“His Exalted Word”

Sunday, March 10, 2019

The longest chapter in the Bible is Psalm #119—a poem that extols the glory of God’s written word. There is a very healthy ideal underlying a composition like that. It’s the kind of thing that God’s people should always aspire to—that we value the words of God as highly as that psalmist. That’s why we are a church who take the Bible seriously. And just a quick survey of our practices, procedures, and conversations reveals that:

• Instead of studying each year’s newest best-seller from the Christian world, our classes focus on studying the Bible again & again.
• When we teach about salvation, we do so by opening the Bible.
• Our goal is to have a pulpit where sermons are defined by appeals to the Bible as God’s final authority on matters of daily life and eternal doctrine.
• We have a program of daily reading assignments to encourage folks to spend more time in the Bible and let it permeate each of our hearts more each day.
• We teach our children the stories and doctrines of the Bible.
• We contemplate God’s words from the Bible before the weekly communion with Christ.
• When we talk about both morality and religious practice for the modern age, we are primarily concerned with what the Bible says about those things.

All of that probably sounds perfectly normal to most of us. And yet, all of that would cause many in the secular and religious world to ask: “Why?” For many people, the Bible should be thought of more like guidelines than actual rules.

But not for us. We continue to agree with the psalmist’s belief that God’s written word is righteous, healthy, holy, encouraging, empowering and generally wonderful. May it ever be so.

- Dan Lankford, minister

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