E65 Why God Still Speaks Today: Knowing the Bible Isn’t the Same as Knowing God

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Jen (00:00)
the Holy Bible was actually never meant to replace God Himself He actually has a lot more to say than just what He wrote in His book. How can we think that a single book can contain everything that God wanted to share with us? Knowing the Bible is not enough. You need to know the one who wrote it. The Bible is not a substitute for learning how to hear God’s voice for yourself. Jesus is the word, but do you rely more on the written word?

than the word himself. God is literally right here beside you in the room. So why would you choose to keep picking up his biography when you can actually talk to him directly and personally yourself? Today we’re gonna talk about all of this and more, so come deeper with me. Here we go.

Hey there, welcome to the show. This is where we go below the surface. And today I want to talk about why God gave us the Bible.

Why did he inspire the authors to write it down? Write down the message that he had spoken to them. And so I’m sure you can come up with a lot of things right off the top of your head. I mean, the Bible is where we get our doctrine and our theology. It’s how we understand why we believe what we believe, right? As Christians, as followers of Jesus. It reveals the plan of salvation and how God sent his son Jesus to die for our sins. It’s a guide for us for to show us a righteous way of living. It establishes standards for truth and authority.

And it shows us more about God Himself. It shows us who He is and helps us to understand His ways. I love Psalm 19 and I’m sorry, Psalm 119. And if you haven’t studied it, go do that. It’s so powerful, but it’s such a great chapter all about the value and the beauty of the written word. And so there is no doubt, absolutely no doubt, that as a believer, we know there is power and there is value in reading, studying, knowing.

Knowing, memorizing the scripture, right? Hebrews 4 12, one of my favorite verses it says.

For the word of God is living and active and full of power, making it operative, energizing, and effective. It is sharper than a two-edged sword, penetrating as far as the division of the soul and spirit, the completeness of a person, and separating Both joints and marrow, excuse me, the deepest parts of our nature, exposing and judging the very thoughts and intentions of the heart. So it’s a living and active

But the topic that I want to actually cover today is the idea that there actually are some believers who idolize the Bible. And so what do I mean by that? people look at the Bible as the main source of life, but Jesus is actually our main source of life. The Bible says Jesus is the bread of life, right? So hear me out. What I where I’m going with this is the idea that we may have a little bit of a wrong perspective of the purpose of the Bible in our lives.

is it possible to idolize the Bible? Yes, it is. I have seen it. It’s I’ve seen it a lot in some traditional conservative circles, unfortunately. But how? What does that mean? What it means is that people rely more on the Bible than they do God himself.

Okay, so what does that look like? Have you heard some believers say things like, all the answers to life can be found in the Bible? I’ve heard that several times. What about this one?

If I can’t read it in the Bible, then it can’t be true and it can’t be real. Everything I need to know about life is there in the Bible. And that’s actually not really true. We’re gonna dive into that in a second. Some Christians believe and have even preached from the pulpit that God only speaks through the Bible. That’s the only way he talks to us right now in this current age. That is such bunk and baloney. It frustrates me when I hear people say that because God talks to me a few times a week.

He gives me encouragement. He gives me pep talks. He will chastise me in love when I’m out of line and I miss the mark, right? He talks to me about my identity. He talks to me about my future and my calling. He’s very direct and he’s very personal in his conversations and it’s actually conversations back and forth. It’s not always just one-liners here or there. But let’s be clear, the Bible says exactly what God wanted it to say, right? It doesn’t explain everything in life, but he put in it.

what he wanted to put in it. People try to say that the Bible has the answer for everything, but is that actually true? All right, we know about current events or personal issues in our lives. You know, how do we know who to marry? What do we name our kids? Where do we move? What job should we take? Those kinds of things obviously not in the Bible. And we take it on faith that we can that God will lead us in those directions. But what about other things? Like God doesn’t actually explain in the Word why he allows innocent people to suffer or to die.

Like think of how Cain killed Abel right off the bat. It doesn’t explain why God allowed that to happen. what about things like kids getting cancer? Right now I’m I’ve just hit my six-year anniversary at the pediatric specialty clinic, and we have kids who come through there with cancer. That’s not fair, right? And that’s not their fault. They’re extremely sick. And so God doesn’t explain those kinds of things in the word. What about the those mysterious?

what do you call them? I guess creatures that the Bible refers to as the Nephilim. I might not be quite saying that word correctly, but found in Genesis chapter 6 or Numbers 13, these beings were considered the offspring, which means there were relations between a spiritual being and a human being that can blow our mind. God doesn’t explain how that works or how that happened or anything. What about the Trinity? The Trinity is not technical.

Technically written in the Bible, but it’s inferred, right? We can understand it. what about the idea of creation? Was it a literal six days or was it figurative? Theologians have been arguing over that for thousands of years. Was it literal or was it just a you know symbolic way of God explaining how he made the earth? I mean, I

believe that the Bible inspires more questions than it does give us answers personally. And I think God did that on purpose because it’s an invitation for us to actually go talk things out with him. It’s an invitation for us to have conversations with other believers about why we believe what we believe and banter back and forth. Like is that’s this is still a concept that the Jewish people do now. They they still do a lot of debating back and forth.

Because they want to understand better and they want to get a well-rounded view of what God was trying to say when he wrote the Bible. And so the Bible clearly doesn’t answer everything, it clearly doesn’t explain everything. So let’s not keep saying that, Prayer is so important. Learning how to have conversations with the Father, with the Son, with the Holy Spirit. I am super excited because I finally created my very first digital course.

It’s called Teach Us to Pray and it’s where I review the seven keys that transform your prayer life. I had so much fun doing this. My partners at the Noble Marriage, they’ve been helping me get this all set up and they invited me a few weeks ago to come on board with their ministry and help them with several admin things and event planning and also bringing me on as a coach for women. And so this has been a really incredible opportunity, but they had asked me if I would create a digital course.

Around prayer and make it available for their clients. and specifically with the idea of praying with more power and more effectiveness. And so you can go over to thenoblemarriage.com for more information on that. I’m actually gonna put my link in the show notes so that you can check out that course and check out some of the things that I’m beginning to do over there with them. But let’s get back to my discussion about the Bible.

We know, we can all agree the Bible is a gift, right? It’s a guide to help us. God gave it to us so that we could better understand the kingdom, better s better understand what he’s doing and what he wants to accomplish in the earth, right? But what if, what if it was never meant to be our final authority? What if it was never meant to be the place where we find all the answers? It never never was meant to be our ultimate go-to. There’s only so much you can fit in a book. Listen, there’s only so much you can fit in.

In a book, right? One even as large as the Bible. That’s it’s huge. There’s only so much God could say in there, and He deliberately chose to explain certain things and not explain other things. So let’s let’s like let’s think of it a little differently here. Let’s picture a person that you really admire. I’m gonna throw out Billy Graham or Mother Teresa. Okay, so let’s say they were still alive and you were invited to have dinner with one of them, and you ended up seated right next to them or

maybe let’s maybe here’s a different idea let’s say you were actually neighbors maybe they had the house right next door and there was a small path from your back door to their back door and you had personal access to go visit them in their home anytime you wanted they had told you you are always welcome okay would you take the opportunity to pick up their biography or would you actually go talk to them in person

And yet, that’s how many Christians treat God. They would rather go to His Word than to go directly to Him. I mean, literally, He is right here, right here. You can constantly have access to Him. You can constantly be talking with Him.

And yet, why are you grabbing the the book, right? Why are you going there all the time for everything instead of trying to talk with him? And here’s my suggestion. I really think it’s out of fear and ignorance. And what do I mean by that? The Bible is tangible, right? It’s it’s physical. You can pick it up, you can touch it, you can flip the pages, you can feel it, right? And God is not so tangible. Seeking God can be hard. He can sometimes feel distant and elusive. It’s just easier to grab something that’s

That is tangible rather than something that feels intangible. I get that. I totally live that way for so many years. But here’s the thing: the Bible was never meant to replace God. It was never meant to replace him. Sometimes God’s gonna direct you to the written word.

He is clear in that he wants us to read it. He wants us to know it, to study it, to memorize it. Okay? We get that. We’re not diminishing that in any way. But technically, hear me out. You don’t actually need the Bible. You can get all of your answers from God Himself. You can go directly to Him and have a personal conversation about anything and everything. Think about it. There are so many Bible characters that didn’t ever have anything written. They never had anything written down that they could access, and yet they walked close.

With God. You can have the same thing. It is possible. Think of it. Adam and Eve, they never had anything written that they could look at or read. Methuselah, Enoch, Job, Abraham. Abraham was God’s friend. And he never had anything in writing. All of his friendship was based on direct communication with the Lord Himself. And think about it too. Moses is the one who actually very first got the law in a tangible form, right? On the stone tablets when he went up the mountain and talked to.

God. Moses until that point never had anything written, and yet he had a very close relationship with God. And so you don’t actually need the Bible to walk closely with him.

The whole reason that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments is because the children of Israel had just come out of slavery. They had been living hundreds of years where they didn’t have hardly any access to the Lord. And so this was a way for him to begin shifting their mindsets from a slavery mindset to, yeah, we’re God’s chosen people, right? We’re God’s children. And how do we live like that? Well, let me give you these commandments to get you started. And then if you will start spending time with me, I will show you, right? That was the whole point of.

Having it written down was to help them with the areas where they were really struggling with the wrong mentality, and I believe it’s similar today. That’s what the Bible does for us, but we don’t actually have to have it to be successful and do the things that God wants us to do in the world. Okay, think about it. There are so many still, so many languages that don’t have a Bible translation, right? There’s still so many remote tribes on other continents where they don’t have a physical Bible, they never get to read it for themselves, they can hear the

truth through missionaries and they’re still getting saved and they’re still getting going to heaven but they never actually pick up or touch or read a Bible. God can accomplish anything. He doesn’t need a Bible to do it. So the common Christian belief that we cannot live without having a Bible let’s push back on that a little bit. Okay? the thing that God wrote down is not more important than God himself, Can God work

In people’s lives without them ever reading or hearing the written word. Of course, he can, because it was never about the Bible itself, right? It was about the message that God put in the Bible. And that message was there years before the Bible ever came to fruition in a physical, tangible form. Okay? So I’m just challenging you, be careful not to depend more on the written word than you do God Himself. He has a lot more to say than what he wrote in his book, and that is really.

important that we grasp that.

Don’t be like the Pharisees, right? When Jesus walked on the earth, they were so hung up on what was written and doing exactly how it was written that they missed out. They focused on the law rather than cultivating a relationship with the word himself. They missed out on so much. Let’s not do that. Let’s pay attention to how much weight we’re putting on the Bible versus how much weight we’re putting on our relationship and our conversations with God Himself. God was very clear that we don’t get

To mess with the Bible. And I want to point this out because I’ve heard this several times. There’s several scriptures that talk about not altering the written word. Absolutely. One specifically rel Revelation 22, verse 18 and 19. It talks about if anybody adds to the words of this book or takes away from the words of this book, there’s gonna be all these curses that come on them. So we as humans don’t get to change anything. But here’s the thing: the Bible never says anything about God Himself.

having anything extra to say about him wanting to add anything else to what he wrote in the scripture. So that is a a misunderstanding. the Bible is a message that God gave us and God s can still talk to us about other things that he didn’t actually address in the scripture. So it’s an important tool. It helps us stay close to God. It helps us live a righteous life. It helps us fight

The enemy, right? We quote it, we have so much power and authority over the enemy, and you know, praying scripture gives so much power and punch to our prayers. But the Bible is not our only tool to live by, okay? God was speaking long before his message was put into written form, And he’s gonna continue speaking after his message is put in written form. All right, he’s not gonna stop speaking just because some of what he wanted to say is.

Is now written down. He is literally right next to you. He wants to chat with you. He wants to communicate. So let’s not constantly pick up the book. Let’s choose to go to him more often. How would you feel? Think about this for a second. How would you feel if you wrote a book and then people stopped talking with you? How would you feel?

What if they just kept walking right by you and picked up that physical gift that you had created for them? This tangible item that you gave them as a gift to enhance their life, they’re much more interested in that item than they are in you. How sad, right? Wouldn’t that hurt your feelings? Think about it. Think about how God feels when we’re constantly picking up the written word and not choosing to communicate with him or include him in our day.

Truth revelation.

It doesn’t have to be biblical to come from the Lord. Okay? Hear me on this. It doesn’t have to be biblical to come from the Lord. God is not limited by what he wrote in his book. God is not limited by what he wrote in his book. He has a lot more to say. I hope I’ve really made you think. I hope I’ve challenged some, perspectives. You know, some of us, especially those who grow up in church, we hear certain things that just make sense and they sound right on. And they’re

just slightly off, anyhow just those things to think about.

As you go about your week, let’s explore the depths of this final thought, okay? Where has it felt easier to grab the Bible and flip through the pages rather than tune your ears to hear God’s voice and lean into what he is currently trying to say to you? Where can you begin to rely less on the written word and more on the word himself? Bless you, friend. I hope you have a wonderful week. See you next time.