The Bible. I know, I know – for many people, well “the Bible” has all sorts of connotations.  But what if – well, what if it really is a love letter.  What if God wants to use it to draw us close to Him.  Well??

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

We have all seen those movies that start with, you know, a message in a bottle. It comes bobbing across the ocean from some place on the other side of the world and it’s washed up on a beach somewhere and someone comes along and finds the bottle. And we are all sitting there on the edge of our seats wondering ‘Ok, what does the message say?’ And they play the music and the suspense grows ‘Come on, hurry up, open the bottle and tell us what it says.’

Now let me ask you something – if you were that person; the person who found the bottle, what would you do? Here are your choices: (a) you ignore the bottle ‘Ok there’s a message in the bottle – who cares?’, (b) you pick it up, you throw it back in the ocean – ‘Let someone else read the stupid message, (c) you take it home and you forget about it ‘Yea, I’ll get around to it one day’, or (d) you open the bottle and read the message ‘I wonder what it says?’ As Bart Simpson would say ‘Duh!’.

Obviously we would pounce on that bottle and open it. Who knows how long it’s been in the ocean or where it’s come from or who wrote the message or what it says. I mean how awesome – a message in a bottle! And what if you opened the bottle and discovered that it was a love letter; a love letter written in one sense, to anyone but in another sense, a love letter written specifically to you?

Now that would be amazing wouldn’t it? As long as people have had ink and paper, there have been love letters. I mean, love letters or cards or flowers, they are a really special way to say ‘I love you’. They say ‘I love you’ in a way that nothing else does. And anybody who has been through a courtship will probably have the odd love letter tucked away somewhere.

There’s one letter though; one love letter that’s more special than any other. It begins like this:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness He called ‘night’ and there was evening and there was morning on the first day. (That comes from Genesis chapter 1, verses 1 to 5)

It’s a love letter that begins with an account of where you and I came from. And as you read on, page after page, you are struck by the overwhelming intensity of the love of God that just overflows from every page into your heart.

Then a bit further on, somewhere in the middle, it says something like this:

God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but will have eternal life. For God didn’t send His Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through Him. (John chapter 3, verse 16 and 17)

And right towards the end, this is the note on which this love letter finishes:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and there was no longer any sea. I saw a Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men and He will live with them and they will be his people and God himself with be with them and be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away.” (That comes from Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 to 3)

This is one awesome love letter and of course, you will probably recognise that they are little chunks out of a huge love letter that these days we call ‘The Bible’. ‘Oh no, not the Bible!’ Now I remember not that many years ago when people would say ‘the Bible’ and I would think ‘Oh no, not the Bible! I mean these old fashioned, fundamentalist, irrelevant Bible bashing – how can they ever begin to believe in that stuff? And imagine reading a stuffy old book like that? I mean – really!’

But when I read those little bits and a whole bunch more of the Bible, what I discovered was that it wasn’t a fundamentalist, religious treatise at all. Fundamentalism – some dogmatic expression of religion – was never God’s idea. It’s something that human beings have taken and twisted God’s love and truth into.

Now when you read the Bible, what you discover is the most awesome love letter; the most amazing plan that God has for your life and for my life, here and now and for eternity. It’s a huge story of God’s engagement of humanity and in it He reveals His love and His grace – a love and a grace that unfolds through the stories of ordinary, fallible people; people like you and me. A story of love and grace that we thought we understood and then all of a sudden we meet the person of Jesus Christ and realize that we understood nothing at all.

Now I definitely had negative images of the Bible – absolutely! I just couldn’t understand how anybody could begin to believe that stuff. Now, you might say ‘Berni, that’s heresy, I believe every word.’ Well, good for you, but there are lots of people who say they believe every word who have one of those thick books at home, somewhere on a shelf or in a cupboard, collecting dust.

Let me get right to the point here. Some people will say ‘Well, God seems to be a million miles away.’ But do you know what I find when I talk to people like that? These are the very same people who have their love letter from God sitting somewhere on a shelf or in a cupboard, collecting dust. And my answer is ‘He’s not, you have just put Him on the shelf.’

I want to shake you out of this attitude that ‘The Bible’ is some kind of, I don’t know, optional extra in our walk with God. The Bible is alive; it is God’s living Word. And when we read it, we need to open it up and say ‘Father, you know, I believe that this is You talking to me today. I believe this is Your will for my life. I believe that Your Holy Spirit wants to shine Your love and Your light and Your grace and Your wisdom into my heart today, through the words on this page.’

It’s alive! It is the living word of the living God – it’s that message in a bottle and it’s His chosen way of speaking with us. Not through some dry theological textbook – no not that at all. But through real life stories that engage our hearts and captivate us with His awesome love.

WHAT AN AMAZING BOOK 

The Bible is an amazing book! You know, it was written over a fifteen hundred year period, starting around 1350BC and finishing towards the end of the first century AD. It was written originally in three different languages. Most of the Old Testament in Hebrew, most of the New Testament in Greek and a little bit in Aramaic, which was the language that Jesus spoke, smattered through both the Old and the New.

It has many different authors from many different cultures in different time periods and different backgrounds, with different things going on when these sixty-six different books of the Bible were written. It has been translated into hundreds of languages and it has been copied by hand because before Gutenberg’s printing press in the mid-1400s, there was no way of printing or replicating it. The only way to create copies of the Bible back then, was for people called ‘scribes’ to write the whole thing out by hand – over and over and over again. Can you believe that?

And the scholars and the historians and the textural critics will agree that there are very, very few transcription errors in this Book. That’s because a whole bunch of experts have pieced together the historical trails of hand written manuscripts of the original texts – and there are literally thousands of those – compared them, picked up any minor errors that crept in, in the copying process and corrected them.

There are a handful of uncertain words – just a handful – in some non-critical passages, but by and large, this thing we call ‘The Bible’ that we read today contains precisely the words that were written back then. God’s gone to a lot of trouble to preserve this God-inspired Book, His love letter to us. In fact, in historical terms it is the most accurate and well attested to, historical document that we have from antiquity, by a country mile.

It’s the story of God – it’s the story of who God is and what His plan is and who we are in Jesus Christ and how we can respond to His great love. It’s this vast, amazing, profound love letter, personally guided down through the waves and the oceans of time over the past three and a half thousand years. And like a message in a bottle; like a love letter, it’s now placed into our hands – it’s placed into your hands and my hands.

Now I know that there are going to be some people who are listening today who get to this point and think, ‘You know something, the last few programmes on How to Get Close to God, no problem, I love what he is saying there about drawing close to God but this bit – this thing about reading the Bible – naaah, I’m going to give that a miss.’ In other words, ‘I want to be close to God and I want everything, except the Bible. I mean it’s hard to read and it doesn’t make sense and no, no I just can’t come at that bit.’

And just quietly, just between you and me, that’s where I started out. Even when I was at Bible College, studying a degree in this stuff, there was still a little bit of that swilling around inside me. And it took a man of God; a man whom I admire so much, Doctor Barry Chant, the principle of the college, to deal with that in me.

Here’s the story. I was a busy businessman and I attended Bible College part time. One of the subjects which I had to complete was essentially a subject done on how to preach. And we would sit around each week listening to each other preach in the class. ‘Such a waste of time’ I thought. I was a good communicator; I had travelled around the world speaking at large conferences in my business career.

So after a few weeks, I said to Barry, ‘Look, give me a credit for this subject. I want to be excused from this thing, it’s wasting my time, I’m busy.’ And on the surface it was an entirely reasonable request but something in this wise old man of God, who had been walking with the Lord for over half a century, caused him to shake his head. He said ‘No!’ He said ‘No, I still want to hear you preach a couple of times more.’ I was infuriated with him but the next time I preached his critique went something like this: he said, ‘Berni, you are a great communicator – you know something though, when you preach, you stray too far away from God’s Word. You tell us what you think instead of what God is saying. You need to bring people back to the Bible; back to God’s Word because it is God’s Word that transforms people’s lives, not your wisdom.’

That hurt – my pride smarted at the criticism! But you know something? He was spot on! And after that he let me go and since that time millions of people have benefitted from his wisdom because it was a lesson that has stuck with me ever since.

Have a listen to what Peter the Apostle says – he says:

If you have been born again you have been born again not from perishable seed but of imperishable seed through the living and enduring Word of God. For all men are like grass and all their glory is like the flowers of the field – the grass withers, the flowers fall but the Word of the Lord stands forever and this is the Word that was preached to you. (You can read that in the New Testament – First Peter chapter 1, verses 23 to 25)

The things that happen to us here on earth, they come and go – they are temporary but God’s Word stands forever. God’s Word is God speaking to us of His love and God and His Word are inseparable. How do we imagine we can ever be close to Him without listening to Him? We men would love to think that we can be close to our wives without listening to them. I once saw a cartoon – it was a drawing of a man’s ear, it had a hearing aid inside and there were two settings on the hearing aid – on and wife. But as any wife will tell you, there can be no intimacy without deep communication and that involves listening.

God’s principle means of speaking to you and speaking to me is through His Word the Bible, which stands forever. Leave that in the cupboard and we can forget about drawing close to God. Everything but is not close enough because God’s Word is not some transient thing like our feelings or our circumstances – it stands forever – it will never fail. It is the truth whether the world receives it or not.

So often you hear people quote this Scripture – they say ‘The truth will set you free’ and that’s written in John chapter 8, verse 32. But you know that’s only a half of what Jesus said and a half-truth is nothing more than a lie. The devil himself is very good at quoting God’s Word out of context and twisting it into a lie.

Now listen to the whole thing:

You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. (John chapter 8, verse 32) 

In other words, in order for the truth to set you free, you have to know it.

A TRANSFORMED LIFE

My life has been utterly transformed by God and it goes on being transformed. And as I have often shared with people, the biggest thing that God ever set me free from was ‘me’ and that is something He is still doing today. Now I’d love to tell you that He did that because I took to heart what I shared with you in the programmes over the last few weeks. I know that you would love me to nudge you and wink my eye and whisper ‘Don’t worry about this programme – it doesn’t really matter – just stick to the first three and you’ll be right.’

I know that, but if I did that it would only be half a truth and that’s nothing more than a lie. You and I can’t be over here and leave the truth over there in a cupboard or on a shelf somewhere gathering dust and expect it somehow, mysteriously, to set us free. It just don’t work that way. To be completely honest with you, the time I have spent listening to the voice of God through the Word of God, has utterly transformed my life. It’s brought me near as He has written His Word, through His Spirit, on my heart. And what’s more, just like the time in prayer – in fact, as an integral part of those quiet times alone with Jesus, reading and meditating on His Word, is the great joy of my life – not a chore, but a joy and a delight.

It does not overstate the matter to say that unless I had spent time reading His Word over these last years, I simply would not have the intimate relationship with God that I enjoy today. And I fully expect that as the months and years roll on and I continue in this regular habit of reading and meditating on His Word, the intimacy of that relationship will grow ever richer and deeper until one day … one day I stand before Him and see Him in all His glory.

I’ll say it again – God’s gone to an enormous amount of trouble to preserve His love letter for you and me, here and now, today. That’s why ‘Oh, I’m just too busy to read the Bible’ is such a feeble excuse. You see how inappropriate that is? No wonder it feels like God is a million miles away! All the time He just wants to speak His promises into our hearts, to whisper His love into our ears, His grace into our lives and the one principle way that He has chosen to do that is through His love letter, the Bible. How can we be too busy?

God has brought us near through faith in Jesus Christ. He set up His home in us through His Holy Spirit – God is with us in every moment of every day, right through the cut and the thrust of life. He calls us to an intimate relationship with Him and God … God’s written a love letter to us; that love letter is called ‘The Bible’ and He would speak to us each and every day through His Word if only we would listen.

God is here in this place with you and me, right here, and through the cross of Christ He is crying out to you and me, “Come, come and be close.” You know it is so easy to get to the end of this series of programmes and be both excited and discouraged. Excited at the prospect of forging a new and intimate relationship with God; discouraged because, well, it all seems so daunting. ‘I mean this guy yabbering on the radio makes it sound so simple but all these years, God has seemed so far away.’

And it would be daunting if it was all up to us, but it isn’t because far from being some passive player, deep in His mighty heart, God yearns for you and for me. He yearns so deeply; so mightily that we cannot begin to comprehend how much He wants to be close to us. And all it takes is for us to take the first step – a step of faith to believe; a step of spending quiet time alone with Him; a step of immersing ourselves in His love letter to us.

Change is always daunting and no doubt the devil would sit on our shoulders and whisper words of doubt into our minds. He wants nothing less than to divert us from this pursuit of God – to set us off course so that we miss the mark.

But the prize; this intimate closeness with God is without peer. There is nothing like it on earth or in the heavens for that matter. When the Spirit of God fills us to overflowing; when we experience God for ourselves in His Word through His Spirit – oh, it leaves us utterly changed – longing for more.

Let’s not pretend that this is some chore, a chore of learning and dissecting and putting our understanding of God in neat little piles of theology. Don’t get me wrong, I am passionate about studying theology and I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to take a step down that path.

But right now I’m talking simply about drawing close to this infinite God – the God who is so vast and so deep and so wonderful and rich and loving and merciful and mysterious and knowable all at the same time, that His very nature defies any attempt for us to dissect Him into trite little sets of doctrines. I’m not talking about that – my prayer for you is that by faith, with the desire of the Spirit burning in your heart, that you would immerse yourself in God Himself. That this oneness that Jesus talked about so much; this intimacy that He purchased for you and me on the cross, would be something that you desire with every fibre of your being.

And that as the days and the weeks and the months and the years roll by, you would know the great delight of looking back on those times and seeing how God has honoured your desire and your faltering first steps.

You know the wonderful thing about God? He’s not looking for perfection in us today. We look and judge people on the outside but God … God looks on our hearts and as He looks on our hearts today, yours and mine, may He see a spark of desire that He Himself will fan into a raging fire by His Spirit.

May you know your God more deeply than you ever thought was possible, by the grace of Jesus Christ!