1.3 My Personal Testimony

1.3 My Personal Testimony
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute

My Personal Testimony. I want to share with you my own personal relationship with the Bible. In my childhood in the Mennonite and Baptist churches, the Bible was just there. It was God’s word to us. Though I was taught it and though I memorized some verses, I had little more thought than that. But when the Lord turned my heart back to Himself when I was nineteen years old, I turned to the Bible as my life.

I can be a very intense person in directions that are of supreme importance to me. I have never been more intense towards anything else than I have been towards the Bible from that time on.

God with Me. The Bible has always been God sharing Himself with me. I am simply uninterested in anything that the Bible does not say.  Please understand, I am speaking, here, of anything regarding God or truth. I certainly enjoy other things besides the Bible, and I am an educator, trained in the field of education and the subjects of English and Social Studies. I read extensively.

Yet knowing God is and has always been the center of my life, and the Bible has always been the source of how I must know God. I have been taught by many Christian teachers and have read many outstanding Christian books, but the Bible, for me, is the only authority of truth.

Into All Truth. I began reading the Bible from the first page to the last. In the first months after my return to the Lord, I spent little of my spare time doing anything else. I remember reading the Psalms in one sitting and the joy I knew afterwards.

When I arrived at John 16 for the first time through the Bible, something wonderful happened. As I read these words “and the Spirit of Truth will guide you into all truth,” those words leaped off the page and entered into my heart by the Spirit as a personal word from God to me. R.C. Sproul states that we are not to “interpret” the Bible in this way (Sproul 43-44), but controlling God is not something you and I want to attempt. If the Word is not personally ours, it’s not anything.

That We Might Know Him. I have never doubted that word, a word that the same Spirit, who first spoke those words through John, made personal to me over 40 years ago. God has given us the Bible that we might know Him.

The idea that there are things in the Bible that are hidden from us or that we cannot know now, the idea that we cannot really know all “truth,” not while we live on this earth, this idea is utterly illogical and contrary to everything God says in the Bible. It is an idea that I reject unequivocally. Eternal life is to KNOW God and to KNOW Jesus Sent; I would live and not die.

Focused. And so I have read the entire Bible through 23 times over the years. But I always read the New Testament twice, thus I have read the New Testament 46 times through. But that’s just reading, important, but not close enough for me.

Let me explain myself a bit more. As an Asperger’s man, that is, high-performing autism (which does not make me that much different than you, it just describes certain qualities and inhibitions that have been marked in my nerves), I can be very vulnerable on the one hand and very focused on the other. Thus whenever I heard some preacher say something about “the Bible” that was different from what I knew, I was in trouble. I have a Bible; I MUST know what God says.

Writing the Bible. My twenties were marked by long hours, much of my spare time, in a feverish pursuit of knowing just what God does say about essential things like salvation and heaven and God and righteousness. And I would do that by the only way I love, writing out by hand every verse on the topic. When I write a verse, I see it much more clearly than when I read it. Then I discovered that typing the verse, watching the words God speaks appear on the page in front of my eyes, makes the meaning and impact of those words much more clear to me even than writing. I have written or typed so many verses so many times, in the intense desire to KNOW, for myself, what God actually says.

Every Verse. I enjoyed writing the Bible so much that I have written out a number of the books of the Bible by hand, several in the New Testament, John, Romans, Hebrews, and so on, and even Isaiah and Genesis in the Old Testament. I have enjoyed taking a word, like salvation, and writing every single verse in the Bible containing that word or its inflections. I have left behind me over the years a long trail of notebooks filled with word studies, what God actually says, Bible verses written in careful observation of the exact words.

But I love to be with God’s people as well, and so I have sat under, literally, thousands of hours of good Bible teaching, anointed of the Spirit, Old Testament and New.

Immersed in the Bible. I estimated once that I have spent around 18-20,000 hours of my life immersed in the Bible and what God is speaking to us through it. I care about the Bible. And I care a whole lot that the Bible says that the Bible can be death or it can be life. I want to live.

But here’s the thing. I began to notice something over the years, something peculiar. I heard often, as I’m sure you have heard, the statement “the Bible says this” or “the Bible says that.” And I would look and look and look only to realize that the Bible said NO SUCH THING!

The Bible Does NOT Say That. You see, the little boy standing there among the crowds of people watching the great emperor pass by in his glory as everyone admired his fine clothes, the little boy that said, “But the emperor has no clothes,” he was most likely Asperger’s.

And so I have been like that little boy, it seems at times, standing there in my naivete against the face of all who are saying the opposite as I say – “No, the Bible does not say that.” “The Bible does not say that ‘going to’ heaven is salvation or that it is the goal of the believer in Jesus. The Bible does not say that salvation has anything to do with ‘going to’ heaven when you die.” Most Christians just look at me as if I am sad and silly and go their way. They KNOW “what the Bible says.”

X-ing out Verses. Then I see brethren who discover that the Bible does say things quite different from how they were once taught. They see that it is the Holy Spirit who reveals to us what God means by what He says. But then, they look at so many other things in the Bible and instead of asking God to show them what He means by what He says, they simply throw out half of what God says.

But this is something, I have found, that most Christians do. Most Christians take one thing God says in the Bible and use it to draw a big X across other things God says that seem to them to oppose the parts of the Bible they choose to believe. That’s not something I can do; I must know what God means by all that He speaks.

God Does What He Says. And if Bible verses are understood wrongly by many Christians, I will not just throw out those verses in response, as most Christians, including you, dear reader, do. One of the most effective devices Christians use is – “Oh, we’ll know that verse only ‘in’ heaven after we die.” Let’s try one. Until we all come to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. And the words “For Heaven ONLY” are written as a big X across that verse, a practice I reject with all my heart. God does what He says He will do.

But here is one thing I have never done with the Bible. I have never used the Bible for anything other than for me to know personally this God who reveals Himself through the Bible.

A Stern Word. In my twenties, however, I still tried to “figure out” the Bible, such things as prophetic Scripture or human nature and so on. One day, in my mid-twenties, I was thinking how fun it would be to write the four gospels into one gospel, merging all the verses from each of the four where they should go as one. I was walking along, minding my own business, when I felt, in my spirit, a bony finger pressing against my forehead and stern words arising in my heart. “What are you doing to My Word?”

Not only did I drop that idea like a hot potato, but through God’s dealings with me in those years, I also stopped trying to “figure out” the Bible with my intellect.

The Bible in My Heart. And so, from my late twenties until my late forties, though I continued to eat and drink the Bible, I stopped all attempts to understand any of it with my mind. Instead, I drew God’s words into my heart, hiding them there, over and over. And I wept on my face before God, many times over the years, “Oh my Father, make what You mean by these words to be the only life I am.”

My relationship with the Bible has never been about the Bible, but only about knowing the God of the Bible, and what He is doing, not just in the earth right now, but also in me. God here and now, Personal in me, is why I study the Bible.

Two Views of the Bible. R. C. Sproul shows you how to use the Bible to know about God and about what God expects you to do, so that you can order your life as a good Christian. I will show you how to know God Personal and real, here and now, and very much alive IN you, by every Word in the Bible.

Sproul shows you how to use the Bible to know about what God did in Bible times and what God will do again someday. I will show you what the God who fills your heart with His glory is doing right now in you and is doing right now through you in mighty rivers of joy.

I will show you a God who does what He says because He is what He says, a God who does the Bible as the only life you are.