this question, how do you know the Bible is true?

How do you know the Bible is true?

Well, we spent a whole chapel on that last spring and some of you weren't with us.

And I'm not going to do the whole thing again, but I'll just give you the summary of that real quick to know how the Bible is true.

And I think there are four things that are.

There are a number of things, but four things.

Things to really look at.

One of the reporting issues of the Bible.

Stories of the Bible, the reporting stories of the Bible.

These were eyewitness accounts.

Look at the life of Jesus.

These were eyewitness accounts of people who were there.

Now, if you were going to make up this thing, you would make sure those all line up.

They'd all be told in exactly the same way and nothing that would ever embarrass you or seem out of place or whatever.

One of the greatest examples is at the critical moment of or all of human history, the resurrection, when Jesus was not in the tomb and they went that morning to find him, what did the Scriptures report?

It was the women who found him and found there was nobody in the tomb and came back to report it.

Now, 2,000 years ago, women had no credibility.

Their testimony meant nothing.

If you were going to make up a story, you sure wouldn't put that in because that just completely wipes out your credibility.

The reporting stories of the Bible prove its truth.

Secondly, the prophecy about Jesus.

How does somebody know, hundreds and hundreds of years before Jesus was born, that the Messiah would come out of Bethlehem?

Anyone even planning to be born in Bethlehem happened to be there because they were going to pay their taxes.

This prophecy over and over and over again validates the proof of the Bible.

You look at archaeology and we're finding more and more in archeology and text authenticity of texts from those early days.

And you can track these things and you can see the places and where things happen, and you can see confirmation of the truth of the Bible.

And most importantly, Jesus taught that the Scriptures were true.

Jesus said it was the word of God.

He knew it, he studied it, spent time in the temple studying the scripture, and he commissioned all the New Testament authors, you know, most of the New Testament authors other than Paul, Jesus knew them personally and Paul knew all the people Jesus knew.

The New Testament is the story of people who were there and people who saw it.

And so when you read it, you have a confirmation of its truth.

And one last thing that's probably pretty important.

There's probably never been a book more studied in the world than the Bible, and nobody's been able to prove it's not true.

So you have to take a little bit of a leap of faith.

Yes, is the Bible true?

But once you understand and accept that the Bible is true, then it becomes God's truth in your hands to lead your life.

A gift that God gives freely, to give his truth, because he doesn't hide his truth and his will.

Excuse me.

Jesus prayed, make them holy by your truth.

Teach them your word, which is truth.

John 17.

Jesus prayed for his disciples.

He knew what was about to happen.

He was going to be taken, go to the Garden of Gethsemane.

He was going to be arrested.

He was going to be be crucified.

Everything was going to change.

And before that, he prayed for his disciples.

And this is what he prayed for them.

Make them holy by your truth.

He prayed that their relationship with God, a holy God, would be strengthened by their truth.

As they understand the truth, they would draw closer to God.

And he said, teach them your word, which is true.

You have to learn it.

You have to put the effort into it.

Again, if you just have a Bible at your bedstand, it's not going to do you any good if you don't spend time with it.

And reading it for five minutes a day is better than nothing.

But that's not going to get you there either.

It takes effort to learn anything.

You're here for four years to learn whatever it is discipline that you're wanting to study, to be an educated person, to go in the marketplace.

If you play on a team, you put a lot of effort into learning your sport.

If you're an artist, you put a lot of effort into learning what it is that you do.

It takes effort.

The truth's available.

So our question is, are we going to decide whether to learn it or decide we know better and we'll just take the parts that kind of come easy, you know, you don't have to give up on your intellect in order to trust the Bible.

What you do have to give up is your pride.

If you think you know a better truth, the Bible's not going to mean much to you.

You've got to give up your pride in order to understand the truth of the Bible.

And here's the key.

We won't know the truth unless we want to be drawn to God.

If you're kind of playing around the edges of it, kind of Christian life is not really important, but it is important.

You're kind of in between.

As our opening slide of CS Lewis always talks about each week.

If you're doing that, you won't be drawn to God.

When you want to be drawn to God, he will open up his truth to you and he will make it very, very clear.

And so it gets lived out in these virtues and values and vision that come out in our lives and become God.

Honoring actions and attitudes and priorities of goodness, patience, love, kindness, mercy, faithfulness, generosity and caring for the least of these answers are in the scripture.

Answers are in the life of Christ.

If you've not read the Bible much, I want to give you an assignment.

Go to the Gospel of John.

Now there's some letters from John first, John two John.

Don't go there yet.

Go to the Gospel of John.

It's the fourth book of the New Testament.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

This is the account of John, who was the closest person to Jesus when he walked this earth.

And read what he says about who Christ is.

So if you haven't read, start there.

If you have read the Bible a lot, I want to instead encourage you to go to the Book of Mark, first book of the New Testament.

Mark was a tax collector and he wrote it down all very carefully.

So he kept a really careful record.

Go to the Gospel of Mark and read for this question what did Jesus do?

A lot of our truth we is based on what we think Jesus would do.

So what would Jesus do?

Became a big deal a number of years ago.

The question is not what do you think Jesus would do?

The question is what did Jesus actually do?

And it will shock you if you read the Book of Mark and go through and write wdjd.

What did Jesus do?

Every time you see something he did, you've got to study it or you can take lazy shortcuts.

And when you do, you make the Bible what it's not supposed to be.

And a lot of people do that.

Don't make the Bible what it's not.

It's not a proof texting tool.

You know, you can prove most anything you want by cut and pasting someplace in the Bible, whatever position you want to take.

You can find some little scrap of a, of a verse some place and a part of a verse and take it out of context and you can make it justify what you want.

Put it on Twitter or Instagram and try to prove your point.

It's easy to manipulate the Bible if you proof text, but it's evil to manipulate the Bible if you proof text because you're throwing that in the face of God.

Ask this question.

When somebody's proof texting, does it fit the consistent themes?

The themes of goodness and love and justice and mercy and forgiveness and truth?

Does it fit those themes?

If it doesn't line up those themes?

Somebody's pulling a verse out of context in order to make their point about what they want.

And the bigger question is, why are you trying to prove texts anyway?

Most people are trying to proof text in order to try to change somebody else's behavior.

It's not your job.

You know, when the Bible was written, it didn't have any verses.

We put those in.

It was just written.

It was a letter.

Most of them were written to a church or to a person or to a country.

They were just written.

We put the verses in later so they'd be easier to find, but the verses weren't there.

So when you're trying to pull out proof texting, you, you're really abusing what the Bible is all about.

Second Timothy.

Timothy says study.

To be the one who can correctly explain the truth, you have to study it.

You're not going to do it just by looking at a verse here and a verse there.

Don't make the Bible what it's not.

Secondly, don't make the Bible what it's not.

It's not a Frequently Asked questions handbook.

That's not a what it's not.

It's.

If you want a bunch of rules, go to Leviticus.

There's a whole bunch of rules there.

But you've got to study hard to put those rules in the context of what was being taught to the people at that time, in that place, in the context of who they are.

You can't just pick out the ones you like and transport them into today's culture.

It doesn't work that way.

You gotta put in the work.

Again, look for big ideas in the Bible to inform specifics.

If you look for big ideas, they will give you the specifics.

The truth is, we need to see the world as Christ sees the world.

People made in his image, people he loved so much he died for, people who matter to him.

And then you want to start asking questions about how to interact with the world around you and public policy.

Those things become much more clearer when you look at the big questions.

If you discover the big questions, you'll have answers to most of the specifics.

Third is don't make the Bible a license to control others.

Be really slow to draw conclusions that apply to others and don't apply to you.

That's called self righteousness or at least pull you into self righteousness.

And Jesus talked more against self righteousness than any other sin.

That was the number one sin.

So be slow to try to use the Bible to control others.

And then don't just give half the picture.

The picture is truth and grace.

The picture is not just truth.

You see John, who I told you was closest to Jesus, when they asked him who Jesus was, he said he came full of grace and truth.

Well, he was a rabbi, so of course he was full of truth.

They expected that to be full of truth.

But he said grace on purpose because grace was as important as truth.

It wasn't 50 50.

It was 100% grace and it was 100% truth.

It's not truth in theology or truth in scholarship or truth in discipleship.

It's truth in.

And if we as Christians would be as serious about grace as we are about truth, then the world might actually listen to our truth.

Because right now they're tuning us out because we're so full of self righteous truth with no grace.

Don't make the Bible what it's not.

Jesus said I am the way, the truth and the life.

No one comes to the Father except by me.

Jesus said he is the truth.

And then he went on to say he promised us we could know the truth.

You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Free.

Freedom from building your life on a lie.

Chasing goals that only disappoint.

Chasing goals that never fulfill because you based your life on a lie.

Or rather than on the truth of God, freedom from self righteousness.

You know, self righteousness is exhausting.

Builds tension in who you are and everything you do.

In every relationship.

When you're a self righteous person, you can be free from that freedom from confusion.

You can see clearly.

You can see the world as Jesus saw the world through his eyes.

And the blinders come off and the confusion goes away.

That's what Jesus promises.

That's what God gave us in his scripture and in the life of Christ.

Truth that is a fact.

Well, next week we're going to talk about how that truth gets lived out in our Christian life every day, in every circumstance.

We're going to talk about character, which is grounded in truth.

If you don't have the truth, you can't have character.

And you're not going to accept the truth if you don't have the grace first.

So we're building this on purpose to look at how character then gets lived in our life.

And with the title no Place to Hide.

Because when it comes to character in our relationship with God, there is no place to hide.

And that's what we're going to talk about next week.

Be thankful for truth, truth that sets you free to be a person of character.

Let's pray together.

Thanks, dear Lord, for your truth, so freely given, so accessible.

Help us to open the book, to put in the effort to study, so we can have the truth that sets us free.

In your name, we ask it.

Amen.

Thanks for listening.