Jesus is the central focus for understanding Scripture, as illustrated by the two disciples walking on the Road to Emmaus and being tutored by the Risen Christ. The Bible is best read through a Christ-centred lens. This hermeneutical approach can reignite faith and deepen biblical understanding. The preacher shares personal experiences and historical anecdotes to illustrate the transformative power of allowing Christ to interpret Scripture, encouraging listeners to prioritise this method in their own study and church life.

Automatically Generated Transcript
[00:00:00] of an example of how Christ used the scriptures and, in particular, how he related the scriptures to himself. And one of the keys to Christianity is to getting right. Where is the central point of Christianity? Where is the central point of the Gospel? And there are some people for whom the central point of the Gospel is how we can please God by keeping the Law. Now that was more in vogue in the Old Testament than it is in the New and does represent a truth that whatever we do in terms of learning how to be New Testament Christians, is not a denial of what the Old Testament has. And there’s much for us to learn by being people who know and use the Old Testament. And indeed, this example that we have here is of Jesus talking to two disciples. This is one of the last passages where Jesus is
[00:01:05] recorded dealing with people in the New Testament. He is about to go back to heaven, and the ascension is going to be close. It’s after his resurrection. but Jesus is talking to them about how they might have used the Old Testament. So it’s a pretty good example, is it not, of how we are to take hold of the truths of the Old Testament, even though they are the site of the old covenant, which has been superseded by the new covenant of the new testament, Jesus being the one who instituted the new covenant. And here as these two people are walking along – and by the way, you can’t help when then you read the scriptures to make some assumptions and reading the Bible reading for us tonight, Nick did make a couple as he read this. Not wrongly, but just they are assumptions.
[00:02:00] He said they’re two men, we don’t know whether they were two men or whether they were a man and a wife. Whatever they were, they lived in one house in the town and the country that they were walking to. And so there is as much reason for them to be a man and wife as there is for them to be two men. And the second assumption that Nick gave, I’ll bring up when we get to it. And it’s not that he’s wrong, it’s just that there are some things that the Bible doesn’t always make exact, because it’s concentrating its purpose somewhere else. Well, he is Jesus.
[00:02:37] He said to them, oh foolish ones. And some people would say that means they must be men. No, no, there are two people and the reason why the foolish has to do with not knowing exactly what is the lesson of tonight, the purpose of us bringing this passage tonight, is how to locate understanding of the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus Christ, through the focus that he brings. But he says,
[00:03:05] foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken Case and immediately there’s visible to us that’s Jesus has in mind the normalcy the fact that it’s right and normal of coming to the Bible with a believing heart you will not be a person who gets very far if you come to the Bible in a way to scrutinize it and accept the things you like and reject object the ones you don’t. Sometimes we talk about that as having an attitude of placing yourself over the Bible or placing yourself under the Scriptures. The latter being what we should do is letting the Scriptures speak to us and correct our thoughts. Rather than doing what a lot of people do is, especially when they’re trained in the Western thinking of our universities today, they’re trained to pick and choose that which they think is
[00:04:00] likely. And these ones here, in some respects, and I don’t know exactly how, but they had not been prepared to follow how the prophets of the Old Testament had spoken. O foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Oh, boy, that really hits me in the eyes because the Bible is not given as an example of some Some prophecies which were rather nice and good and others which you can discard. Our role according to Jesus is to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? Of course the thing that the prophets have been speaking about that Jesus is picking on are those verses that I actually spoke about him, so we have further an illustration of the fact that the way to really understand even the Old Testament is to do so with the
[00:05:01] focus on Christ and what the Old Testament is saying about Jesus. Now being someone involved in theological training I know that there are different ways people come to the Scriptures, and they came a trend recently, that for me means 15 years ago. They came a trend recently where the idea was not to read the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament. Unfortunately that really entails not listening to Jesus’ interpretation of the Old Testament. I think just the reverse is what Jesus is speaking of, is that he’s speaking of the truth of the Old Testament as understood through his understanding and the things that he teaches, he’s doing it here, he’s found a couple of people walking out on their connections with the disciples, because of the sheer despair they had when Jesus Christ
[00:06:02] was crucified, they were expecting of him so much more success in terms of being established as the Messiah and leading into the kingdom of God, then what happened? And when he got crucified, they were so down stricken in their minds that they ditched all that they had believed, probably true things from the Old Testament about what the the Messiah was going to be and do. And so He says to them, you are slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken, and if they had take into account all of the Old Testament Scriptures that spoke of him, then they might have had the opportunity to understand that he was destined to die first, and to rise from the dead. And all the prophecies of Isaiah 53 for example, that speak about so accurately what happened to Jesus, and purpose why he died would have alerted them to truths that would have meant they didn’t
[00:06:58] have to despair when Jesus died. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? That’s an understanding you get, even from the Old Testament-particularly Isaiah 53 in those passages about the death of Jesus. And beginning with Moses and all the prophets. I really love this passage, I have to tell you that it’s wonderful how it speaks about the fact that the scope of how much of the Old Testament really are useful for this higher purpose of understanding, which is understanding through the lens of Jesus, having an interpretive method that places Jesus as the prior focus capacity that you have, beginning with Moses and all the prophets he Jesus interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself and that doesn’t mean that every word of the Old Testament is directly obviously relating to the
[00:08:03] person of Jesus but rather further back from understanding what the scripture is about their purpose is to draw us to the reality of him the one that is to come Well, now he’s the one who’s there. What a funny scene this is that these two defeated people are on their way out from the place of activity and love for Jesus cause they’ve been amongst these group of disciples who’s followed Jesus. And then when he died and got killed, they’re so smashed and ruined that they’re giving up the lot, they’re going home, They are leaving the place of where their excitement was strong and where that sense of joy was real. You know, one of the features there is in what is going to happen next Saturday night is that there will be people who would be back-sliders, who have had a Christian start
[00:08:59] somewhere and knew what it was to have that joy of walking with the Lord but then some event occurred in their lives that they couldn’t explain, and they got scandalized by it. And so they dropped out. And they go away, and because they don’t go to church any more, because they don’t spend time in the Word of God, because they’ve had their trust in the Word of God, especially in the Old Testament, pulled to bits. Something seems to go downhill. I almost use the word die, but the interesting thing is it’s very often not a complete death, but something happens to their fervour because of that disillusion, and because they’ve walked out on the place of their enthusiasm. And so he’s speaking to that very point, one of the most wonderful things about Jesus and about the ministry of the Gospel, and about the ministry of the Word of God which
[00:10:02] really is the same thing, the gospel is the central heart of the Word of God and there’s more applications to the gospel in the Scriptures than you might ever realize. But one of the most beautiful things is is that where you have the Scriptures open and you have someone interpret to you the Scriptures, there’s a joy and there’s a thrill and there’s something in your heart that revives again, then that happens to people who are backsliders who’ve dropped out and their answer to the position of being a backslider is to have Jesus come along. And when he begins to speak to you, and sometimes it happens by accident, because you run into another Christian who’s a bit more alive than you are, and they begin to tell you something, and somehow in your heart you know it’s happening again. It’s the voice of Christ. There is something about Jesus and the Scriptures, some connection whereby he’s the one who speaks through them. He’s the one that’s being spoken
[00:11:00] about, and he’s the one who comes to you, and he opens the scriptures to you, and once again your heart is getting alive again. That happens for anybody who’s been a backslider, who decides to take time to go through the Scriptures and to read and let them speak for themselves. It’s one of the answers there is, to where some people bring to you all sorts of arguments and complaints. They’re so much better at their apologetics, which is a negative one, that they turn you away with reasons and arguments, and one of the ways you get over that is that you get the scriptures. You’ve probably heard from me many times some of my heroes are people like, in those who have been Bible expositors, like Campbell Morgan, and here’s a fellow who was a preacher, he was a young preacher. I began as a young preacher and Campbell Morgan did too and he used
[00:11:52] to get around with the gospel. What does a Bible expressive? And sometimes as evangelist, I love that mixture. And he is a bit of an example and a help for me. Cameron Morgan is and he was. But I want to tell you that when he and his generation began to face some of the questions about the reliability of the scriptures and whether it was inspired by God or to what degree you could trust it to be taken, on its face value. You take it for it to be saying what it reads as its saying.
[00:12:26] He found all those doubts. He had no answers. He wasn’t trained actually in… Back then, the theological training he’d had through the church was not adequate to answering the latest attacks that were coming on biblical Christianity. And so he thought for the first instance that he go out and buy a whole lot of intellectual books books, which were basically books on apologetics or books about all these doubts, are coming from what we call liberal Christianity. It’s not liberal anything to do with the politics,
[00:13:01] but it’s liberal in the sense that they say, we’re free not to believe these things. There’s something good about, can I just say so you don’t misunderstand, I believe in what is called the liberal philosophy, because what that liberal philosophy in politics means is feeling free always to look again, always to make up your mind from the facts again, and that’s what it means to be a liberal politically. It should do. It doesn’t always, but it should do. And when there came this movement of people fostering having a liberal outlook where you might hear what the authorities say, but you feel free to look again for yourself. That’s a good thing. But when the ways of looking again were being fed by what were a lot of doubts concerning the Truthfulness of the Scriptures and a lot of false assumptions that it was full of mistakes, and you still hear the same old false assumptions.
[00:13:58] People saying you know its not really necessarily the case, there is lots of mistakes in the bible. If you get anybody to say that to you, I will tell you what the thing to do is open your Scriptures and hand it to them and say show me one. Because there aren’t that many spots where people can say their actual mistakes, I’ve heard so many things put up to be reasons why the bible’s wrong and something is contradicting itself and there are many good answers to those facts. There are some of the things you ought to learn when you study apologetics where you learn how the Scriptures actually hold up as Truth and most of the things that people choose the Scriptures of where it’s being mistaken or wrongful, that’s because haven’t read it properly or they don’t know all the background facts so that’s another part of apologetics, sort of like. But anyway when someone brings doubts against
[00:14:51] the scriptures, as happened to Campbell Morgan, he took a real dive. He went and bought all his books on all the latest accusations, the latest things that the scholars were saying, and they were above his head. He hadn’t a background to understand them. And it just made him gloomy, and he’d been a traveling preacher as a young man, and he began to say, think to himself, perhaps I shouldn’t go around and be sprouting off things that I can’t necessarily know are true. He had to stop his itinerant preaching because it cast a blanket over the sincerity with which he might do. And so he bought all these books,
[00:15:32] and when he read them, they were over his head to answer. He didn’t know what to do next, so he put them in the cupboard. Not a bad idea, and turned the lock. He went down to the local place where you could buy Bibles. I don’t know whether that was a Bible Society back then, but he went down and he bought himself a new scriptures, just to have a new one, and said, What I’m going to do is just to read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, just go through and start again. I’ll read nothing else but I’m doing so with a prayer for the Lord to speak, if this really is the truth and I can rest in it, please show me so.” And he asked Jesus to speak through the Scriptures.
[00:16:17] He was giving the Scriptures the ultimate test that they’d speak to him and prove themselves. So I want to say, the reason why I believe in the accuracy of the Bible, most I have had education about some of these issues different from Campbell Morgan, but the biggest reason why I trust the entire accuracy of the Bible is because it speaks to me and because, in the reading of it, it has proved itself again and again. Not only in terms of factual things, and I won’t go into the details about that now, but also in terms of being the Book that has spoken to me in times of crisis, where I’m needed to hear the voice of God, and He turns up when He’s needed through the Word of God. And if you give yourself a habit of regularly
[00:17:11] reading the scriptures and don’t overdo it by saying, I’ll read, you know, ten Old Testament books a week or something, because you’ll give up too quick. But if you give yourself something like, I’ll read a chapter every day, I’ll make time to pause and pray, and say, Lord I’ve used something to say to me. It is amazing how God chooses through the chapter you happen to be up to, to have something that’s pertinent to the crisis you’re going through. And that happening again and again, and sometimes in my case when I’ve been stuck overseas in a desperate position without money or with the needs of all sorts of different things, and God has turned up with a passage that I just turned to and read, and his voice. Jesus has a habit of coming alongside Christians with a problem and speaking directly into it. He doesn’t do
[00:18:12] so when you try and twist his arm and has to do it now, but if you give yourself to an attitude of placing yourself under the Scriptures by reading it like a chapter a day and by saying, you’re not going to take an interpretation of me being the judge of the Bible. I don’t like this part, and I’ll follow that part, and this theory doesn’t suit me, I’ll throw that out. That’s putting yourself over the Scriptures, but if you put yourself under the Scriptures and you let him talk to you, you’ll be staggered at the times that he can turn up at just the right moment with an answer to the need to understand well that’s what happened to these two was the walk on their way out and beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them in all
[00:19:02] the scriptures the things concerning himself I want you to underline in your mind that is that final he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself and the very best way to have to study the scriptures is to to have the intent to find how they speak of Jesus, how they speak of Christ, that is actually the key to understanding the heart of the whole Bible. One step back from just what I said then is also to see the sensuality of the gospel all through the scriptures.
[00:19:41] As you can find, even though the Old Testament was written by people who were largely ignorant of what the New Covenant Testament we’re going to say, yet God has used those Old Testament scriptures with beautiful insights and suddenly shine light on the gospel we have from the New Testament. It’s a staggering thing if you take on board this interpretive method. Jesus interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself, but if you take that on board as How you read the Bible, it’ll speak to you in ways that will really surprise you. Well, anyway, that’s what this passage is about
[00:20:23] and how you discover the Bible can be a book that speaks to you as you have an interpretative method to see the Christ centeredness. I’ve said just a moment ago that not only that’s the most important thing Christ centered, but one step back from Christ is his gospel, because the gospel is about Christ, and sometimes you can get folk who read the scriptures and they will get some central theme further back than the gospel, the Christ or the gospel, and the further back away from those two, the more possible it is is that you’ll get a twist. Now, I’m talking to you as a theologian. I taught theology for twenty-three years, so I am an experienced theologian, but I want
[00:21:13] to tell you that the very nature of being a theologian is to take on interpretations. Every theologian will have one slightly different. That’s the reason why when you get together with other theologians you discover subtle differences in outlooks, and especially if if people take on interpretations of different aspects of the Scriptures, and for example if people get together and want to talk about the Second Coming, it’s really fascinating just to see how divergent can be the interpretive theologies that are coming out. So when it comes to the Second Coming of Christ there are those who are amillennial, and those who are premillennial, and those who would be not very often today but postmillennial, and And then on each of those different styles of interpreting the Second Coming there’s some who might be Premillennial but they are post-tribulational,ennial, about
[00:22:10] the Rapture that is. And there are those who have all sorts of different views as to how to interpret the Book of Revelation and they believe Jesus is coming but you could be surprised at how many different interpretations because as much as the Book of Revelation’s pretty It’s open territory for someone to bring into, I know what that means, like you get some of the cults, the JWs or whatever, want to talk about the 144,000, they had to change their minds about who that was because at first they said, that’s the number all of the JWs, I hope I’ve got it right, JWs who do this but there’s other groups who likewise make something of the number 144,000. But the trouble was that their group grew. went over the mark of 144,000, so they have to change their official views to being a special subject of the people who have become in their group and in the right spot.
[00:23:05] And the people who make big deal doctrines out of mysterious passages are liable to have to change them from time-to-time. That’s actually happened a lot with the scholars who were what you call amillennial. And the word amillennial means there is no millennium. And the reason why they didn’t want to have a millennium, particularly with the Jews in Israel. Because this was at a period of time when Israel was occupied by other races and the Jews were scattered all around the world. But back in the 1940s, as a result of the outcome of World War II
[00:23:36] when the nations in charge of what was going to go on in the land of Israel allowed the Jews to go back and re-enter the land and take it over. Ever since then, there’s been an enormous swing people more being pre-millennial, rather than amillennial. As a matter of fact, if you were to study doctrines of the second coming, Australia’s pretty slow at catching up with the trends. There are a lot more amillennial people than there are pre-millennial, but if you go overseas to other places, where the issue of Israel is a big a deal and you’ll find that that’s a different thing, but part of the reason for that is that it’s not exactly abundantly clear, and to have a strong interpretation by which you center yourself on, the further
[00:24:22] away you get from making Jesus the heart, the Gospel the second step and you keep on going back to other things like your particular interpretation of what it means to have in the book of Revelation, you know, the new heaven, a new earth, it’s very hard to know exactly when that is about and what it’s about. The further back you go, in things like making the second coming, the heart of the Gospel, the further away you are from what the rest of the New Testament teaches because the rest of the New Testament — the rest of the Bible, I would have to assert — teaches that the heart of the Gospel is not the second coming, it’s the first coming. Not the second advent, but the first advent. The heart of the Gospel is, as the book of Hebrew says, in these last days, God has spoken
[00:25:10] through his son, and talks about the fact of Jesus coming into the world and who he is as the expressed image of the Father, and talks about who Jesus is in the revelation of God. That’s the heart of the Gospel, and the heart of the Gospel is what the content of the four Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – are all about. Frankly, it must be pretty silly not to understand that, when you read the four Gospels, you’re getting told what is the Gospel. They’ve got their name of being dubbed as Gospels precisely because that’s what people read them to be saying.
[00:25:46] It’s about how God stepped into this world and the Person of His Son and this One who came, who had taken on humanity examples for us how we can relate to heaven, how we can relate to God the Father through the Son because the Son had the relationship of the Son of the Father, and invites us, by coming to know him as our Saviour, that we too take on, from his sonship, a relationship with the Father. So the whole idea of God being Father is definitely a New Testament emphasis. That’s come about because the Gospel highlights it. And the Gospel is a message which centres in the first coming of Jesus when he took on flesh and reveal God, as God had never been revealed before. Jesus, you know, we’ve been talking originally about the Lord’s Prayer in the morning services. The Lord’s Prayer is when you pray from earth to heaven
[00:26:48] and you pray Our Father who is in heaven. And talks about the kingdom of God that Jesus is in command of, but this kingdom is something that comes, and Jesus taught us to pray that it would be made to happen, let your kingdom come, and let your will be done on this earth as it is in heaven. And so, the interpretation of the scriptures through what is the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is the key. And furthered by the letters of the Apostles that Jesus chose, those Apostles like the Apostle Paul, that Jesus chose, and the Book of Ephesians For example when he shows about the gospel making one new man out of the once were Jews and Gentiles oppose but now the only thing there is is those who have come to Christ and found forgiveness of sins in him whether you happen to have been a Jew or not.
[00:27:44] The one new man is what the book of Ephesians talks about. It’s the church and that’s the important thing to understand from the epistles all about the Church but it is that which Jesus teaches is through his apostles. And those apostles have given us the Scriptures, the New Testament Scriptures. And that’s why if a Church is built on something further than the New Testament , further than the whole Bible there is something wrong with it. When they leave aside the study of the Scriptures and make more important the study of philosophy and make more important all the other human ideas that take precedence over the Scriptures. You know you’re in the wrong place, get up and leave. If you find out, Church, some of the things that we leave aside the Scriptures and don’t
[00:28:31] teach it, please leave us. Escape while you can, because we’re a difficult group that are leading you away from the truth, if that were to be the case. Jesus here to these two disciples, interpreting to them in all the Scriptures, the things concerning himself from one of the acid tests when you go somewhere and you’re listening and you’re learning. It’s if you can go away from there time and again and say the Lord has spoken to me, you’ve been in a good place, if you can find that your attendance there has made you to understand the scriptures, just as Jesus did here, then you’ve found a good place to learn. And that’s a church, what all of us ought to be, every church, a place where
[00:29:21] the chief purpose of the church is to expand the scriptures. I get amazed sometimes at ministerial meetings. I get called to go to different ones, and people who give a paper. What’s the chief purpose of the church? And I’ll have a good purpose, but I’m staggered how little, over here, the chief purpose is to expand the scriptures. That’s what I’m waiting to hear, and I’ll tell you, I hear again and again people saying, No, you’ve got to learn how to be representative of the community. Not a bad idea, but not the chief purpose, or others will say things like, you’ve got to be able to put it into the culture of our times. The does happen naturally, but it’s not a chief purpose. I’d rather have our church singing old fashioned hymns. Now this is not saying that I dislike what we do here because they have a good mixture. But I’d rather have a real old-fashioned
[00:30:20] place where they have even stand up or kneel down and do things like in the olden days, But still have the Bible at the heart and to have a church that does have all the latest things to get your mixing well and have the latest, you know, things. The late lingo used, so you know you’re in somewhere that’s up to date. We did have, from this church, from people who left once, who explain to me their leaving is that we don’t keep up to date with our music. And they meant that there’s more songs and choruses or whatever you call them, that come out that we don’t get into yet and they want to go somewhere which is up to date. I don’t think you want to be up to date because the scriptures speak from eternity’s perspective and you speak from Jesus’ mind and his
[00:31:15] interpretation and I’m not leaving there and we shouldn’t as a church. It’d be far better for us, Lord, to put up with some of our culture aspects that might be out of date. If by doing that we at least are doing of making the interpretation of Jesus through the Scriptures the chief thing that happens in this place. Well, that’s a pretty big lesson to come out of that little passage and it’s how Jesus spoke to them and you know what happened? They got to where any which was their they didn’t know it was Jesus talking to them, and he is made out that he’s got further to go than what their house is. But they has so moved by how he’s been dealing with them they can’t bear the thought of, excuse me, of letting him go. And so they keep insisting that he should come in, so they press on
[00:32:11] him and he comes in for a meal, and at the meal he says the prayer of grace of some sort, and he breaks the bread. Now, I don’t know whether I’m only guessing here now that when he broke the bread they saw some holes in his hands. But whether it was they been in a previous meal after his resurrection, Jesus had been across 40 days appearing to the disciples, whether they suddenly saw something that they had just previously seen and known it was him. But in that moment, they saw the heart of Christianity is the person of Jesus being revealed. No truer moment, truer central point, truer thing about which it all is. They saw it was Jesus who’d been speaking to them. Do you know that’s my biggest prayer and I’ve copied Cameron Morgan if you want to know the truth. He made it then his hope that what he wants
[00:33:16] to happen when he opens the scriptures he became such a famous expositor of the Gospels that when he spoke, Jesus would speak to people. That’s my biggest aim coming along to a church to speak is to say, Lord, I can just, I know how to use a microphone, I know how to keep on talking, I’ve always been a good talker but that that could be just a lot of dribble. But if Jesus is in it and people go out the door, and when they go home they say, the Lord spoke to me, I’m happy. And even if I didn’t get the latest methods and didn’t have all the other things that other churches do, I don’t really care. As long as the Lord is in the gathering, where two or more are gathered together. In my name, said Jesus, there am I in the midst.’ I think I’ve told you before one Crusade there was a meeting, actually it was a woman’s meeting,
[00:34:17] but they wanted to tell the pastor how they wanted their woman’s meeting to go. I was to be the speaker of it, but they said, we don’t want you opening in prayer. And I knew you wouldn’t have as good a meeting if you don’t open in prayer. Open in Jesus’ name for when you evoke the name of Jesus there is his person by the Holy Spirit who comes in his presence. Where two or more gather together in his name there he says, I am in the midst. And there’s something in a Christian heart that knows when you’ve been in the meeting where Jesus is present. And there’s something that does miracles when Jesus is the one who’s talking. And so that’s actually the role of being a preacher is to learn enough of the truth of Jesus and then to be close enough to him.
[00:35:09] He’s the one who ministers to them. And that’s what happened on the road to Emmaus to these disciples. And so they, as Jesus broke the bread, they recognized him, and the thing is though that this is after his resurrection where he could come and go in a flash, and he disappeared from their sight. We don’t know whether that’s just that he became invisible or whether in a flash he was out the door through the walls or what. He just was suddenly not there. And they said, to each other, Did not our hearts burn within us? While he spoke to us along the road and while he interpreted to us the Scriptures. And they got up the same time and went back to Jerusalem to find the other Christians who had enough time to get back just to find and present
[00:36:00] like in an evening meeting. It was a Sunday I think. They found them and they told how Jesus appeared to them. This is in the Bible at the end of the gospel of Luke. Luke 24. Notice this spot. So you can read it at home Luke 24. For us to understand what is the purpose of an evening service. survey. What’s the purpose for any service but for the evening services, that we might celebrate the centre of the Gospel which is Jesus and that Gospel understand it more clearly interpreted by Him to us through the Scriptures. And when that happens, He will feed your heart and you will know you’ve had a good Sunday feed from Him, because He interpreted to you the scriptures in all things concerning himself. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I
[00:36:53] thank you for this message, I meant to go on to other passages, but Lord you caught my attention about this one. Oh Lord, would you be pleased in our Church to reveal yourself through the Scriptures and would you be pleased to do that in a way that it inspires people to love you more, inspires them to take on an interpretive method about the Bible that is Christ-centered. Help them, we pray, to take on board that love of Christ as revealed through the scriptures that will start going around to people, Hey look here, look here, have you read this? Have you seen this? Oh, Father would you make that happen amongst us? That we become captives to the Word that’s a phrase that sometimes is used by people who like Campbell Morgan
[00:37:53] Maybe earlier he was captive to being a preacher and having the opportunity of speaking but through what happened to him he became a captive to the Word And law, we know the Word is another way to describe Jesus. Just as much as it’s a word, the Word, Word is a word to describe the word of God. And that’s not a contradiction, because the very heart of the word of God is Jesus. And when he speaks, people know it’s a bit like his master’s voice. They know that the one who is behind it all has spoken to them. May that capture people of this church tonight and that turn them into apostles of Jesus in the sense of people sent out to always tell about Jesus from his Word. We pray this in his name and for his sake. Amen.