A strong emphasis on God’s Word is a primary mark of spiritual renewal. Down through the centuries, God’s people have gone through cycles where His Word has been neglected and the spiritual condition of His people deteriorates. In His grace, God sends renewal. Inevitably, one of the main marks of such renewal is a renewed emphasis on God’s Word. We see this in the Old Testament, when Judah languished under the godless reigns of King Manasseh, and his son, Amon. Amon’s son, Josiah, began to seek the Lord when he was 16 and to institute spiritual reforms. Then Hilkiah the priest found a copy of God’s law and Josiah called the nation to repentance (2 Chron. 34:14). Revival ensued because God’s Word was obeyed. The same thing happened during the Reformation, which at its heart was a revival of God’s Word. The Roman Catholic Church had neglected the Word. Priests were the only ones with access to it, and most of them were ignorant of its contents. John Wycliffe and William Tyndale labored to get the Bible translated into common English. Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. John Calvin began to preach expository sermons, explaining and applying the Word to the people of Geneva. The Reformation theme, sola scriptura, renewed God’s people. The same thing was true of the great Puritan revivals in England and America during the 16th and 17th centuries. J. I. Packer (A Quest for Godliness {Crossway Books], p. 98) writes, For Puritanism was, above all else, a Bible movement. To the Puritan the Bible was in truth the most precious possession that this world affords. His deepest conviction was that reverence for God means reverence for Scripture, and serving God means obeying Scripture. To his mind, therefore, no greater insult could be offered to the Creator than to neglect his written word; and conversely, there could be no truer act of homage to him than to prize it and pore over it, and then to live out and give out its teaching. Intense veneration for Scripture, as the living word of the living God, and a devoted concern to know and do all that it prescribes, was Puritanism’s hallmark. Nehemiah 8 shows us four marks of spiritual renewal related to God’s Word: 1. For spiritual renewal, God’s people must read His Word. The people gathered and asked Ezra to bring the book (scroll) of the Law of Moses which the Lord had given to Israel (8:1). They read from it publicly from dawn until noon! Kidner (p. 104) refutes the liberal view, that the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) was the creation of a recent redactor who pieced together the older materials. He says that what Ezra read from was obviously not a new manifesto, but rather “the foundation articles of the faith, laid down at the exodus.” Also, this law had full divine authority. The phase translated, “which the Lord had given to Moses” is literally “commanded Moses.” As Kidner observes, “one does not tamper with material that one would describe in such terms.” The people recognized and respected the fact that God had given this material to Moses, and therefore it was His authoritative word to them. Copies of the Law of Moses were probably somewhat rare, and many of the Jews may never have heard it read before. Even in the New Testament, Paul instructs Timothy to give attention in church meetings “to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13). Until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, the Bible had to be copied by hand, and often there would only be one copy in a city, often chained to the pulpit. Since people were often illiterate, the Bible had to be read publicly for the common people to know what it says. God could have communicated with us in some form other than writing. He could have sent an angel to each language group with His message and saved Wycliffe Bible Translators a lot of time and effort! He could have had the message communicated verbally from generation to generation. But He chose to put it in written form. That means that for people to know God and His message of salvation, at least one person in the group, and preferably many, have to learn to read and study. I would argue that the strength of a church will be in direct proportion to the number of people in that church who read and study God’s written Word. We live in a culture where almost all of us know how to read. Those who can’t read or can’t read well can readily learn how. We have multiple translations of the Bible in our language. And yet most American Christians spend far more time playing pointless computer games or sitting in front of a TV set that spews out garbage than they do reading and studying the words that God has given to us in the Bible! For the good of your soul I would challenge you to read and reread the Bible all the days of your life. If you want spiritual renewal, it will come through God’s Word. In Psalm 119, which extols God’s Word, nine times the author (probably Ezra) mentions how God’s Word (or some synonym for the Word) brings revival (Ps. 119:25, 50, 93, 107, 149, 154, 156). If you have never done so, I’d encourage you to read through the entire Bible in the New Year. For spiritual renewal, God’s people must read His Word. 2. For spiritual renewal, God’s people must reverently hear His Word expounded. Having ears that work does not guarantee that we really hear. Although God made us with two ears that we cannot close and one mouth that we can (which ought to teach us something!), we sometimes close off our minds so that we do not really hear what is being said, even though we did hear the sounds of the words. Anyone who is married has had that experience. Your wife is talking to you, but you are reading the mail or the paper and you didn’t hear a thing she said. In the same way, it is possible to hear the Bible read or preached and not hear a thing. Your mind was elsewhere. That’s why Jesus often said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mark 4:9, 23). He said, “Take care how you listen, for whoever has, to him shall more be given; and whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has shall be taken away from him” (Luke 8:18). If the Bible contains the very words that God Himself is saying to us, then it certainly behooves us to listen reverently to what He is saying! The people in our text were both attentive and reverent when God’s Word was read to them. Verse 3 mentions their attentiveness, and verses 5 & 6 show their reverence. They stood up as if to greet a royal visitor, and then they bowed down in worship. They were not worshiping the actual scroll that Ezra held in his hand, but rather the God who had given the words of that scroll to Moses and through Moses to them. Attentiveness stems from reverence. If we maintain our reverence for God and that fact that He is speaking to us through His Word, we will pay attention to what He says. If we forget that this is the Word of the living God to us, our minds will wander to other things. I realize that preachers can sometimes be boring. But if I lose your attention, direct your mind to the text of Scripture and ask the Lord to open it to your heart. Rowland Hill was an 18th century English preacher greatly used of God. Shortly before he died, he was visiting with an old friend who told him that he could still remember the text and part of a sermon that he had heard Hill preach 65 years before. Hill asked him what he remembered. He said that Hill had said that some people when listening to a sermon did not like the delivery of the preacher. Then he said, “Supposing you went to hear the will of one of your relatives read, and you were expecting a legacy from him. You would hardly think of criticizing the manner in which the lawyer read the will. Rather, you would be all attention to hear whether anything was left to you and if so, how much. That is the way to hear the gospel preached
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 20:21:02 +0000
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