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Bibleline Bibleline, here God’s word on Bibleline, here God’s truth on Bibleline. Welcome to Bibleline with Dr. Ralph Yankee, pastor of Calvary Community Church in Tampa, Florida. Clearly declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ through the radio and the internet. Your regular prayers and monthly support make it possible for Bibleline to continue on the air. You can reach us toll-free at 1-800-576-3771. Online donations may be made by clicking on the donations link on the BibleLineMinistries.org homepage. We pray that you will enjoy our commitment to the clear gospel of Jesus Christ and that today’s first part of this two-part message will be a blessing to you and your family.

If you will, take your Bible. I want to share a few things with you. Look in the book of John in chapter 14, and we’ll look at that just a moment, but we’re always trying to eliminate the possibilities of the devil getting victory over your life. You can’t see him. He’s an enemy, but he’s real. He’s just as real as God is real. And you know what he did to Adam and Eve in the garden? Well, he did to Eve anyway.

He deceived her. words he lied to her, have God said, oh you’re not going toplugin surely die, he was deceptive. And the biggest thing that the devil does is getting people to believe that the Bible is not true. And I believe something that affects Christians lives, those who believe that the Bible is the word of God, is that many times people believe that the Bible is the word of God, but it has mistakes in it. You know, there’s contradictions in the Bible.

So if he can get you to believe that one part of the Scriptures isn’t really true, he can convince you of another section. And another section, after a while, you’ll have doubts about any of it. Well, when you can’t trust it, and you don’t know exactly what part to trust and what part not to, after a while, you won’t trust any of it. It affects your faith in the Lord. So therefore I want to try to give you a few things to help you.

Now, I never tried to translate the scriptures. I believe we’ve already had some proficient translators of the scriptures. There’s a lot of different translations out there. I use the King James because I believe it’s the most accurate translation that there is. Therefore, I use it, I trust it. And I believe that when they translated it, they use the right words to convey the words that we needed to understand And I do not believe in devil inspiration. I don’t believe they were inspired of God.

You know, sometimes people read a book and say, oh, I was just so inspired. Well, that’s a different word that news for inspiration. Inspiration means God breathed. God breathed life into His Word. And when you trust Christ as your Savior, God gives you new life. So it is important to believe that the Word of God is true. Because the devil is going to try to get you not to depend upon the Lord even though you may have trusted him to save you, you have eternal life.

But whether or not you really believe that what God says is the truth can affect your whole Christian life. I have staked my whole Christian life on the authority of this book. I believe that it’s true. Therefore I’ve tried to make decisions for my life based upon what this book says. And I don’t believe that it’s filled with mistakes and contradictions. I don’t look for them. And so I do not try to translate the Bible, but I do try to use whatever means available to try to interpret what it really says, which every person can seek to understand what does he really mean by what is said.

And so there’s nothing wrong in studying the Word of God seeking truth and using the means that we have our reasoning power, everything about us, the reading, the studying, the comparing, all these things, seeking to understand. But there’s a few things that I think is good for guidelines in your life. A passage of the Holy Scriptures is to be taken as true in its natural literal sense. In other words, if what you read seems to make sense, then seek no other sense.

chances are if it makes sense, that’s probably what it means. Unless you read it, sometime it seemed like there could be another meaning to it and the passage seems to give you some problems and you might. Find that it might dictate otherwise. That the reason that you have may not be as accurate as you think it ought to be. Remember, every one of us who have trusted Christ as Savior have the indwelling Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit indwelling us is the author of this book, and that’s why it’s so important.

Now, our attitude toward the Scriptures should be the same kind of an attitude that Jesus Christ and the Apostles had toward His Word. and you’ll find out that Jesus Christ and the apostles both had great confidence in the reliability of the Scriptures. Therefore, they utterly trusted the Scriptures and all that it contains in it. And they believe that it must govern the Interpreters’ practice. We often call it the faith of rule and practice. In other words, it’s for what we believe and how we live.

So we should approach the Bible with the same kind of an attitude that they had. We rely upon it and believe that it is the truth, that it is the source of our authority for our whole lives. In teaching the kids in my Cultivangelism class, I say one of the things that you find about a cult, There’s a lot of religions in the world. And just because it’s a religion and people are sincere does not mean that it’s of God.

And you have some religions started by men. You have some religions that were started by women. And you have LNG white that started a religion, Seventh-day Adventists. And you got Christian science. And it’s like great nuts flakes. It’s not Christian, it’s not science. It’s not grapes, and it’s not nuts. Well. You have a lot of extra biblical source of authority. Jehovah’s Witnesses have extra biblical source of authority. And you find out that these other ones have written books and they call it an extra biblical source of authority.

In other words, not just the Bible, but their own writings are compared or even equal to are in some cases more accurate than the Bible. Like a Jehovah’s Witness will tell you that the Bible is good, but you must understand that you need to read the Bible through the lens of their literature to rightly divide it. If you lay their literature aside and only study the Bible, you can go blind. You will not understand the Bible at all, but you need their writing.

So, extra biblical sources of authority should not be used by God’s people in order to truly get the true meaning of scripture. Now, you can use people’s writings, You can check with strong concordance and other books and dictionaries and whatever, but remember, the source of authority must be the scriptures. Very seldom do you hear me say, I know this is true because Hank said, or I know this is true because Dr. Stanford said, or I know this is true because Dr.

Cambrian says, they are not the source of authority. The Word of God is the authority and so Remember this extra biblical data cannon should be put to critical Questions to a text which is nothing wrong in looking at a text and say I don’t understand it And so I might use somebody else’s understanding to try to help understand it But that understanding cannot say this is true because It’s still the Word of God is truth thy word is truth sanctified thy word because the Word of God is the truth of God, and it must be as reliable as God is reliable.

The Word of God must be as true and real as God and the Holy Spirit. Do we can trust them? We must be able to trust this book and what it has to say. But only Scripture itself can legitimately answer questions about itself. When you read and study the Bible, the Bible has an uncanny way of teaching itself what it means. It’s just most people don’t like to spend the time studying the book. I’ve mentioned this before. I didn’t get much time to do it while I was in Bible college, but once I left Bible college and I knew what they had told me the Bible said.

Now I needed to find out what do I believe. So I begin to study the Bible and some nights I would read all night long, not even go to sleep at night. I would just get so engrossed I wanted to find out this, find out that I would check and study and cross-reference and I’d be reading the whole book of Jeremiah through in one night, the whole book of Isaiah and I’d go to Daniel’s in Revelation and I just absorbed myself in because I just had to know.

I didn’t want to say the Bible says in the Bible didn’t say that or to quote somebody and what they said that doesn’t make it truth. Now you can learn a lot of things from people. I love a lot. But you can also learn a lot of air. So you must understand truth to discern air. So when you know what the Bible does say, you know what somebody else says about the Bible isn’t true. But without truth, you cannot discern air.

This is why there are so many people today, so many churches that do not make the gospel simple, clear. How many times have you heard that you have to be good to go to heaven? And yet the Bible doesn’t say you have to be good. The Bible says you have to be what? Perfect. Perfect to go to heaven. And if I say, I’m going to heaven and you’ve got to be perfect to get there. You look at me and say, you hypocrite.

Are you trying to tell me you’re perfect? Well in God’s eyes, yes I am. I’m not perfect in my own righteousness. I had a righteousness that was given to me by God. He gave me the righteousness of his Son. You see when I believed that when Christ died, he died for me. So Christ paid for my sins, gave me His righteousness. I’m going to heaven on His righteousness, not mine. When you and I examine my life or I examine your life, I’m gonna find a lot of fault and mistakes.

You’re gonna make a lot of blunders. You and I can still see. We, I was a sinner saved by grace, and I got news for you. I’m still a sinner, but I’m saved by grace. But every one of us are saved by grace and grace alone. Not because of anything we’ve done, but because we accepted Christ as our Savior and He gives us this free gift of eternal life. Now, when we read the Bible and seek to understand what it’s talking about, we should employ all the scholarly wisdom that people have come up with and spent years studying because you can save a lot of time learning what other people have dug up from the scriptures.

And so that’s why you go to church. You go to church and you listen to the preacher. Well, the thing about an advantage of that is he’s supposed to believe certain things in the Bible. And so all the people are supposed to have a Bible and read the Bible so that you can say, okay, he said this, and he said this. He said this, and that’s not in the Bible, that’s not right. So the authority is in the book, and you can check the preacher and make sure the preacher is right.

Otherwise you can be swept along by every wind of doctrine that comes along, but you need to know what you believe it, why you believe it, and stand upon what the word of God says. We can guide you into what the word of God says, but remember, you have the Holy Spirit living within you to help you to see and understand what the scripture has to say. Let me give you this and make sure you understand it correctly. You don’t try to interpret the Bible.

come to the real meaning of the scriptures by your experiences you have in life. I know the Bible is true because I had this experience one time. Well, you’re not an accurate interpreter of all of your experiences in the application of the scripture, so that’s not a good move on your part. There’s a lot of people who seek to understand the Bible by their experiences they have in. You can have a lot of different kinds of experiences. I’ve been in the hospital where I’ve had people in there and says, Pastor, last night, right where you’re standing, Jesus appeared to me.

You say, now do I believe that? No, I do not believe that. I don’t believe nobody has seen him. I believe when he comes back, there’ll be no mistake. When he comes back for us, he’s gonna change us in a moment, twinkle of an eye and caught up to meet the Lord in the air. And then when he comes back seven years later, there’s going to be a light to shine to eat as far as the east is to the west and everybody’s going to see him.

He’s going to be coming from heaven. And the Bible says he’ll have an army with him and there’s going to be multitudes and multitudes of people that will be with him. And there’ll be no mistake who it is. I asked one person one time they said, I saw Jesus. I said, have you ever seen him before? Well, now this was the first time. I said, how do you, how do you recognize him? How do you know it was him?

How do you know you’re not deceived? You can’t trust stuff like that. You don’t put confidence in your experiences and you don’t trust your reasoning power. Doesn’t the Bible make this statement that your thoughts are not his thoughts and that your ways are not his ways. For his ways and his thoughts are higher than yours. And just because you have thoughts about God, doesn’t mean that’s the way God is. Like the daddy says to the little girl as she was drawing a picture, she says, what are you drawing, honey?

Well, I’m drawing a picture of God. Well, nobody knows what God looks like. Oh, they will when I get through. And so there’s people who draw pictures of what they think God is like, and then tell you this is what he’s like. It doesn’t matter how your imagination can run wild, so you don’t trust your reasoning power. And you don’t trust your feelings. So you don’t use your feelings, you don’t use your reasoning, and you don’t use your experiences in life as the proof of this is how I know this verse means this.

No. The verse means that because the verse means that. It has nothing to do with what goes on in your life. Believe what the scripture says. As you read the scriptures you will find at times there are difficult scriptures that seems to come. to dick each other. But there’s something that I’d like to just read to you this one little statement. A parent’s scriptural difficulties should be perused with unreasonable limits.

The interpreter must leave the problem open rather than by assuming air, impugned the absolute truthfulness of God who inspired all holy scripture for our salvation and learning, just because you don’t understand what it means. Don’t automatically assume the men God used to write the scriptures messed up. The manuscripts were corrupted or… Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But maybe you got a bad translation. Maybe you just don’t want to admit you don’t understand it. That doesn’t mean that God is in error, that the writers God use are in error, or that the original manuscripts and the copies even are in error.

It could be you are in error. Is that a possibility that you just don’t really understand the scriptures? Now, here in the book of John in chapter 14, I want you to look at the scripture with me. So, again, John chapter 14, verse 26, so we have the witness of the Lord using the apostles. Now Christ in advance told how some of His apostles were going to be able to write the Scriptures and how are they going to remember everything that they’re supposed to remember?

It’s an interesting question but I believe it’s answerable. So you look there in John chapter 14, look in verse 26. Now remember, we sometimes take verses and apply them to ourselves, but in reality this was written as he’s talking to his disciples. So in verse 26 he says, but the comforter, which is the Holy Ghost whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you.

So he’s already said this to them and he’s going to quicken their mind by the Holy Spirit so they will remember everything he said to them and as you read some of the Scriptures you’ll find out they understood not what he said. This was a heart set they didn’t get it but he says now when the Holy Spirit come upon you, you are going to remember everything that I told you. Now that’s a good promise in the Word of God.

Now we know that the Holy Spirit that indwells us is a great comforter. He comforts us with the Scriptures. He talks about the peace of God, the joy of the Lord. Those are things that God wants to give you. He says my peace and my joy I give that nobody can take away from you. Well this is because you’re learning how to trust the Lord for things in your life that you can’t manipulate, you can’t change, you can’t alter, but your peace and joy is not going to be because of the wonderful experiences that you’re having in life.

You could have some of the most terrible things in the world happening to you but still have peace and still have joy because it comes from the Lord, not because of happenings. So you’ll notice here in chapter 14 of John. Look there in, well let’s look over to chapter 16. Chapter 16, look in verse 12. Verse 12 down to verse 15. And notice what it says in verse 12, I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them now.

How be it? When he the Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth is come. He will guide you into all truth. Now, he’s talking to his disciples. They are going to be writing Holy Scriptures in the future. He says, he will guide you into all truth, for he shall not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear that shall he speak, and he will guide you or shall show you things to come. So we know that John was shown things that was coming down the road, the prophecies and so forth.

There were individuals who wrote Scripture talking about Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, and Romans, and Corinthians, and all these. Everything they would remember. You talk about total recall. They would remember it. Now, I’d love to take these verses and tell the kids in college. If you study real hard, the Holy Spirit will bring these things to your remembrance. Well, I might be a tad telling them something that’s not totally true, but it makes them study a little bit harder.

And if they will study it enough, they can remember it. But I believe this verse goes further than what you and I use as we study the Scriptures and we depend upon the Holy Spirit. things. Here he’s talking about the inspiration of the scriptures in advance and how they’re going to be able to write what they wrote because the Holy Spirit would tell them what to write. And holy men of God wrote as they were moved or guided along by the Holy Spirit.

So the Holy Spirit came. Now when they were in the upper room the Bible says that Jesus Christ breathed on them and said receive ye the Holy Spirit. Now they may have received it but that’s not the same as been baptized by by the Holy Spirit on that day of Pentecost, where they were indwelled by the Holy Spirit, but it came upon them and he spent forty days teaching them all kinds of things to remember and write it into Scripture.

Now that’s a little bit of what I believe. So do you know where I’m coming from? Look here in verse 12. I have yet many things to say. And then notice what he says down here in verse 14, he shall glorify me for he shall receive of mine and shall show it unto you. All things that the Father hath are mine. Therefore said I that he shall take of mine and shall show it unto you.” So this is a promise that I believe that God is going to tell them what to teach, what to write, and it would be Holy Scripture.

Now take your Bible look in the book of Acts in chapter 1, the book of Acts in chapter 1. The book of Acts is a continuation, as you would say, maybe of the book of Luke. God used the same writer and He says that this is a continuation of what Jesus began to do and to teach. So here in chapter 1, notice what He says in verse 2, until the day in which He was taken up, after that He through the Holy Ghost, hath given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen, that he, through the Holy Ghost, had given commandments unto the apostles.

He had told them what he wanted them to do. Now this I believe is more than just the great commission that he gave on the day that he had told them to go into all the world and preach the gospel of them, but there’s more than just the gospel because he told them to teach whatever I have commanded you and now he’s fulfilling that responsibility in those 40 days before Jesus Christ had been after he had been taken up and 10 days later the Holy Spirit came on that day of Pentecost.

So turning your Bible down to the book of 2 Peter chapter 1. You and I should believe that the Bible is the Word of God. So here in 2 Peter chapter 1 and verse 21, we’d covered before our last winds denied about the, and been an eyewitness of His majesty when He was on the Mount of Transfiguration. So what He saw, what He heard, but we have a more sure word of prophecy and that’s the written scriptures. And a lot of confidence is put upon the scriptures.

So in verse 21, for the prophecy came out in old time by the will of man. In other words, man did not decide this book. It was not the will of man. This is the will of God. This is called the Word of God, not the Word of man. This is God’s Word, holy Word, given to us. You see, God could reveal his power through the things that he made, but you couldn’t know God. So God revealed himself through his son and through the Word itself.

So that we have special divine revelation, not just a natural revelation where we know there’s a God But through the book we can know God know what he’s like know how to be saved know how to get to heaven But will you take away this Bible and man has no knowledge about a lot of things that going on this world? We would have a clue what are we doing here? We would be like the lost people in this world that has no inside knowledge We know the truth.

We know what’s going on. We know how it’s going to end. We know what’s right ahead of us. And we don’t have to guess. God’s already told us. And so we have been so blessed. But look what that verse says. But holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. They were moved and guided along by the Holy Spirit. Now, I wrote a little statement down that I thought it was pretty cute. The word of God…

Is by the God of the word. The word of God is by the God of the word. Man didn’t get his human wisdom into this book. What’s in this book reveals the wisdom of God. And yes, God can use man. And like we said, the mold was man, but the word, the gold was God. So God can pour that goal into different shapes of vessels, and it takes upon the image of the person, but that’s because God knows every individual and can use what a man knows.

And in some cases in the Old Testament, it says they wrote and understood not what they wrote. They had to study what God meant when he talked about the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow. So all these things are very, very important. and 2 Peter in chapter 1, looking in verse 16. In verse 16 he talked about being an eye witness. And this was upon the monotransfiguration that we talked about before. Now, I want you to look right there since we’re real close, 2 Peter and chapter 3.

2 Peter chapter 3 and looked there in verse 15. You know there was a time in the book of Galatians where the apostle Peter came down from Jerusalem And he calls a little stir. What he did is Paul had a church down there in Antioch and Peter comes down there, the great apostle, and split it. He split his church. He did some things that was not comparable to the gospel. It did not become the gospel. It was something that was a compromise.

He was given legitimacy to the legalistic Judaizers. And so what they said was true and he was afraid of them. And so out of fear, he was a Compromiser. Now who, and ever thought the first pope would have been like that, but here in the book of 2 Peter, chapter 15, I need to correct that, he was not the first pope. I thought I’d been to say that. In verse 15, an account that the long suffering of our Lord is salvation.

The reason that God is so patient is God wants everyone to be saved. Now look what he says about the great apostle Paul, Peter, what he says about Paul. He says even as our beloved brother Paul, also according to the wisdom, get this, given unto him, hath written unto you. So he’s telling them the wisdom that he wrote was given to him. It wasn’t manufactured by him. It’s not about the wisdom of the apostle Paul. Have you heard about Bibleline Institute, the online Bible College of Bibleline Ministries?

There are 11 different Bible College courses to choose from, and for this month we’d like to give you a free enrollment to the class Personal Evangelism taught by Dr. Arnold. For your gift to Bibleline Ministries in any amount, you’ll have full use of the 10-hour course which you can access whenever you like as often as you’d like it’s online. The classes include video instruction, lecture notes, quizzes, and if you’d like to send a quiz, you can submit it. Again, it’s all online.

When you send in your gift, please include your email address and we’ll enroll you in the class personal evangelism. Our mailing address is 4811 George Road, Tampa, Florida, 33634. Again, don’t forget to include your email address or contact information. God bless you and thank you again for supporting By the Land. Thanks for joining us on Bibleline. If you are in the area, we welcome you to visit us. The address for Calvary Community Church is 4811 George Road, Tampa, Florida, 33634.

And now, a closing thought from Pastor Arnold. Friend, one day it will happen. The trumpet will sound. And we will be changed. Caught up to meet the Lord in the air. So live today and every day. Believing that the Lord is coming soon, just keep looking up.