Sometimes we can look at God’s Word – the Bible and think of it as a book of rules.  But it turns out that this notion that God is all about the letter of the law is way, way off the mark.    

The law’s a funny thing … some people say the law’s an ass, it’s something that we both love and we hate. On the one hand, when we see a serious crime committed like a child killed by a drunk driver or a murder or a rape or terrorism, we want the perpetrator to experience the full force of the law.

On the other, sometimes the law does indeed seem to be an ass. When people apply the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law, we can end up with silly, sometimes damaging outcomes.

In a sense that’s how we think about God. If God was God, holy and righteous (whatever that meant,) then I knew that I fell short of that. And therefore, God must be a bunch of rules that I’d fallen foul of. But my hunch is that, I don’t know. If we understand God that way well maybe we’re missing the point.

I wonder if you recognise any of these:

I’m your Lord, your God and you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol or bow down and worship an idol. You shall not use the Lord’s name in vain. You shall keep the Sabbath day of rest. You shall honour your father and your mother. You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bare false witness against your neighbour. You shall not covert your neighbour’s wife. (Exodus 20: 1-17)

Well of course, we recognise those as probably the Ten Commandments – Gods law in a nutshell – the things that Moses brought down from the mountain on the tablets of stone. But actually, you may or may not know that in the Book of the Law (as the Jews understand the Law), which is the Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known as the Torah, there a 613 commandments and prohibitions. So the Ten Commandments are just like the top ten. Then there’s another 603 commandments and prohibitions on top of that … do this, don’t do that, don’t do this, do that.

Some of them make a lot of sense – don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, and don’t lie. There’s a whole bunch of other ones that we look at now and they’d make our stomachs turn like animal sacrifices and all that sort of stuff, things that don’t make a whole lot of sense to us, (here and now, today). I mean, could you imagine going to Church and taking some animal and slitting its throat? Probably they’d come and lock us up for doing that these days.

So some of God’s Laws come naturally. They make sense and others don’t. Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t bare false witness – they make sense but the temptation’s always there. Just run your eyes down those ten and most people have broken at least one of those in just the last 24 hours let alone the other 603.

In one sense, the law does make sense. Imagine what our society’s would be like without the will of law. Look at what happened in Bosnia, look at what happened in Rwanda, look at what’s happening in Israel and Lebanon. Without law there’s anarchy and innocent people get hurt and there’s pain and there’s oppression.

So the law does make sense but you can take it to extreme. Totalitarian law is ugly and oppressive. People’s freedom is taken away. So the law is a great servant but a terrible master. But (and here’s the but), it’s easy to think of God’s Law as being like a totalitarian regime. If God’s God, He is the ultimate totalitarian because He’s all-powerful, so who wants to have a part of that? Who wants to have some rule-based God that’s got all the power? No, thank you very much.

Well, in fact, there was a bunch of people called the Pharisees. They were a bunch of religious leaders in the 1st century who lived at the same time Jesus did and the word Pharisee comes from the Hebrew word ‘to separate’. They were religious separatists and they took following God’s Law, those 613 commandments and prohibitions, to the most absurd and extreme lengths.

What do you think God would say about that? Is God a rule-based god? Is God a god that says, “Yes, there’s someone following my law, I’m excited about that.”

This is what Jesus said to these Pharisees. He said:

Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites because you tithe mint and dill and cumin but you neglect the weightier matters of the Law. Justice, mercy, faith, it’s these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others, you blind guides, you strain out a gnat and you swallow a camel. (Matthew 23:23)

What’s this tithing of mint and dill and cumin all about? Well, these days we go to the supermarket and we buy a bunch of mint or we buy some dill or we buy a jar of cumin and we think so what? Back then, mint, dill and cumin were pretty high priced herbs and spices. There weren’t take-aways on the local corner. So herbs and spices were important and tithing was part of Gods Law.

Tithing was giving a tenth of your income to the priests to keep that whole priestly system in the temple and the synagogue and everything running and so everybody had to tithe. But Jesus is saying to these people:

You hypocrites, you do the tithing, you do the external things but in your heart what about justice? In your heart, what about mercy? In your heart, what about faith? It’s like straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel, you hypocrites. (Matthew 23:23)

It seems to me that Jesus was much more interested in goodness, in relationship, in justice and mercy and faith. He didn’t want to throw tithing out but to Him it wasn’t the main game. To Him there was something much more important – what’s going on in our hearts. Sure do the right thing and tithe and all that sort of stuff but there are some things that you should never, never neglect.

Why are we talking about this stuff today? Because this week, we’re starting a new series called Spirit and Word.

Some people pick up the Bible and discover the letter of the law. They think that’s what God is all about, and you can read the Bible that way. You can pick it up and read the 613 commandments and prohibitions and if we did that we’d be missing the point.

On the other hand some people never pick up the Bible. ‘Man, I’m walking in the Spirit, you know’. They believe they’re getting inspiration direct from God and they’re missing the point completely too.

Paul writes to his junior minister, Timothy and he says:

Every last bit of the Bible is inspired by God and it’s there for our instruction and for our correction and for us to grow and to learn and to understand. (2 Timothy 3:16)

That’s why the Bible is called God’s Word, it’s God speaking to us.

Maybe some people think, ‘Oh no, that wacky fundamentalist sort of Christian thing, the Bible! Give me a break’. Part of me agrees with that because if we try and understand the Bible as just a bunch of rules, what we discover is that some apply to us today, like murder and adultery and stuff. But others, like the Levitical sacrificial system, no pork, no crustaceans, a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t.

And we try and apply those rules and say, “God is a bunch of rules and if I work hard and I follow those rules, I’ll make it into Heaven.” Try and do that and it just doesn’t make sense. It’s where you get that Bible bashing, fundamentalist, oppressive, totalitarian religious thing from.

But in that book, the heart of God is there. There’s the Spirit of the Law, the gentle, powerful, breath of fresh air. That’s what we’re going to look at for the rest of the week on the program – His grace, His mercy, His love, His forgiveness, God’s Spirit and God’s Word.

No matter how much we want to believe that God is a God of grace, we all at some point end up living life as though He’s a God of rules……the law of His Spirit and life can seem a long way off.    

When you think about it, God’s gone to amazing lengths to preserve His love letter to us down through the centuries.  You know, the Bible.  Yeah – that’s it – His love letter.      

Sadly, these days we tend to send and receive very few letters. I mean personal letters, letters of friendship, and letters of love. There’s something about receiving a personal letter in the mail. It’s so much better than email, it has a stamp and a post-mark and you have to open it and then you sit down with a cup of tea and you read it.

That friend who wrote it, you can see their handwriting, it’s so personal, it’s so wonderful! So much better than all the emails that flood in my in-tray.

I wonder if you can ever remember receiving love letters. Well, what if we received a love letter that was thousands of years old, written by God himself and preserved down through the ages just for you, just for me, what if?

That’s what the Bible is; it’s a love letter from God (sixty-six different books). Some of them stories, some of them songs and poems, some of them letters written to different groups of people at different times. Each one of them, written by someone that God handpicked – someone in whom He breathed His Spirit, someone to whom God spoke and was just the right person at the right time – this someone who listened to God and wrote one of the books, one of the sixty-six.

Paul, the Apostle, wrote letters to Churches while he was in a dungeon on death row. Matthew and Mark and Luke and John wrote the four Gospels to different groups of people to tell them about Jesus. And God preserved them all over thousands of years from the first to the last with an incredible degree of historical accuracy. Before the printing press they were copied out by hand, by people called scribes. You know how thick a Bible is; it’s a pretty big book. And you can imagine hundreds and thousands of scribes copying the Bible over and over and over again.

It wasn’t until the 30th of September 1452 that Johan Gutenberg’s printing press published the first book on mass and that book was the Bible.

Now, these days, when we look at all those different copies and translations and manuscripts there are almost no discrepancies in the hand copies and any that there are there are really minor and not very important.

The Bible is this vast, amazing, confusing book, and story that begins right at the beginning with God creating the heavens and the earth. And tracks through the story of Israel in Egypt and their departure through the Red Sea and their forty years in the desert, into the promised land and all the turmoil and war, the exile and the return.

And there are stories of people, Moses and David and Ruth and Esther and Paul and Timothy. And it’s an account of God’s Son, Jesus. And of the fledgling Church and the Book of Acts, the letters of Paul and Peter and John and others. This amazing array of God’s stories spread over thousands of years, preserved for thousands of years more, now here, in your hand, in my hand to read.

God’s amazing love letter! Not a text-book, not a theological text, not a book of dry rules, not a book of dot points – but of stories and poems and people in pain and agony and fear, crying out to God. And people praising God and worshipping God, seeing God’s hand in delivering them and protecting them. God’s a heartbeat through it all, loving them. God’s word’s there for you and me, God’s story there for you and me. God crying out through it all, ‘I love you, I love you so much.’ God’s promises, God’s power, God’s mercy, God’s wisdom all laid out in this vast story. This huge canvas which is a story of God touching people.

It’s the story of God revealing Himself. It’s history; His story and not in a dry text, not just in words but through His Spirit. Every part of the Bible was inspired by God’s Spirit. If we open that book and just read the words, we miss the point. But if we approach this love letter in prayer, in the Spirit of God and say, “God open it up to me. God, as I open it up speak to me today.” The most awesome amazing spiritual reality happens as God pours His love and His spirit out through those pages into our hearts and our lives.

People who stare at the Bible as some fundamentalist doctorial statement like Karl Marx’s communist manifesto or Hitler’s Mein Kampf, you miss the point or people who call themselves Christians who have a Bible or two or three or four that they never open, just collects dust. It’s too hard to read or hard to understand, we miss the point. God’s written a love letter. God’s taken men and women and told their story and had them write it down and preserved it and put it in our hands to tell us about His love for us, “I love you.”

God is speaking to someone today; I believe that God today is crying out to you, reaching out from His heart into your heart saying, “I love you, read my love letter.”

Can I ask you a question? Do you want to know that love, deep in your spirit every minute of every day? Do you want to live through the turbulent and difficult and uncertain days knowing the promises of God in your spirit? Do want to have so much of that love in you that you can’t contain it? That His love and His spirit just overflows from you into the lives of others? Are you so hungry for God that you ache? Are you so thirsty and parched and dry that you just have to drink?

Then pick up His love letter for yourself, pray, “Lord, where do you want me to begin?” Follow His lead, follow His spirit. “Lord, now show me, now speak to me, now feed me because I need you.” And He will show up and in those words of His love letter, you and I will experience and know and hear Him through His spirit.

Father, I pray for each one of us today, pour your Spirit into us, give us a passion to open that love letter. And as we do, as we read the words, lift them up off the page and speak them into our hearts. Bring life, bring refreshing, bring peace, bring joy in Jesus Christ’s name, we ask. Amen.

Once people get over the fact that the Bible isn’t a bunch of do’s and don’ts, the biggest thing that stops them from reading it is that it doesn’t makes sense.

You know … once people get over the fact that the Bible isn’t just a bunch of do’s and don’ts, the biggest thing that stops them from reading it is that it doesn’t make sense.

One of the things that I’m really passionate about is, I guess, just being here with you today and knowing that through our time we’ve spent together (somehow), God’s used that time to draw you closer to Him.

Life’s too short to live it without a passionate and a dynamic and a real and a beautiful relationship with Jesus. Some people may scoff at that. But deep down – right deep down in our spirit – we all hunger for God to touch us, for God to fill us, to give us His peace and His joy and His abundant life. And what’s so sad for me is to see people living their lives as though all of God’s blessing, as though God Himself is somehow a million miles away. When all along, He’s closer, closer than even their deepest secrets of their hearts.

This week on the program, we’re looking at intimacy with God through His spirit and through His word. People make a mistake and say, “God is all about a bunch of rules and it’s all about a bunch of doctrine and logic and so I’ve got to get all this head knowledge to know God.” And hey, knowing God’s word is fabulous. I make a living out of doing that. I try and let God use me to bless you by doing that. But there’s more … there’s God’s Holy Spirit.

If I just pick up His Bible and read it as a bunch of words and a bunch of rules and don’t let God’s Spirit work in me and lift the words off the page and put them into my heart, what I end up with is some sort of legalistic – religiously thing.

Here, you and I are in the world that God created. Jesus in the flesh has been here and gone, He’s promised to come back.

But in the mean time God has actually left two things of Himself behind. Now sure, the world and the universe and all that’s in it are God’s but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the two things of God Himself that He’s left here for us, here and now. What are they?

The first is His Spirit, the promise of Jesus to His disciples and to you and to me (here and now) is to pour His Spirit out on us, to come and dwell in us. Through His Spirit God has left behind God Himself, the Spirit of God.

And the second thing that God has left behind of Himself is His word, the Bible. Now many people cringe at that. But His word is His love letter to us, His story, His promises, His wisdom, His grace.

And it’s so sad to see people want more of God, to hunger for Him, to thirst for Him and they have a Bible on a shelf or in a cupboard somewhere and it’s gathering dust. I often meet people like that and they see my enthusiasm for God, or they hear it in my voice and they say, “I wish I had that.” No! I’m nothing special. In my own way, I’m just like you. Where do you get that real relationship with God that just bubbles over? And so I say to them, “When was the last time you read your Bible?” Hush … silence.

The Bible (in my neck of the woods) is looked at with mistrust and negative connotations, fundamentalism, conservatism. There are more ‘isms’ poked at the Bible that we could poke a stick at. And so I say to people, “If God wrote you a love letter, wouldn’t you want to read it?” Well, He did and it’s called the Bible. “Yeah well, I don’t understand the Bible. The Bible’s hard to read. It’s all over the place, who’s Ephraim, what was Babylon all about? And who was Paul? And why did Jesus tell a story about a Samaritan? None of it makes sense to me so I just gave up. It was too hard.”

I understand that … so I’m going to share just four practical tips with you that anyone can implement and do in their lives to read God’s love letter.

And the first one is – to pray in the Spirit. The Bible says of itself that the Holy Spirit inspired every word that it contains. If the Holy Spirit inspired and wrote the thing through men and women, then the Holy Spirit can open it up and speak it into your heart and into my heart. And I tell you the truth, I never open that book without first asking Him, the Holy Spirit, to open it up for me.

Dear Holy Spirit, I’m about to read your word, and I need you to open it up. And I need you to lift the words off the page. And I need you to feed them into my spirit because if they’re just words, they’re useless. But these are God’s words and God I need you to feed me with your word.

That’s the first thing, to pray in the spirit to ask God himself to open the book for you.

The second one is nowhere near as spiritual – get a Bible dictionary. What’s that? You can get a Bible dictionary that’s thin and small paperback. You can get one that’s 27 volumes. I’ve got one that’s 27 volumes but I’ve also got one that’s one volume and it’s called, “The Holman Bible Dictionary“. And I just had a look online and it’s under $50.00 or less than a pair of shoes. And it has pictures and diagrams and maps so when you come to read about Ephraim you can read two paragraphs and you know who or what Ephraim is. And when you come to read about Samaria or the Temple or David or Ruth, you can go a look those people up or those places up and just in a short time, all of a sudden we know what it’s talking about.

A Bible dictionary is a wonderful tool. As I said I use the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary. It’s under fifty bucks and there are stacks of them online. You can go to www.biblegateway.com. It has a whole bunch of Bible dictionaries online to help explain things and issues and concepts that we may not understand because the Bible was written in different times and different cultures. Pray in the spirit, get a Bible dictionary.

The third one, – get a Bible translation that makes sense to you. People sometimes ask me, “What’s the best translation? Which one should I have?” The one that you’ll read is my answer. I have several. I love the New International Version. I love the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version). I love the Contemporary English Version. I love The Message By Eugene Petersen, I love that, it’s really contemporary.

So I have a few, I rely on the NRSV as my favourite translation but hey, that’s me. It may not work for you. You may prefer an NIV. And one of the things that we can do is get a study Bible. A study Bible has an explanation about each book and what the context was that it was written in … about the author, it explains situations and has word references and maps and cross-references. They’re really helpful. Get a Bible translation that makes sense to you.

And the fourth one is – get serious, do this every day. Just twenty minutes, some prayer time, reading God’s word, listening to Him, praying again. Read it through book by book.

We have on our website www.christianityworks.com some ‘read me’ plans. You can read from beginning to end. You can read in chronological sequence, you can read the Old Testament, the New Testament in parallel. Go to our website www.christianityworks.com and have a look at the Bible ‘read me’ plans.

Come on – get serious! This is God wanting to talk to you.

Let me ask you a question, are you hungry for God? Are you thirsty for God? Do you want to be filled with His Spirit? Well, get serious! Open His love letter and enjoy.

It’s amazing how thoroughly we can manage to delude ourselves about our own failings and weaknesses.  But God is a skilful surgeon capable of performing radical surgery.   

This week on the program, we’ve been looking at intimacy with God through His Spirit and His Word. And when you think about it, those are the two things of Himself that He has left here on this planet for you and me. His Spirit – God Himself, with a promise that if we believe in Jesus, He will make His home in us, dwell in us when we put our faith in Him. And His word – the Bible.

I so often see people cringe when I mention that book. But as we’ve been exploring this week, this is the most amazing and awesome love letter God’s left here for you and for me. Through His Spirit (we open that book), He speaks to us in the most direct and intimate and extraordinary way. And sometimes when we open that book and read it through His Spirit, it’s like holding up a mirror to who we are. And I don’t know about you but sometimes I don’t actually like what I see in that mirror.

Let’s not kid ourselves. When things aren’t going well, when we’re under pressure, we blame everyone else. He did this; she said that; if he hadn’t done this, I wouldn’t have blown up in his face, you know the sort of stuff. It’s amazing how much more quickly we’ll forgive ourselves than we forgive other people. We are so quick to rationalise our own failures and yet to blame others for theirs and even ours. And the longer we delude ourselves about the things that we’re doing wrong or our bad character traits or our bad habits or our anger or our fear or our insecurities, the more they’re going to ruin not only our lives but also the lives of people around us.

There’s a great passage in Hebrews in the New Testament. The book of Hebrews chapter 4, verses 12 and 13, says this:

The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides the soul from the spirit, the joints from the marrow. It’s able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the heart and before God no creature is hidden but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.

Boy, that’s bad news isn’t it? Who wants to read God’s word? Sharper than any two-edged sword, it pierces, it divides the spirit from the soul, the joints from the marrow, it judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart. No, thanks. I’ll give that a miss, I think. I’ll pass.

But it’s only bad news if we want to hang on to the bad stuff. If you or I want to hang on to our dishonesty, our critical spirit, our nasty attitudes or whatever, then this bit about God’s word is bad news.

But if we want to be set free from this stuff, it’s fantastic news. In other words, we read God’s word and it’s like a mirror, it judges the intentions of the heart. It lays everything bare, it lays everything open.

We can see in there where our intentions are wrong – where the way we think is wrong or hurting us or hurting other people and it happens to me all the time. When we let God do that, when we go to God’s word and open it up and say, “Dear Holy Spirit, you wrote this thing. Will you now open it up for me, will you now hold it up, will you pour into my heart, will you show me who I am through your word”? When we let God hold His mirror up to our faces it changes us.

Let me give you an example …there’s a story about a woman caught in adultery. And the religious leaders whip up the crowd and they drag her out in front of Jesus for a good old-fashioned stoning. And it wasn’t because of what she did; they were trying to trick Him. Jewish religious law prescribed that a person caught in adultery should be stoned to death. But Roman law, (remember at this point in the first century Rome had occupied the land of Israel), Roman law said, they weren’t allowed to do that anymore. So whichever way Jesus answered, He’d lose.

So Jesus pauses and squats down and doodles in the sand. Then He looks everyone in the eye, one by one, and He says:

 Whichever of you has never sinned, you pick up the first stone, you cast the first stone. (John 8:7)

And one by one they all drift away. They all go embarrassed because they know that none of them can say that they have never sinned. And He’s left alone with her and He says:

“Woman, is there no-one left to condemn you?” And she says, “No-one sir.’ And He says, ‘Then neither do I condemn you. Go, go and sin no more.” (John 8:10-11)

That is brilliant isn’t it? But I remember reading that and it was as though God’s spirit was holding a mirror up to my face. God’s spirit spoke to me and said, “You know Berni, the way you think, the way you act, you would have been one of the people in that crowd.” And it was true … I was so judgemental, I was so critical, I was so ready to jump down peoples’ throats and tell them what they were doing wrong.

And here I was reading God’s word and through this beautiful story of Jesus’ wisdom and the way He protected this woman and yet He dealt with her sin. The spirit of God said to me, “Berni, there’s something I want to change in you.” My favourite saying used to be, “It’s so hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkeys.” And the Holy Spirit took that and said, “Now I’m going to do something in you”. And He really challenged me. God used that story. And He’s still using that scripture in my heart and in my life today, and He’s done a radical work.

I used to be so judgemental, and now other people’s weaknesses and failures (by and large), I just let them go. And the more I’ve been able to do that (not in my own strength but because I opened the Bible and read the story and the Spirit of God did this work in me), you know what’s happened? He set me free … from me!

God is good. God through His word and His Spirit give us the power to change. That’s what God’s word does and that’s what God does through it, through His Holy Spirit.

He lifts the words off the page. He breathes them into our hearts and into our souls and into our spirits. He makes things happen inside us. He changes us in a way that we could never even begin to contemplate. It’s not just about believing in Jesus, but about letting Him change us. Jesus said, “I have come to set the captives free.”

That’s you and me He’s talking about day by day. For me, that wouldn’t have happened thus far. And it wouldn’t still be happening if I wasn’t spending time in His Word, letting His Spirit breath His life into me.

Awesome stuff – God’s plan! God’s Word is sharper than any two-edged sword. And He is the skilful surgeon who cuts out just as much as He needs to – through His word and His spirit – and leaves us healthy and whole and free.

Pretty good plan, huh? God’s Word … God’s Spirit … God’s way.