ONE thing to secret of life

Donald Trump has called the Bible, “The Book, it is the thing.”

In the 1991 movie “City Slickers,” Curly the cowboy, played by Jack Palance, informs Mitch the vacationing cowhand (Billy Crystal) that the secret of life comes down to one thing:

Curly: You know what the secret of life is?
Mitch: No, what?
Curly: This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean (crap).
Mitch: That’s great, but what’s the one thing?
Curly: That’s what you’ve got to figure out.

*****

Jordan gave a study the other week on how there’s only one way to understand what God’s doing today and that’s by personally, physically reading and studying what Paul writes:

“Look, it isn’t enough to be a Bible packer, toting it around underneath your arm. It’s designed to be read.

“Paul says in I Timothy 4:13, ‘Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine.’

“The verse doesn’t say attend church and let the preacher teach it to you. Do you know there’s no verse in the Bible that tells you to attend church?

“The one verse in the Bible that tells you what to attend tells you to attend reading God’s Word. It’s that personal intake. You see, reading is something you personally do. It’s not me, the preacher, reading it for you and explaining it to you.

“That’s important, but fundamental to that is that you have taken it in, because the understanding for YOU, to get into YOUR heart, is going to be the reading of those Scriptures yourself.

*****

“Isaiah 34:16 says, ‘Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read.' What do you think Timothy as a pastor was supposed to read? Paul says, ‘You understand by reading what I’VE written to you.’

Jesus, in talking to the Sadducees, says in Matthew 22:29, ‘Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.’

“Now, these folks knew the Scripture. These were a bunch of rabbinical scholars. But Christ said, ‘You don’t really KNOW the Scripture.’ “In verse 31, He asks, ‘Have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God?’

“You see, ‘the entrance of thy Word giveth light’ (Psalm 119) and it’s not just being a scholar, understanding what the rabbis and what the scholars and tradition is, which is what these guys were doing. He said, ‘Really it’s not reading ABOUT the Bible; it’s reading the Bible.’

*****

“Paul writes in I Corinthians 14:37, ‘If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.’

“Everybody’s interested in keeping the commandments; there’s a commandment you need to keep. ‘The things that I write to you,’ his books Romans through Philemon, are God’s commandments for us today.

“One of the very first books Paul wrote, if not the first book, is I Thessalonians. Chapter 5:27 says, ‘I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read unto all the holy brethren.’

“Notice how when Paul wrote the epistle he expected everybody to read it. Now tell me something, were all the holy brethren at Thessalonica? Weren’t there some up in Berea? Some in Athens, Philippi, Galatia?

“All of Paul’s epistles from the very beginning were designed to be circularized among all of the saints. That’s why you had a prophet. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers were given in the church before the Scripture was completed, and one of the functions of a prophet . . .  They had people in those various local churches who could say, ‘That’s Scripture.’

“Colossians 4:16 says, ‘And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and that ye likewise read the epistle from Laodicea.’

*****

“You see, he wants his epistles to be circularized into all the other churches. By the way, if we had an original letter from Paul here today, and we knew that that letter needed to be read by the saints in Detroit, Phoenix, California, and the saints on the other side of Chicago, do you think we’d send them our original copy? Absolutely not.

“The guy in the church there, there were people supernaturally gifted with the capacity to make authoritative copies. You get a copy from another assembly, you had a prophet there to say, ‘This is Scripture and this one isn’t.’

"Look at the end of that verse: ‘and that ye likewise read the epistle from Laodicea.’ Do you see an epistle in your Bible called the ‘epistle from Laodicea’? No. Somebody says, ‘Well then, there’s a missing epistle in the Bible!’

“Who made that decision? One the gifts God gave to the church at the very beginning, before the Bible was completed, was the gift of a prophet. He could identify what Scripture was Scripture and what epistles were not epistles.

“Paul wrote a lot of epistles. He said to the Corinthians in I Cor. 5:9, ‘I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators.’

“Wait a minute! Have we lost a part of the Bible?! No, that previous letter wasn’t Scripture. How do we know? Because the prophet was there to tell you.

“And then the prophet made copies of it, sent them out, collated them together and made at the end a book, and that’s how your New Testament came about in book form. That was a group of people in the assembly designed to do that for us, and when the book was finished their function was over with because the Bible was established.

“Don’t buy into this stuff that it was 4^th Century churchmen, a bunch of old dead heads up in some church council, that finally decided, after they argued the politics of it, that this is what ought to be in the Bible.

“Nobody in a religious system could have ever put your New Testament in the dispensational design that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John demonstrate; the Book of Acts with the offer to and fall of Israel; Romans-Philemon with that doctrine, proof, and correction, doctrine, proof and correction, that spiritual growth design in it, and then the same thing in Hebrews-Revelation.

“Nobody could have put your Bible together except somebody who understood how edification took place and what the dispensational time line looked like. The spiritual design in it demonstrates something behind it. Who was it? It was God the Holy Spirit working together to produce His Word.”

(to be continued tomorrow)