Devotion to the Scriptures | 2 Timothy 3:14-17
Brian Hedges | December 29, 2024
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to 2 Timothy 3.
While you’re turning there, let me read this quotation from John Wesley, who was the father of Methodism, the great revivalist and evangelist from the eighteenth century. Wesley said,
“I am a creature of a day. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God. I want to know one thing: the way to heaven. God himself has condescended to teach me the way. He has written it down in a book. Oh, give me that book at any price! Give me the book of God. Let me be a man of one book.”
That prayer is a good prayer for all of us to pray. “Let me be a man, let me be a woman of one book.” Especially as we are about to turn into a new year, 2025, I want us to think about devotion to the Scriptures. And especially in the new year, it’s a good time to set some new plans, to choose your Bible reading plan for the year, to maybe set some new goals for your devotional life.
Now this is just kind of a one-off sermon, and this is going to be an instruction-heavy sermon, where we’re going to look at a number of different things together from 2 Timothy 3 and try to get practical, in the last point especially, and look at some ways in which we can devote ourselves to the Scriptures in the coming year.
Let’s begin by reading this passage, 2 Timothy 3:14-17. Many of you will be familiar with this passage, one of the clearest passages in Scripture on the nature of Scripture itself. Paul is writing to his young son in the faith, Timothy. And he says,
“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
This is God’s word.
I want us to look at three things together this morning:
1. The Source of Scripture
2. The Function of Scripture
3. Our Engagement with Scripture
1. The Source of Scripture
Number one—and we can be brief on this one—the source of the Scriptures. Where do the Scriptures come from? What does the Scripture claim for itself? And for most of you, this will not be new, but I think it’s worth stating again that the Scriptures are the word of God. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God.” So Paul here is claiming something for the Scriptures. He is claiming that the Scriptures are the product of the breath of God, they come to us from the mouth of God, that they are the word of God.
The breath of God in Scripture is a metaphorical way of describing God’s powerful work through his Spirit and his word. So for example, Psalm 33:6 says, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their hosts.” God created by his word and by his breath.
You might remember Genesis 2:7, when it says that “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.”
God created by his word, by his breath; and that same divine, creative, life-giving breath of God is the source from which we get what Paul calls here the sacred writings, the Scriptures.
Now, Peter expresses a similar idea when he says in 2 Peter 1:21 that “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” It’s important that we get that idea clear in our minds. When we talk about the Bible being the Word of God, we mean that God, in some mysterious sense, is the author of Scripture.
Now that does not mean that the Scriptures do not have human authors, and we know in fact that they do. The Scriptures were written by human authors, and those human authors left the stamp of their personality and their culture and their time upon their writings. You read the writings of John; they’re very different than the writings of Paul. You read the writings of the New Testament authors; they’re quite different from the writings of the Old Testament prophets. The Scriptures were written by men in a particular time and place, with particular language and culture; and it bears all the marks of that enculturation.
Yet the Scriptures themselves claim that these sacred writings come to us from the mouth of God and that they are the very word of God. So in a mysterious way they are both words written by these particular men in a particular place in history and also the word of God.
I could give you a more lengthy defense for the Scriptures making that claim, not only of the Old Testament Scriptures but of the New Testament Scriptures. Now, my guess is that most of us in this room already believe that, and so I don’t need to do an apologetics-type sermon. But maybe there are some of you who just have that nagging question in the back of your mind. “How do we know that this is really true? How do we know that the Scriptures are what they claim to be, that the Scriptures are the word of God? How do we know that somebody didn’t just make this up and that this isn’t all just make-believe and not even accurate?”
There are really a couple of answers to that question. One answer is to look at the evidence for the historical reliability of the Scriptures. I would just point you to a slim little book by a man named Peter Williams that’s called Can We Trust the Gospels? This is a short book; it’s a fairly easy read. Peter Williams is just looking at the four Gospels here, but he’s building a case for the historical reliability, the historical veracity of the Gospels.
He has a chapter called “Did the Gospel Writers Know Their Stuff?” It’s quite interesting, because he looks at the kinds of things that you most likely just pass over when you’re reading the Bible. He looks at geography. He looks at the names of cities and regions and bodies of water. He looks at botany—plants and animals and things like that—from the region of Judea. He looks at these things in detail, and you have to remember that in the first century there’s there’s no Google Earth, there’s no Google Maps, there’s no Internet by which to research these things. There’s not an Encyclopedia Britannica, there’s not a Rand McNally Atlas. There are none of these things, and yet the gospel writers write with incredible detail and accuracy about the persons and the places and the culture and the manners and the customs of that time. And it shows that they wrote with eyewitness detail, that they wrote with firsthand knowledge of the place in which they lived.
It’s a very strong argument that these are historical records by eyewitnesses that were written very close to the time in which these events took place. And Williams contrasts this with some of the other so-called gospels, such as the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. These are gospels that came much later. They did not come from the confessing Christian church, but they came from aberrant sects, kind of offshoots that were characterized by false teaching, and they don’t have this kind of detail. There’s a distinct difference between the false gnostic gospels and the gospel records that we have in the Bible. It’s just a strong argument for the historical reliability of the Scriptures.
That’s part of the answer to, “How do we know?” If these records are accurate about that, well, that gives us reason to think that they’re accurate about the truths that they are declaring as well.
But the other answer is simply to ask another question. How do you know that there is a sun? Well, you know that there’s a sun because when you walk outside you see by the light of the sun. And on most days (not today), you’re going to feel the heat of the sun on your face. Right? You see the light of the sun in the sky. Even today, on a cloudy, rainy day, we still see by the light of the sun, but you don’t need an astronomical argument to prove to you that the sun is there. It’s self-evidently there.
In a very similar way, there’s something about the Scriptures that is self-attesting, that God himself speaks through the Scriptures. The Scriptures have what John Piper has called a peculiar glory, and the deepest reason why we can have confidence in the Scriptures is because when we read the Scriptures we begin to see that God himself begins to work through them in our hearts and lives.
This was Calvin’s argument, John Calvin the Reformer. He said,
“The highest proof of Scripture derives in general from the fact that God in person speaks in it. The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his word, so also the word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what has been divinely commanded.”
If you will read the Scriptures, if you will open your Bibles, it is the Holy Spirit who speaks through those Scriptures, and you’ll begin to hear the voice of God speaking through them in a way that attests to their reality.
So the source of Scripture is the Holy Spirit, God himself. The Scriptures are breathed out by God.
2. The Function of Scripture
Now, what is the function of Scripture? Point number two, the function or the use or the purpose of Scripture. And what I want us to do now is just think for a few minutes about five reasons for which God has given us the Scriptures as they are recorded here in 2 Timothy 3.
(1) The first reason is salvation. This is what we might call the evangelistic function of Scripture. The evangel is the gospel, the euangelion, the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s the good news. And the chief and the primary reason why God has given us the Scriptures is because in the Scriptures he is pointing us to the gospel of Jesus Christ by which we are saved.
You see this in verse 15, where Paul says, “From a child you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.”
Now, listen: the biggest question that any of us can ever try to answer for ourselves is this question, What happens to me after I die? What is the answer to the problem of sin and suffering and death in this world? Is there an afterlife? Is there a way for me to know that my life will continue after I die? Is there eternal life?
The Scriptures answer that question by pointing us to the salvation that is through faith in Jesus Christ.
Listen, you can know a lot about the Bible. You can read the Bible, study the Bible, and miss Jesus. And if you know a lot about the Bible but you miss Jesus, you’ve missed the main point. Jesus even said this to Bible scholars of his day. He confirmed them and he said, “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life, but they testify of me and you will not come to me that you might have life.”
Don’t miss Jesus in your study of the Bible. The Scriptures testify to Christ, they point to Chris, they are able to make us wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
It’s one reason why I love that old nineteenth century Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, because he was so relentlessly Christ-centered in his preaching. Over and over again he is pointing people to Jesus Christ. He is preaching the gospel, and Spurgeon said,
“From every town, village, and little hamlet in England, wherever it may be, there’s a road to London; and so from every text in Scripture there’s a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is, Christ. Your business then is when you get to a text to say, ‘What is the road to Christ?’ and then preach a sermon running along the road towards that great metropolis, Christ.”
“Faith comes by hearing and hearing through the word of Christ.” And in your engagement with the Scriptures in 2025, don’t miss Jesus. Look for Jesus. Look for Christ. Look for the connections to Christ in all the parts of Scripture.
That’s the first function: salvation, the evangelistic function.
(2) Then secondly, there is an instructive function, and you see this in the word “teaching” in verse 16. Paul says that this God-breathed Scripture is “profitable” or useful or beneficial for teaching, or the old King James says for doctrine. And this is a word that is used probably a dozen or more times in the pastoral letters—1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus. It’s a word that is often joined with another word where you have this emphasis on sound doctrine or, maybe better, healthy teaching.
It really just carries the idea of instruction, and it’s instruction that leads to health, that leads to spiritual health. It’s instruction that nourishes us, and this can be instruction about both what we generally think of as doctrinal theological categories, such as the doctrine of God or the doctrine of Christ, but it’s also the practical instruction for living life. So it’s instruction about our character, about our relationships, and about ethics, and how we are to live in the world. All of that is teaching or doctrine in Scripture. Really, what the Scriptures are doing is giving us a set of lenses through which to view the world so that we can see the world accurately as it really is.
Some of you know that I have an eye disorder called keratoconus, and so I can’t see without corrective lenses. And in fact, it’s so bad, I can’t even see with glasses. I need gas-permeable hard lenses. So without the lenses in, I could be sitting across the table from you, and I could see that there’s a person there, but I wouldn’t be able to make the expression out on your face. That’s how blind I am without these lenses. But with the lenses, that corrects the disorder in my vision, and I’m able to see clearly what’s before me.
The lenses just help me see with more accuracy the world as it really is, and that’s what the Scriptures are like. The Scriptures are corrective lenses. Through its teaching, through its worldview, through its doctrine, the Scriptures help us understand human nature, human life, the nature of the world in which we live, who God is, what he is doing, how do we understand suffering, how do we understand evil in the world. The Scriptures give us the lenses for understanding that, and that’s why we need doctrine. That’s why we need the Scriptures, because the Scriptures help us to see clearly by instructing us and shaping our view of the world.
(3) There’s another reason the Scriptures are given. Here’s the third function, what we might call the diagnostic function of Scripture, and it’s the word “reproof.”
When you read the Scriptures, something begins to happen in your life. You start reading and you realize that not only are you reading this book, but this book is reading you. You start reading Scriptures and the Scriptures are like a mirror; it begins to show you yourself. It begins to diagnose the problems in your heart. You can’t read the Scriptures long with any kind of personal application without feeling conviction. You begin to feel conviction of your sin. You begin to see parts of your life that need to change. The Scripture diagnoses our problem.
This is really the role of the law in Scripture. The law diagnoses what’s wrong with us. It’s important that we understand this, that the law is not given to save us. The law has no healing power, but it does have an important function. The law is given to diagnose what’s wrong with our hearts.
Now you might think of going to the doctor. You go to the doctor and maybe you’ve had a pain in your chest or you’re having some kind of symptoms. And if you go to a good doctor, the doctor is going to begin by running you through a series of diagnostic tests. That may include something like getting an x-ray or an MRI or an ultrasound, these imaging diagnostic tools. All of those tools are very useful, because they can help show you what’s wrong with you; but they have no power to heal. You need something else. You need medicine. You need therapy. You need surgery. You need something else to bring about the healing, but you can’t have healing until you really diagnose what’s wrong.
That’s how the law works in Scripture. The law diagnoses us and it reproves us and it shows us what’s wrong with us, but it can’t save us. That’s why Paul says in Romans 3:20, “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law is the knowledge of sin.” The law exposes us, and there are aspects of God’s word that have this function—it is an important function, it’s a needed function in our lives—to expose our hearts to show us what is wrong. That helps prepare our hearts for the gospel.
(4) Number four, the healing, restorative, corrective function of Scripture, which you see in the next word, the word for correction. It’s the word epanorthosis. Maybe you can hear the root word of our word “orthodontist.” It’s a word that literally means to straighten. Just as an orthodontist works to straighten teeth, and orthodoxy is straight teaching and straight worship, correct worship and doctrine and so on; so this word carries the idea of straightening out what is crooked, of correcting that which is deformed, of healing that which is diseased.
This is the healing function of Scripture. Of course, the reason why the Scriptures do this is because they point us to Chris, in whom we have salvation. But it’s not just that we get saved from sin and saved from hell and receive eternal life; this salvation includes restoring us in the divine image. It includes healing the broken parts of our hearts and our lives. It includes maturing us as human beings. It includes what we often call sanctification, which is that process by which God makes us more like Christ, makes us right, conforms us to the image of Christ, and begins to make us holy.
This also is one of the functions of Scripture. Psalm 107:20 says, “He sent out his word and healed them and delivered them from their destruction.”
Jesus, when he prayed in John 17, said, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”
Listen, brothers and sisters: we’re never going to really grow in grace and in holiness until the word of God has its proper place in our lives. We need the Scriptures. You need the word of God for its washing and cleansing and restoring and healing properties. You’re not going to be a healthy person if you don’t have healthy teaching and you don’t have this corrective function of Scripture in your heart.
(5) Then there’s one more, training, and maybe we would say also equipping. So Paul says that the Scriptures are useful for “training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
This is what we might think of as the formative function of Scriptures. And here we might think of the Scriptures as a gymnasium through which we exercise our spiritual muscles and we grow healthy. It’s literally training in right living. That’s what training in righteousness is. It’s training us to live in a right kind of way.
Just as if you want to progress in physical fitness and physical health, you actually have to exercise, you have to do something with your body, you have to discipline your body and what you put into it and what you do with it—in the same way, for you to be spiritually fit requires a kind of spiritual discipline and exercise and training, and the Scriptures are the primary tool that leads us in that process.
So these five functions of the Scripture, these are really motivations. These are reasons why you and I need the Scriptures and reasons why we should be called to a fresh devotion to the Scriptures in the new year. So how do we do this?
3. Our Engagement with Scripture
That’s the third point, our engagement with the Scriptures. How is it that we engage with the Scriptures?
Notice that Paul is exhorting Timothy to continue in what he has learned, and he’s reminding him that from a child he had been acquainted with these sacred writings. Now he doesn’t give detail as to how to continue and what that acquaintance with the sacred writings looks like, but I want to give you a practical way to think about this, and it comes from the English Reformer Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of the Church of England back in the sixteenth century, in the very first Book of Common Prayer, in the collect for the second Sunday in Advent.
It’s a wonderful prayer; maybe you’ve heard this before. It says,
“Blessed Lord, who has caused all the Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning [now here’s the prayer], grant us that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy word we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Savior, Jesus Christ.”
Now, that’s old English and it’s a mouthful. I just want you to get the five things he’s praying that God would grant that we do, and that is to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Scriptures. And let’s just think about each one of those things. Here are five practical ways that you can engage with the Scriptures in 2025.
(1) Number one, hear. There’s an importance to hearing the word. I’ve already quoted Romans 10:17: “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ.” We need to hear the word, and the primary way we hear the word is through the preaching and the teaching of the word.
I want to urge you in 2025 to commit yourself and your family to weekly worship where you are able to hear the word of God together, and to make this a regular practice in your life—not once a month, not twice a month, but weekly worship with your family, with your household, and with the assembled body of Christ in order to hear the word.
There are all kinds of reasons why we need to do this. Hebrews tells us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together and reminds us that God is now speaking to us through his word, and we need this. We need to hear the word.
One of the things I’ve observed over the years is that when people begin to drift from this, a commitment to the weekly worship of God and the weekly hearing of the word, that is the first step in drifting from God himself. I don’t want you to drift, and I don’t want to drift myself, and that means that we need this commitment to weekly hear the word of God together.
Now I know there are times when you have sick kids or you’re sick or you’re traveling or you’re on vacation. There’s all those kinds of things. I understand the exception to the rule. Listen, that’s why there’s a live stream! That’s why we record things. That’s why you can go back, you can watch the video or you can listen to the message. But commit yourself to this, that every week, no exceptions—even on vacation—you are either going to church together or you’re at least stopping long enough with your family to listen to the preached word together. It will have a tremendous long-term positive effect in your life and in your family. So hear the word of God; that’s first.
(2) Number two, read. Here, the challenge is to commit yourself to consistent personal Bible reading.
Now, there are lots of ways you can do this. It could, of course, be something like a read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan. You could read through the Robert Murray M’Cheyne plan that takes you through the Old Testament once, the New Testament and Psalms twice.
But you don’t necessarily have to read the whole Bible in a year. You could read through the New Testament in a year. You could take smaller chunks, and maybe you’re reading a chapter a day or even a paragraph a day. Maybe it’s a parable, maybe it’s a single story, but you’re spending time thinking about that and meditating on that and making some observations of that. But somehow you are on a regular basis engaging in a personal way with the word of God.
Listen, if you miss a day, you don’t beat yourself up and you don’t live with a guilt trip. Instead, you just pick up the next day. You just keep going. Alright? The goal here is not so much to check off, you know, every calendar day of the year as it is to keep yourself in an ongoing relationship with God through his word. But you need a plan to do that. You need to pick a time, pick a place, and have a plan, and do something with intentionality if you are to regularly be in the word.
(3) But not only read the word, mark. The prayer is, “May we hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.” And probably what Cranmer meant by mark is take note of, as in “mark my words.” But one way to do that is to literally mark up your Bible. So the challenge here is to become an active reader.
Have you ever had this experience I’ve had many, many times? I’m reading something, maybe the Bible or something else, but I’m reading something, and I don’t even quite realize that my mind is drifting. Then there’s an interruption—you know, there’s a text on the phone or someone says something to you; somehow you get interrupted—and then you look back down to try to find your place, and you end up reading an entire page again before you realize that you’ve already read it before. Am I the only one this happens to? Okay. Alright. It happens to you too.
So, when we do that, it’s because we are reading passively, not actively. To read actively, you have to do something to get your mind a little bit more engaged. And one very practical way to do that is to get a pen or a highlighter or a colored pencil and to look for something while you read.
Again, there are lots of ways to do this. As you read, you can be highlighting keywords that you see in a passage. You can read through a whole genre of Scripture and look for a key theme or a key word. Years ago, I read through all of the New Testament letters looking for every reference to prayer and highlighted it in orange. So I have a Bible that has a lot of orange in it with every prayer in the New Testament letters.
Something like that. There are lots of ways to do it, an endless variety. Be creative. Think of something that you want to know more about from the Bible, and then pick a part of the Bible and read through and mark up that Bible. And as you do, you will be engaging the text in a more active way, and you will increase your learning exponentially. Become an active reader.
(4) Then number four, learn. Hear, read, mark, learn.
Here I have in mind using tools and developing skills, even taking a class—doing the things that will actually help you become a student of Scripture, and it will help with one of the primary difficulties and objections that I think many people have to reading the Bible.
The Bible is actually a difficult book, and you may feel that. I’ve talked to people who feel this way, and I have felt it as well. The Bible is difficult to understand. For example, there are lots of difficult names of people and places and things. You have Gehazi and Zarephath and Cyrus and Zerubbabel and major prophets and minor prophets and shekels and talents and denarii and temples and tabernacles and sackcloth and ashes. You’ve got these long theological words, what I call the “-ation” words: justification and regeneration and sanctification and so on. And it’s easy to just get lost in the nomenclature, right, and to lose yourself in the vocabulary and to just start kind of zoning out, because you don’t understand what all this stuff means.
So what do you do with that? Do you just quit? I think we have to remind ourselves that anything that’s worth learning requires some effort.
When you were being trained for a job, you had to learn new things. When you went to college and you earned a degree, you had to take classes, you had to learn things. If you’re learning to play an instrument, you’ve got to learn some degree of music. You’ve got to know how to make chords or where the notes are on the piano or some degree of music theory. If you’re learning a language, you have to master the vocabulary. If you’re learning a sport, you’ve got to learn the rules of the game.
We don’t begrudge the effort it takes to learn these things. Why should we think that the most important thing in the world, God’s revelation to us, should not require any effort from us? It does require effort, and it’s our lack of seriousness and intentionality that keeps us from understanding the Bible.
The good news, folks, is that we have almost infinite tools at our disposal. If you get one good study Bible, it will deal with most of those places and names and difficult doctrines in the notes and in the introductions. Or you can get a commentary; you can take a class. We offer Bible study classes that meet on a regular basis, beyond the Sunday morning experience, where there’s interactive discussion about the Bible with a smaller group of people and a whiteboard. You can take notes and do various things together. These are ways to help us be students of the Bible and to learn. You have to learn these skills if you want to learn the Scriptures.
(5) Then, finally, number five, inwardly digest. Here, what we have in mind is the application of the Scriptures to our hearts and lives.
Just as food needs to not only be tasted, it needs to be actually eaten, chewed up, digested, assimilated into our systems; in the same way, we need to do that with the truth of Scripture. It’s not enough to just read it, you actually have to assimilate it. You have to apply it. That’s where you start thinking through the personal application and implications of the Bible to your life. There’s always at least one application in Scripture for your life. There will be a promise to believe, a sin to confess; there’ll be a command to obey; there’ll be a prayer to pray, some truth about Jesus to cherish. There’s always something that you can grab hold of and you can apply to your life that day.
Do you remember the words of James 1:22-25? He says,
“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.”
We need to apply the word to our lives. We come to the word, it’s like this mirror, it’s showing us ourselves, it’s showing us there’s something to change. Application means you make those changes.
The Danish philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard, said this in a sermon on James 1. He says,
“The first requirement is that you must look not at the mirror, observe the mirror, but must see yourself in the mirror. The second requirement is that in order to see yourself in the mirror when you read God’s word, you must remember to say to yourself incessantly, ‘It is I to whom it is speaking. It is I to whom it is speaking.’”
We need to read with that mentality, that this is written for us. It is to me that God addresses his word, that God is speaking, and there’s something for me to apply.
So we’ve seen now the source of Scripture, that this is the God-breathed word of God; the function of Scripture with its fivefold purpose, pointing us to Christ, the evangelistic purpose, but also instructing us and reproving us and correcting and healing us and training us; and then these five ways to engage with Scripture: hear, read, mark, learn, inwardly digest.
Let me end by issuing this challenge to you. As we end 2024 and as we begin in a few days 2025, between now and New Year’s Day, will you take some time to think about the message and to think about your own personal engagement with the Scriptures, the Word of God, and would you prayerfully ask God to lead you in developing your plan for 2025?
What are you going to do in the next year? I’m not saying you have to do any particular thing that I suggested. It doesn’t have to be the Bible through a year; that would be good. It doesn’t have to be journaling, but that would be good. But you pick something, so that you are with intentionality engaging with the word of God in 2025, and you do that prayerfully, asking God to speak to you, to lead you, to guide you, to mature you, to help you grow as a Christian, and especially to help you see more clearly Jesus Christ.
The Scriptures are able to make us wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Search the Scriptures, and as you search the Scriptures, look for Jesus.
Let’s pray together.
Gracious Father, we thank you this morning for your words. Thank you that you are not silent, but you have spoken, and that you’ve spoken in the pages of Scripture, and you’ve spoken through your Son, and that you continue to speak to us individually as your people and assembled together as the church. You speak to us by your Spirit through the pages of the word of God.
We ask you, Lord, to give us ears to hear, to give us eyes to see, and to give us hearts to understand. We pray that you would stir up in our hearts an appetite for the Scriptures. We pray, Lord, that there would be appropriate conviction and motivation in our hearts and lives to repent of any neglect of the Bible in our personal lives, but also a fresh motivation and a hopeful anticipation as we begin a new year with a fresh engagement with your word. Lord, this would all be in vain if your Spirit did not work, and so we pray that you would bless whatever plan we choose, bless our efforts, and as a church that together we would grow in the next year, that this would be the greatest year of spiritual growth that we’ve seen together as a body of believers because of a fresh engagement with your word and the blessing of your Spirit. So, Lord, we ask for that.
As we come now to the Lord’s table, may we remember that the table, like the word, is a means of grace to us, to set Christ before us in his saving work and to invite us to once again trust him with all of our hearts. Help us to do that this morning as we now prepare our hearts. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.