Welcome tonight. This is our first night of equip. I want to take you in Scripture by Good to Ephesians 4th chapter in the 11th verse. It says, So Christ Himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and the teachers to equip His people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure, the fullness of Christ.
This is what equip is all about. You heard Pastor Mark talk about equip on Sunday? Equip is not a program. It's not a new program.
It's a program that is better than that. Equip, we feel, is a culture. And it's a culture that is about doing just this. It's with this understood purpose.
We are called to help all people become mature believers of Christ. John Piper, some of you may be familiar with his name, John Piper, is with theologian and the chancellor of a Christian university. And in author John Piper said this, people need to become Christians and people need to be taught how to think and feel and act as Christians. And that is the purpose of equip.
It's first to see people come to Christ. I mean, that's where we start, right? We have to cross the line of faith as Pastor Mark likes to say. But then we have to learn how to think and how to feel and how to act like Christians because that's not our nature.
That's why Paul in the book of Ephesians says that God gave all these offices to the church for that purpose so that the church couldn't mature into belief in Christ. So we see this happening. Like I said, this is not a program. It's bigger than that.
We see this happening at Calvary and in a variety of ways. We see it happen in Stearmans. We see it happening in things like tonight, in lessons and classes and teaching. We see it happen in men and women's group.
We see it happening eventually in one-on-one mentoring. But tonight, we're going to start someplace, right? And we decided we would start with what we believe. Now, if you go to our website and you go to about on our website, you'll see there's a link that says what we believe in.
It lists 16 truths, 16 things that we believe. And tonight, Pastor Mark is going to start. We figured, you know, if we're going to start somewhere, let's just start with the basics so that everyone has an understanding of what we believe. And that's our starting point to become a true believer.
Pastor Mark's going to start with our first fundamental truth tonight and that is that the Scriptures are inspired. Let's welcome Pastor Mark as he comes, please. Guys, when you put that website up here one more time, one of the things, and you'll find this on the back of your notes. If you take your notes and turn them over to the back, at the very bottom, you'll see a statement that says for questions, this is what you do.
What's going to happen over the next several weeks is we're going to teach on some very fundamental things about the next five weeks. And then we're going to come back at the end of that time and have a Wednesday night where we answer questions. And so as you tonight, as you think about this tonight and over the next few days, if you have a question, if you've run into something dealing with this issue, we want to be able to deal with the practical things that you're facing in life on these issues. And so as you have questions, write them down, all you've got to do is go to the Calvary website, go down to the bottom where it says contact, hit contact, you'll have an email, an ability to put your name in, send us an email, those will come to us and we'll start getting those ready to be able to answer questions and help in a very, very practical way you get a hold of this and know what it's all about.
The start is a new, as Dan has already just said, a new and purposeful way to equip this church family to face the temptations and tests of the day. And you're here on the very first night of this effort. We see this really expanding and I believe the day's going to come when you'll come in here on a Wednesday night, there'll be, as Dan said, multiple classes going on, different things happening even throughout the week. A lot of people just running around getting into places.
But we're beginning with these very foundational truths. We want to be a church of the word. Pentecostals have a reputation of being emotional and many times lied on biblical foundation. In fact dismissing the word of God for being quote unquote spirit led.
Well, the spirit led me to do that. And fundamentally, we want you to understand the spirit doesn't lead us to do anything that's not biblical. I mean, if it's not in the Bible, the spirit's not going to lead you to do it. There has to be a biblical support with that.
So as we begin this over these next five weeks, we're going to hit some very foundational doctrinal truths that if you don't believe these, if you don't have these, we'd really have to question whether we really have a solid biblical grip on salvation and truth itself. When we get down with this, we're going to spend a few weeks talking about the Holy Spirit. And I remind you that Jesus said when He, before He left the earth, it's good that I go because if I go, God's going to send the conference, He's going to send the Holy Spirit. He thought us having the Holy Spirit in our life was important.
We're going to talk about that for several weeks. And then we're going to come around and spend a few weeks talking about in time events and what we believe, scripturally about in time events. Now remember, this is basic stuff that we're doing right here. So today we hope that the person who already believes in this thing that we call the authority of scripture, being the final authority in our life, most of you would probably say, Yep, I get that.
We hope you're growing your faith in that. We hope that you begin to have more and more of an ability to communicate that and why we believe that and that you understand we have nothing to be ashamed of in our Bible. We have something to be very, we can really build our life on and we know there's critics out there, we want to be able to answer the critics with solid truth. And if you're wondering about the Bible, we hope you'll begin to see the fullness of it.
These are teachings again that if a person rejects them, they basically rejected Jesus and so we don't want to reject Jesus, do we? So we're talking about basic doctrines. If you want to go, and again, we can only touch on the surface of a lot of these things. If you want to go deeper in this, this is a great book to get.
It's just called Bible doctrines. It's by Dr. Menzies, one of my teachers in Bible school, Dr. Stanley Horton, one of the great biblical theologians of our day.
And if you want to really dive into this and more depth, you can get this and really read some stuff and go into a lot of detail about why we believe the things that we believe from Scripture. So that's just a side note for anybody who really wants to dive. We hope, here's our hope. Our hope and our prayer is that out in the future, there will be classes for people at all levels of spiritual growth.
And that may mean simply the person who's just gotten saved, all the way to the person who wants to prepare for ministry and really wants to be held accountable for things and really wants to grow in their life. And you know, many will be classes like this and all you've got to do is show up. And we hope that there will be many, many classes where if you're going to be in them, there's some requirements that you have to meet to say in them. And that you're serious about learning the things that we want to learn.
What our hope is, again, is that when we go out of this place, we'll become no more and more as people who live righteously and know why we live the way that we live. Last night, I happened to be in a meeting that I went to. And two people spoke of me. There was a board meeting of a group and I was able to sit and listen.
And in this meeting, two people spoke very specifically. Now, they both happened to claim to be Catholics. Both of them in their discussion, in their talk, denied Catholic doctrine. One, very overtly.
He just basically said, I'm a Catholic, but I don't believe a lot of the things the church teaches, but I find comfort in the Bible. The other one said it a little less overtly. She made the statement that I'm a Catholic myself, but I have a lot of friends who believe a lot of things, and I don't ever want them to be offended. This is a cut and paste theology that is impacting our society today.
It's take out what I don't want and leave what I do want and go on with my life. Basically, what we want to cut out is any moral responsibility. And we want to cut out any fact that somebody may not go to heaven. And we want to leave in that there is a heaven and there is a God that we're going to serve.
I would just present to you today to say that when you begin to do that, when I hear people talk that way, whether Protestant, Catholic, or anywhere in between, I just begin to think they're really nothing. They're really their own religion that they're calling Protestant or Catholic. God doesn't give us that choice. He doesn't say to us, here's my word, pick and choose what you like.
He doesn't give us that choice. He tells us this is the way things are, and this is how it works. So we don't want to make that mistake. We want to make sure that we have a solid foundation.
Sometimes that happens just because of ignorance, and we want to make sure we're not ignorant. So let's begin this lesson. This lesson today is about the place of Scripture in our lives. And so I just tell you today, I hope you'll capture this, whether you hold your Bible this way or whether you hold your Bible this way.
The Bible is a miracle. You're holding a miracle in your hand. What does it mean? What do we mean by a miracle?
Well, it means it goes past man's ability, and it has been established by the will and power of God. It's something man couldn't do on his own, but God has done. God has protected it over the years. God has established it over the years, and God will always protect his word.
Men will try to destroy it. They have tried to destroy it. Men may try to shut it down and cut it out. They will continue to do that.
But God's word will remain true. Here's the baseline belief about the Bible. This comes right out of our teaching where most of our teaching comes from this book. It comes right out of this book.
Listen to the statement. The Scriptures, both Old Testament, both Old and New Testament, are verbally inspired of God and are a revelation of God to man. The infallible, authoritative rule of faith in conduct. If you're going to be a solid Christian walking in victory and come to completeness, that we talk about this issue has to be settled in your life.
What is the final authority in my life? It can't be circumstances. It cannot be culture if you're going to be a victorious and complete Christian. It's got to be the Word of God.
Let's back up and look at the Scripture we touched on Sunday. We'll back up to verse 12 where it says, indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus, here's a great promise for you. We'll be persecuted. While evil people and apostles go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
But ask for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Scripture has power in our life. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training and righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. 2 Thessalonians chapter 2.
But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits to be saved through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. Again, we have nothing to back down from here in front of our critics. We have everything to stand on. So we believe that the Bible is the verbally inspired Word of God.
The word inspiration literally means God breathed. So by divine breath, divine power, the Holy Spirit moved upon human authors of the Bible with such precision that the product, the Bible itself, actually represents or reflects the intention of God himself. So what we have here is God, that's why we call it God's Word. You can know more clearly here God's Word than if God stood before you and spoke to you today.
It's His Word. That's why no Spirit, no true Spirit will take you away from this because this is God's divine ordered Word for us, written in such a way that it would transcend cultures and transcend time so that as we dig into it and we pray and we seek God and we seek the fullness of the Word, we will get revelation about how we live our life, how we walk before God, who God is, how things are going to happen in life. We can get it because we have the Bible. God's divine Word breathed out for us.
Now these people who wrote over 40, almost 40 people wrote the Bible. They weren't robots. They were prompted and guided by the Holy Spirit. He spoke to some of them in audible ways.
He spoke to some of them in dreams. He spoke to some of them in visions. Sometimes simply he spoke to their minds and their hearts and led them. This is what the Lord says occurs 3,808 times in the Bible.
Cleaning, this is what God is saying to us. The Bible has 66 books written over a course of time around 1200 years. 39 Old Testament books that by the time of Jesus were established as scripture, Jesus referred to them as scripture. I don't know any more authority that we can get to support Old Testament scripture than the fact that Jesus called them scripture and pointed to them as scripture.
The apostles wrote about them and quoted them and called them scripture. And so we have this Old Testament canon, 39 books that have been established for a really long time. The New Testament is a little different. 27 books of the New Testament.
So as Jesus went to heaven, as the end of the apostolic age came about, and over the next literally three centuries, the early days of the church, there were many writings floating around from church to church. A lot of things that were written, a lot of things that they suppose were written that were floating around in the church that they didn't have email like we did today. You can go down to the book store and buy the Bible like you can today. You just had these writings floating around.
And between the third and fourth century that this began to get more and more problematic because they were trying to figure out what scripture and what isn't scripture, what can we count, what can we believe in, and what is just man's wishes or man's desires. And they ended up with this council in Carthage where they met to discuss the problem and decide which of these writings were scripture. And they came up with, they established four tests for scripture. Apostolicity was this.
It was a book or product of an apostle or a close associate of an apostle. So the books written by Paul get a checkmark by them. The books are written by Matthew get a checkmark by him. He's not these apostles that were with Jesus various ones, the books written by Peter get a checkmark by them.
The books written by John get a checkmark by them. But then we come to books like Mark. Mark is a book that was a close associate. Most people believe that Mark was really writing the preaching and teachings of Peter.
So we have this close associate. We have Luke who was a close associate with the apostles who very clearly at the beginning of his writings talks about how I've researched these things. I've talked to the people about these things. These are the events that happened.
And so we have these either they're an apostle or a close associate with an apostle. It's not somebody that is 100 years removed from the apostles. That's criteria number one. Criteria number two is universality, which Smith this, the book was widely accepted and used in the churches.
So they looked at what all the churches were using and what all the churches were taking the same with scripture and they said, okay, which ones of these writings does everybody kind of have in common? Those ones do we all for the most part, we all say, yeah, that's one. That's one. And they used, so you might be like taking a list of maybe 100 and say which one, oh, there's 27 of them that we all use.
And so that was one of the criteria. The third criteria is that the contents was that the subject matter of the book appeared to be on the plan with known scripture. Did it match the Old Testament? Did it fit with the Old Testament?
Did it fit with other things that we knew to be scripture? Or while Peter was alive, he was talking about Paul's writing being scripture. He was already alluding to it and saying about Paul's writing, some of his writings pretty deep and people misconstrued it like they do other scripture. So was it seen on a plane and a plant that fit with all of that or did it deviate from known scripture and the known plan of things that they knew to be solid and true and if it did, those were excluded.
And finally, there's a quality of inspiration. Did the book bear the special qualities that speak of divine inspiration? Now they concluded that there were 27 writings that matched all of the criteria, not two out of three, 27 that matched all of the criteria. And that's where the first lists, if you will, of New Testament scripture began to be recognized at.
One of the questions about the Bible that you'll face in the world that we walk in today is the accuracy of present day interpretation of versions. Has the Bible survived intact over these years? Is it, are those really the words of Jesus? Are those really the writings of Peter and Paul?
Is that really what happened? Now we could go into a lot of facts on both the Old Testament and the New Testament that would for some of us bore us today and really get into a lot of detail that we'd never remember. Let me sum it up in two very simple things. One is accuracy of any writing historically.
Now accurately, we believe it to be, is measured in historical terms to proximity of time of when it was first written and when the events first happened. Are you understanding this? I know you would if I'm being clear. Am I being clear enough?
So if X event happened here and I have an eyewitness accounts writing about it that day, that bears more weight than somebody 10 years later who wasn't there but heard the story four times than what they would have to say about that event. And so the closer you can get to proximity to when the writings actually took place, the more confidence you can have in those writings. And this is one of the great accomplishments of the Old Testament, the Jews and the Old Testament and keeping accurate records of the Old Testament when they didn't have things like we have today where they could keep them in store and had to write them over and over again. And one of the great accomplishments and one of the great wise moves of the New Testament writers is that we have more evidence of the accuracy of the Bible than any other ancient world writing by the tune of hundreds and hundreds of years.
We have there today, there are some fragments of writings that we have for the New Testament within the first 100 years of when Jesus was on the earth. Some of them within 30 years of Jesus' death that we can look to and say and look and say, look at those things. They accurately reflect what we have today. So we have all of these, just tons of evidence that point back to the accuracy of these things.
And again, if you really want to get into it, you can get this and it'll just kind of make your eyes roll around the circles. But it's really, really, if you need your faith built in that, that'll help you. The other part of it is not only the accuracy, but historical discoveries continue to bring up to light the legitimacy of the Bible and its claims as they discover more and more things as archaeologists study, as they look and study, instead of it taking away from biblical truth, they lean into biblical truth. So when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, there was writings in those that went way back into the Old Testament and as they begin to examine the writings that were quoted in those Dead Sea Scrolls that were found in Israel, they began to look and see the accuracy and how close it was and there was hardly any discrepancy at all.
It may be a dot here or a little mark there that wasn't exactly the way it was in the interpretation that had come down through the years. And so we have these scriptures that we can stand on and look at and say, you know what? We believe with all of our heart that these things came clearly from the original writings and typically what you find when you have somebody attacking those facts is either they don't know the facts. They've never really studied the true facts of what we have or they have an agenda why they don't want to believe what's written there.
So we're going to a lot more with that. We believe the Bible is inspired and infallible. Why do we believe it one? We just talked about it, historical support, the more we discover the more that we discover it's true.
We believe the Bible is the Bible because of moral clarity. When you look in the Bible, it's just hard to condemn the moral clarity of the Bible. And what the Bible tells us to do and how the Bible tells us to live our lives. It's a very simple test.
If everybody lived this way, would the world be better off or worse off? So just take that in comparison to something like Islam. If everybody lived the way of the teaching of Islam today, would the world be better off or worse off? All you've got to do is go to Islamic countries that are under Islamic rule and you ladies would discover very quickly, it would be a lot worse off.
Children would discover very quickly, it's a lot worse off. All you've got to do is look into the moral teachings and the teachings of these religions and ask yourself which one leans towards a revelation from God and what is good for all mankind and how we walk with mankind. So we think about moral clarity. We think about spiritual revelation.
God brings revelation as we read and say the Bible. We're going to come back and touch on that in just a moment. And here's the one that is absolutely unique to the Bible. Prophetic proclamation.
God backs his word up with prophetic claims that come true. Let me remind you of one. In the 1800s, Christians would preach many times and they would come to these passages that talked about in times and Israel being a nation again, Israel being established as a nation again. And instead of taking them by faith, you can go back and read many of the preachers' writings, they had to do mental gymnastics because they could not imagine how that could come about.
And so you read some of their writings, they begin to say, oh, it's a spiritual church, it's not really Israel being there, it's a spiritual location, not really Israel being back. And then you come to the beginning of the last century, in the early 1900s, and there were around 10,000, 12,000 Jews in all of Palestine at that point in time. And yet God in his word was saying that they's going to come, when I'm going to put a hook in their jaw and I'm going to draw them back and re-establish them as a nation. And it was just unimaginable.
And yet in the late 1940s, what happened? Israel became a nation again. Now that is a prophetic claim that backs up what God says is going to happen. We're seeing some things begin to unfold today.
We see this proclamation that in the end times that men will have a mark on their hand or their forehead by which they're going to be buying and selling, won't be able to buy and sell without that mark on your hand. We didn't understand that. That's going to be a tattoo. How is that going to work?
We didn't understand it. Now we can see it. We can see the probability, the possibility of men not having to have money anymore, of having something in his hand, something on his forehead. They can take your dog now and put a chip in it and find him anywhere.
So now, years later, we begin to see this revelation of what God says is going to happen and how it can come about. They talk about the scripture that talks about the two witnesses, and we'll get into more of this. We begin to talk about it in times that are in Jerusalem that are proclaiming God's word that gets killed and the whole world sees it. When that guy wrote that, he didn't know how the whole world was going to see it.
Now we sit here day and we go, yep, the whole world can see it. They can carry something around their pocket and see it. But God was saying this is going to happen and the whole world is going to see it. And we can go through hundreds and hundreds of prophetic claims from what was going to happen with Jesus to what's happened in these days that tell us that the word of God is something we can trust.
So we have our personal experiences in it and we have the prophetic experiences in it. So let me kind of wrap this up a little bit tonight for us. We don't have time to go into all the different versions of the Bible that were written, but if you want to talk about that we can. But here's where it was.
All Scripture. This passage starts out with all Scripture is given by inspiration of God. Scripture, listen, this is really important to hear and I know most of you know this, Scripture brings balance to itself. So what does that mean?
When you're researching a subject, when you're going through an issue and your resource, what does the Bible say about this? How am I supposed to act? What am I supposed to believe? When you hear something on TV or something here, am I really supposed to believe that?
Is that really correct? Is that really right? In researching Scripture, you must consider all Scripture. You can't just look at one pulled out Scripture.
A good book talking about faith is going to talk about all Scripture, not just Scriptures that deal with what they want to say. There has to be a revelation of all Scripture. So how does Scripture speak about this issue? With this understanding, there are two things.
There are key verses about most major topics. For instance, 2 Timothy 3, 16 is a key verse about the revelation of what Scripture is. The Psalm supports that verse, Proverbs supports that verse, the rest of the Bible supports that verse. Everything comes back into this fact that we need to live our lives led by Scripture.
So we get this. As you read the Bible, we talked about this the time of the... Each of the books of the Bible has a key purpose and theme. It's why we have four Gospels and not just one Gospel.
They tell the same stories, many of them. They have the same doctrine. They have the same teaching. They lean a little bit of a different way here, there.
The four of them together bring the fullness of the Gospel so that we can understand who Jesus is and we can understand His teaching and His faith. And each one is you read them and then you go and bring a little more enlightenment to it. That doesn't mean we have to just read your way through the Bible, say the Bible, get to know it. But if you're going into research a subject, you've got to think about all Scripture.
And here's somebody teaching about a subject. You've got to think about what does all of Scripture say? What does the entirety of Scripture teach us? Or it becomes very easy to get sidetracked.
And when we get this wrong, we build false hope. We build false doctrines which lead to people doubting God's word. So God makes Himself known to us. He makes Himself known to us through creation.
God speaks through creation. Psalms 19 1 says, the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaim the sandy work. Day to day pours out speech and night to night reveals knowledge. There's no speech nor their words whose voice is not heard.
What it's telling us in the Scripture is that when we walk out and we look around and we get outside of ourselves and we look at the world around us, we see the creation of God and it speaks to us of order. It speaks to us of power. It speaks to us of purpose. It speaks to us of all these things that there's a designer about this and it cries out to man's heart if he looks honestly at it.
This cannot be an accident. It's two, it's two enters, two balances, two in order. And man has to receive that. The second way that God speaks to us is God speaks to us through our conscious.
In Romans 12 verse 14 it says, for when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves. Even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts while their conscious also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts, accuse or even excuse them. On that day when according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Jesus.
He said, listen, God speaks to us in our very spirit. He's written some things in our heart that for us to be able to get by and do them, we've got to dismiss that conscious appeal of God. We've got to dismiss that truth and sometimes, hear me, cultures do that. Right now in America there's an attack upon the conscious spirit of God moving in our life by in the area of sexual morality.
What is sexually right for us to do before God is under attack. It's coming against our children at a very young age to rob them of the conscious spirit of God inside of them that would tell them what's right and wrong. So this scripture says when a man does what's right because of spirit, listen, that's God speaking to him. But when he dismisses it and when he stands before God, the revelation of his heart is going to be revealed and what he dismissed and what he accepted is going to be laid bare before God because God speaks to men's hearts.
Now the problem with that is neither one of them really speak with clarity about the condition of man and the redemption of man. So God not only sent a son, but he inspired a revelation of his word so that we can know our condition before God and we can discover the redemptive power of God. The Bible reveals that God has invaded the human situation, has acted to redeem us, and is offered a way for us by which we can enter into that redemption. Nature and conscious do not make that clear.
The Word of God makes it clear that we are fallen people who need a redemptive work to happen for us and that happens through Jesus. So we need the Bible. And then finally, Hebrews 4-12, for the Word of God is living in an act of sharper than any two edges, so piercing to the division of soul and spirit of joints and marrow and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. The man with an open heart who opens the Bible and begins to read the Bible.
That's why we encourage you to read the Bible. God's inspired Word. God says this word is living. What does that mean?
It means that when I read it, when I study, when I memorize it, when I'm going to put it in my heart, that it begins to do something in me. It builds faith, it builds conviction. At the right time it builds revelation. Have you ever read through the Bible and come to a verse that you know you've read dozens and dozens of times and all of a sudden it jumps off the page at you and says something you never thought of before.
Anybody ever happen to you? That's because the Word of God is living. At the right time God reveals things to us. At the right moment He lets that thing come alive in us and speak to us.
Here's the other interesting thing that happens. You're in the middle of a test. You're in the middle of a trial. You're going through something.
And some way to respond, some truth comes into your spirit. You don't even know where it came from. He said, this is the way I should act. Later you're reading the Bible.
Oh, look at that. The Word had preached and it was sitting there almost dormant until the moment you needed it. And the moment you needed it, the Spirit of God in you reminds you of it, brings it into your heart and speaks to you. Now that can't happen if you don't sit here preaching.
That can't happen if you don't read the Bible. The more you read the Bible, the more you hear preaching, the more you put the Word in your heart, the more available the Word is for you to complete you and to prepare you for every good work. So we look at this Bible. We realize it's a miracle.
We realize it's God's infallible Word. It will always be true. We realize that it's living and active for us. And so if we want to be the healthy, complete, full-hearted Christians that God would have us to have, unshakeable on this earth, undefeatable by the attack of the enemy, able to withstand every test and know that we've gotten it right, this book must be our standard for faith and conduct.
And anything that shakes you from that is the enemy. And anything that shakes you from that is probably most likely a lie of the enemy. But if you study just a little bit more and listen just a little bit more, you'll learn the answer to it. Here's the last thing I'll share with you tonight.
I remember when I was young it was times when I was afraid to get in debates. Especially when you're in high school and some teacher wants to debate with you. I had one used to call me Billy Graham all the time. And he thought it was an insult.
I thought it was a compliment. We just had a different world view on what he was saying. You're dealing with somebody a lot older than you. You're dealing with somebody who's studied different things more than you have.
They have more expertise than you do. And they ask you questions that you're not prepared to answer. And I remember thinking at times, oh I don't want to get in this discussion because I don't have answers for this. And so God finally helped me.
I don't know who it was from or how I got it. God finally helped me to realize I don't have to have the answer today. I can look at that teacher. I can look at that older person and say, you know, I don't know but I'll go find out.
Because I can have confidence that the word God is true. I can have confidence. And I discovered very quickly that there's very, you know, there's smart guys who try to argue against scripture. But there are equally and many times superior guys and gals who have studied and can answer their questions.
We don't have to shy away from anybody. We can stand proudly, boldly say we believe in the revelation of scripture and know that scripture will be true. Hey, don't be a cut and paste Christian. Don't be a cut and paste Christian.
If it says do it this way, do it this way. Know all the scripture. Make sure you're not making something else. But check with mentors, check with teachers, check with people around you.
Make sure you got it right. And then stand on scripture. Amen. Lord, in these moments I just thank you for your goodness.
Thank you for the men and women that are here tonight. And in these next few moments I just pray you would touch us and guide us and help our commitment, our commitment to know your word, to grow in your word, our faith in your word, to grow and let us be fully established in you and all things in Jesus name. Amen.