Clarity Everyday #4 - Necessity
Message Description
Continuing in the Clarity Everyday series, Young Life Regional Director, Mike Chilcoat looks at Psalms 19:10-11 and the necessity of scripture in our lives.
Message Transcript
Good morning, Orchard Hill Church. So great to be with you. As Russ mentioned, my name is Mike Chilcoat, Chili. I am actually on Young Life staff, but my wife and I consider Orchard Hill our home, and our family attends here at Orchard Hill. So, it's always so exciting and such a humbling experience to get to jump up here and spend a little bit of time with you.
Since the last time I jumped in here with you, we've had a lot of changes in our family. A lot of exciting stuff happened in July. My oldest daughter, Caylee, got married to an amazing guy, Jacob, which is really exciting. We're really blessed to have him in the family. I got a chance to actually do the wedding and perform the ceremony, which was so fun. Humbling. It was great. So, thanks for letting me share that with you. It was amazing.
So, we are continuing our series entitled Clarity Everyday. We've been diving into Psalm 19 that you just heard Russ read a second ago, and we've been walking through the sufficiency, the clarity, and the authority of scripture, basically, you know, the Bible, we've been walking through those aspects of it. Today, I'll be leading us through the necessity of Scripture, and we will be in large part kind of zooming in and focusing on verses ten and eleven.
In Chapter 19, a necessity is something that is indispensable. Sometimes the word necessity gets watered down. We say, you know, it's a necessity that I have Starbucks or it's a necessity that I get home before kickoff of the Steelers game or whatever. We kind of water down what a true necessity is. But a necessity is something that's indispensable. It's absolutely required.
When something that is truly a necessity is downplayed or underplayed or ignored, dire consequences can take place. When we don't realize something's a necessity, or we maybe were ignorant of the whole thing, we either downplay it or we don't even realize that it's a true necessity. A real problem can arise if we fall victim to that.
Years ago, when I got my first ministry appointment, I was sent to a community to do ministry, new to this community, it was in Ohio. I was fresh out of college, and I didn't know what I was doing. It was like two weeks in this community, so I knew barely anyone. And I have to pause that the cardinal rule of telling a story is to not give away the ending. But I do have to a little bit so that you can enjoy the story in it.
I will be talking about a young guy named Vince and let me just tell you this, Vince made a quick and great recovery. He's totally fine. It was awesome. You can enjoy the story. You can laugh. Okay. So, Vince is doing great and did great pretty quickly after that.
So, I'm new to this community and there was a car accident. A car actually struck a young kid named Vince, and Vince, again, made a quick recovery. A community leader, a woman that was a very generous person with ministry but was a pretty influential person in the community, called me up and said, Chili, there's been this car accident.
We're going to do a prayer vigil so the community can kind of rally around Vince as he recovers. And so I go, okay, when is it? And she tells me and she says, it's not a necessity that you're there on Saturday night. You can come the next day. We're going to do something else the next day. So, if you can make it great, it's not a necessity that you make it. That night I go, what's up? What time is it? Okay, I'll see if I can do it. I'm going on a date with my wife that night, but if we can make it, we will. She says, not a necessity, come the next day if you have to. Great.
I go to dinner and we finish up a little early and I'm looking at my watch and I say to Kimmie, you know, I think we can make this provision. We should go over there and pray a little bit with some of the folks in the community. So, it's at 7:00 pm. It's going to start. We pull in at maybe 6:59 pm, right at seven.
And the woman who told me about it is waiting there by the door pretty anxiously and looks a little upset. And she runs over to the car and she's like, where have you been? And I'm like, you said seven. And she goes, you're running this event. And I go, Wait a second. You did not say I was running the event. You said it wasn't even a necessity that I was here. And she goes, well, I meant to tell you. And I'm like, well, you did. And she goes, well, you have to do it now. So go out there. You're running this event.
So, I'm walking into this event, a serious event, a prayer vigil, and literally I'm saying now, what's his name again? And they're telling me his name. I walked up on stage. I'm 22 years old. I have no idea what I'm doing. And I get up in front of these folks and I welcome everyone. And I think it's a prayer vigil. Let's pray. So I go, hey, let's pray now for Vince and pray for a full recovery. So, I pray, open us and crickets. Total silence for a while. If you've been there, it feels awkward, right?
So, I'm like, I'll jump in again and try to get this rolling. So, I pray and some more silence. Crickets. And I'm literally saying things like, you know, at this point, folks, anyone's welcome to jump in and pray. Share your thoughts. Nothing. So, I'm like, boy, that's been about 5 minutes. This doesn't feel long enough.
So I go, let's just share some thoughts about Vince. Go ahead and share some thoughts. Crickets. This is a mute crowd. I'm like, okay, anything? Any thoughts at all? No, nothing. I don't even know who Vince is, so I can't share. So, I'm like, alright, it's been about six or seven months. This doesn't feel great. So, I don't know what's happening.
Folks, this happens to me a lot. I don't know what was going through my brain. Maybe nothing. This is what came out of my mouth. So I go, you know what we should do right now? I'm trying to think. I'm scrambling. What can I do to make this feel a little longer and more appropriate?
And I go, let's sing a song together, okay? Never mind the fact that I really can't carry a tune, that there is no band, that no one has any music, no sheet music at all, no one has any lyrics. So, it was a terrible, terrible idea. But it comes out of my mouth, let's sing a song together.
So, I'm scrambling there. Everybody's looking at me like, what are you talking about? So, I'm like, well, what's the song everyone knows? Amazing Grace. I'm like, everyone knows that song. Let's sing that together. So again, I'm so flustered and so nervous that I don't sing the classic Amazing Grace that everyone knows at the time.
A little while back, they had a more contemporary version they released that went like this Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound. Maybe you've heard it. It was like a sped-up version of it. So, solo, a guy with very little musical ability is standing up in front of a crowd. And I start into the Amazing Grace, but no one knows it. So, everyone's staring at me. I'm bright red, I'm singing solo. Okay, it's terrible. I mean, the family is like, this is the guy you got to run this.
So, I'm singing this song, and if you know the song, there's a female accompaniment that comes in. So, it's like, Amazing Grace. You get to a point where you are like halleluiah and the men pause, and then the women come in with halleluiah, and then the men come back with halleluiah.
So again, folks, remember, no one knows the song, no one is singing. I'm singing a solo. So, I would say in front of everyone with a red face, completely embarrassed, I go, hallelujah, silence, crickets while I sit and count in my head. Hallelujah. Oh, I think people thought I was insane.
This is my introduction to this community. Thankfully, Vince recovered so the Lord had mercy on all of us that day. But that story, silly story, is an example of when something is downplayed when it's actually a necessity. And it was a necessity for me to know that I was leading that, for me to plan that out, for me to have action steps, and for us to take total necessity. But it was downplayed. It was told that it was not. And that's a silly example.
Well, what about things in our life that are truly necessities that we have not taken inventory of, that we don't realize that they're there, but they are really foundational, that they are the stalwarts, the things that we really need to rely upon and look at. Ignoring or turning a blind eye to the foundational necessities of our spiritual lives will have dire consequences.
Okay, we're going to come back to this. Push pause on that for a second. So back to Psalm 19:10 -11. It's a short one. So let me refresh your memory. “They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb. By them your servant is warned; in keeping them there is great reward.”
So, here's David referencing Scripture and talking about how wonderful it is, what a gift it is. He's talking about the precepts and the laws and all these other things that are coming out of this. And if you take a 30,000-foot view of this, of the entirety of Psalm 19 that we've been studying over the last several weeks, David is referring to having yet to boil it down. David is referring to the self-revelation of God through his word, the self-revelation of the God of the universe, the infinite all-powerful God, and the self-revelation of this God through His Word.
As we have zoomed into this passage over the last couple of weeks, what is David referring to in regards to the self-revelation of God through his divine word? What is it that he's really trying to hone in on? Is David referring to some generic and general scripture? And that's a lot of the ways that even believers view Scripture. Oh, I have a general sense of it. I think I've got it right. I don't really need to dive into it consistently because I think I kind of have the gist of it. Is that what it is?
No. He is specifically describing that portion of the message God has revealed through his prophets up until that time. And this would include the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Job, and part of Psalm. This is what David is specifically referring to. So, in a nutshell, David's referring to the Bible. He's talking about the Bible because David is navigating the Old Testament.
Sometimes this can trip us up to think that, oh, he’s just talking about the law, right? He's only referring to the law, the Ten Commandments, etc. But the terms law, testimony, precepts, commandment, all of the verses just prior to ten and eleven, refer collectively to what God has revealed in His Word, not just the moral law. But catch this, not just the moral law, but in particular, he's referring to the great promises of love and mercy and faithfulness.
You see, the law was set up to reveal to us that we will fall short, that we can't do it, and that we will fail. The law was set up to reveal to us, put a big mirror in front of us and say, look at our sin and look at how messed up we are apart from a loving creator.
And so really the references here are to talk about the great promises of love and mercy and faithfulness of our God. And this has been the focus of what Kurt has been sharing and revealing to us the last couple of weeks from Psalm 19. In fact, in verse seven, David refers to God as Yahweh. Yahweh is the same way that God is referred to when Moses encounters the burning bush. Yahweh, it's God revealing Himself to humanity in a personal way and exposing his will and his covenants.
Yahweh is covenant keeping. Yahweh reveals himself to humanity in a personal way and shares his purpose with humankind. Hear that one more time. Yahweh is a covenant-keeping personal God that shares his purposes with you and me, his creation. That should be mind-blowing. But the God of the universe loves us enough to not only care for us and eventually die on the cross to free us of our sins, but to share his purposes and his hopes and his will with us.
And the outlet that he does that with is Scripture. So, we focus back on Psalm 19:10-11. Let's borrow a couple of questions from the author, Wayne Grudem, to help frame our time and help us grasp what we mean when we're talking about the necessity of the Bible. So, here are a couple of questions from Wayne Grudem. Number one is, for what purposes is the Bible necessary?
The first question we would ask ourselves is, okay, if we're going to talk about necessity in scripture, what purposes is the Bible necessary, and two, how much can people know about God without the Bible? How much can you and I know and how much is revealed to us apart from the Bible, if it's just sort of a vague sense of it or we get it and hey, check the box, we're good from here on out? We don't really need to study the word now. We've got it. How much can we know about God without the Bible?
Maybe some general revelation or some vague idea about God is enough. Maybe that'll suffice. Would we really use the word necessary when referring to the specific words of God revealed to us in the Bible? Is that the word we would use? Maybe if we just know a little bit, it'll be okay. Our general idea.
Years ago, my dad was in ministry for a long time and then he had a second career where he went back to law school and became an attorney. And he represented this guy named Dave, who owned a series of car lots. And one of them was Dodge-Jeep. And at the time, Dodge Durango was kind of their larger SUV. And it maybe would have been a $30-40,000 car at the time. Now it would be a $50-60-70,000 car fully loaded. So, this is, you know, a pretty nice vehicle, and a guy comes in and he buys a brand-new one right off the lot, brand new Dodge Durango.
And Dave, my dad's client, told the story to me where he said this guy was really rude, really arrogant, and really abrasive. Every time Dave would chime in with trying to tell him about the vehicle, he'd be like, I got it. I got it. Yeah, I know, kind of condescending. And then he'd start to talk to him about basic maintenance on the vehicle.
He's like, I've got it, just give me the keys. So, the guy was pretty rude and Dave said he drove off, and about two years later the guy returned, this time with a tow truck with the Durango in tow. It has 38,000 miles on it and a blown engine. And Dave thinks that's odd. A brand-new vehicle with a V8, 38,000 miles, and a blown engine. The guy had never changed the oil and was unaware that you had to do that.
And Dave said, normally I would just take care of it and maybe I'd do the guy a favor and I'd replace the engine. The guy was such a jerk. He's like, I just made him pay. You have got to replace the engine. The guy had no idea. He didn't want to hear it. He thought, oh, I know what I'm doing. I know how this works. He didn't want to study. He didn't want to figure out what the creator of the vehicle knew to be true about it. And it had dire consequences.
Grudem would start the process of answering his own questions that he poses here with this definition of the necessity of scripture. Check this out. This is from Wayne Grudem. “Thus, even Old Testament believers had saving faith in Christ. Even Old Testament believers, people prior to Jesus coming and dying on the cross, they had saving faith in Jesus to whom they looked forward, not with the exact knowledge of the historical details of Christ's life, but with great faith in the absolute reliability of God's word of promise.”
So, let's break this down for a second. What Grudem is talking about here is having is about believers, having great faith in the absolute reliability of God's word of promise. That's how he ends that quote there. It's always been and has and will always be about saving faith found only in Jesus Christ. It is right now and will always be about saving faith found in Jesus Christ and Him alone.
People before Christ looked to the coming and promised Messiah, and that's how they had faith. I know that the Messiah will come someday, and that's how they had faith, and that's how they were saved. Then, during Jesus' 33 years on the Earth, people would look, hey, there he is, there's the Messiah. I'm going to put my faith and confidence in Him, and that saving faith will be with us, trusting and putting our hand in His hand and saying, I trust that this is who He is.
Romans 10:9-10 says, “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” That is referencing how it's always been saving faith. Whether you were prior to Jesus, you would look to him, whether you were there during his 33 years, you would look right to him, or now all of us post-resurrection. We look back at Jesus and say, yes, we trust. He is who He says He is. He rose from the dead. He died on the cross for our sins. I can have saving faith in Him and I can be confident in Him.
Well, how does He communicate with us? It's through His Word. How do we know Him better? It's through His living and active Word. The necessity of that as we learn and grow. Even as you look at the Old Testament, where Psalm 19 resides, God's promises become more and more specific. And this galvanizes and strengthens the faith of believers. But this is still increasing, only locked onto the bedrock of Scripture. That's the foundation that we stand on. The promises are specifically revealed to us by God in the Bible.
Okay, with all this in mind, let's slow down for a sec. Let's look at a couple of additional questions posed by Wayne Grudem. And I ask you, ask these questions to yourself right now, process and sort of marinate in these questions. Do you nourish your soul on the spiritual food of the Word as carefully and diligently as you nourish your body on physical food? The second question here would be what makes us so spiritually insensitive that we feel physical hunger much more acutely than spiritual hunger? What is the remedy?
And I'm not talking to you. I'm talking with you. This is me. So many times, I treat diving into the Word and spending time in Scripture and knowing the word well, I treat it as if it's the last thing. If I get to it, I get to it. But it's the bottom rung of the priority list. Daily time in the Bible is not just an extra thing we get to if we have time. It is as necessary to us as oxygen or food or water. The daily nourishment spiritually for all of us, from the Word of God, is more vital than the nourishment our body receives from food.
Yet most of the time it's not prioritized like that. If you're like me, it's not. If we're honest. One time a while back, I had a chance to speak to some parents about parenting and raising our children to know the Lord in a real way. And the first question I posed is, I kind of walked through, think about it with me for a second, your financial plan for your family.
And we just threw everything up on a dry erase board, you know, 401k, retirement plan and what year you're going to retire and literally what month you're going to retire, where you need to be financially, the market, how it adjusts, and how you know when you're going to pay your house off. We talked through everything and everybody has this extensive plan down to the finest detail. And then we talked about with your children, you know, what about sports, their sports schedules and their plan for education.
And as we walked through these things, we ended with what are your spiritual goals for your kids? What's your plan? And, I mean, this is, again, not me talking. It's just talking with you. It was hard. We were like, yeah, you just hope they get plugged into a church, I guess, and maybe there's a Young Life leader that can spend time with them, and yeah, hope it works out. And if it's the bedrock of it is the most important and vital thing, why does it get that bottom rung priority? It's interesting and it challenges, right? It brings into the light maybe that sometimes our priorities can be off.
The necessity of Scripture certainly takes it much further than some vague, generalized, and limited understanding of God's Word and will. It's necessary to consume the Word daily. And I love this word, don't miss it, to marinate in it. As I've gotten older and maybe I'm trying to slow down a little bit, but as I spend time in the Word, it used to be, sometimes I would just read, hey, check that off, I got my chapter and I'm ready to go start my day. Now, more and more, the Lord is revealing to me to spend time in the Word, maybe read, maybe less, but read a smaller passage several times and then just stop and pray and reflect on it. Oh Lord, reveal your truths to me. The Word is living and active. It's sharper than any two-edged sword.
These are not just dead old words on a page. These are living and active words of you, Jesus. As we marinate in that, how does it change from just empty head knowledge, to go from the head to the heart? And we can't just have this empty head knowledge. There’s a great illustration I heard a while back that I think is really good.
Imagine a nutritionist, an expert in the field of nutrition and he knows everything there is to know, all the nutrients that are in the foods, everything there is to know. And he's sitting in front of a large banquet table with just every food you can imagine stretched out over this table. But he's starving to death.
He's starving because he's never taken the step to actually reach out and grab the food and consume it and allow it to nourish his body. He might know everything there is to know intellectually about everything on the table, but until he takes it and eats it, it does nothing for him. As simplistic as that illustration is, it's true for us with the Word to just sort of have a vague understanding about it, but to never take it and consume it and to use that as your daily nourishment will have dire consequences.
The Bible is necessary for us to maintain and progress in spiritual growth because for one thing, it is filled with clear and definitive statements about God's will. The most important thing we could know about. God is all-knowing. He is omniscient. If He's all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing, we can trust Him long-term. And he has the answers and instructions for us to live out these promises. As John 10:10 puts it, life to the fullest. Life abundantly is offered to you and to me. This confident faith we can have that God reveals to us in the Word is saving faith.
It will save you and it will save me. This revelatory knowledge in Scripture that God graciously gives sinful and messed up people like you and me, gives us humans the highest degree of certainty we can have in a world where there's hardly ever a certainty. In a world where everything feels up and down and insecure and crazy and haphazard, this is the one thing that we can have true security in, this foundational truth of God.
God's grace in Psalm 19:11 also extends to warning us. It seems weird that there's a warning in this, verse 11, about failing to know God's Word and how that's revealed in the Bible. This is like a warning sign, like a bridge out sign. If you're driving, it's going to stop you from going around it and continuing to barrel ahead at 100 miles an hour. But it's these warning signs that are there and God sets those up because he loves us enough to tell us the truth. He loves us enough to get in the way and say, hey, listen, this is not good. Keep going if you want. But trust me in this, you want life to the fullest. You want life abundantly. Here's where it's found.
When Kaylee, my oldest, was really little. Maybe I've told you this story before, but Kaylee would, as toddlers do, she would always try to get into everything, and she would always try to get underneath our kitchen cabinets. And in there was Liquid Plumber and Drano.
So, eventually, I had to put child safety locks on because she would go in there, grab the liquid plumber, and she'd be trying to get the cap off, and she'd take it over to me with her sippy cup and be like, yeah, this looks good. And as the parent, I wasn't a great parent, but at least I knew this, I'd be like, listen, you don't want liquid plumber, you don't want Drano. And I would try to take it from her and she would get so upset, and she would burst into tears. She'd be like, don't tell me what I want. I know I want this. I'm like, trust me, you don't want this. Let's stick with the apple juice. This is no good.
But she'd be so upset. She thought she knew better. Well, I knew better, right? Well, here is a prime moment where the Lord loves us enough to warn us because he knows better. He knows what'll shipwreck our life and our world. So back to this question. Do you nourish your soul on the spiritual food of the Word? Carefully indulge only as you nourish your body on physical food.
I remember coming off college, I used to live in a house of 14 guys, a dirty, disgusting house on Ohio State's campus, and half the guys in the house had grown up with a little more means. And so, they would go on these nice spring break trips and the rest of us that were kind of working our way through college would have to go on the worst trips ever. It would be like, you know, we'd drive down to the lake or something.
So, one year we're like, we're going to hike the Appalachian Trail. So, we go down there with very little plan, like a bunch of college buffoons, and we start hiking. We get pretty far, a couple of days, and we realize we're out of food. This is not good. So, no one is in any real danger, but we were starving to death for us. And we finally get back to the van and I mean, we just are dying, right? And we were so dirty and gross. And we drive into this little town that we find and there's a Bob Evans there.
And imagine just, you know, six or seven dirty, smelly, disgusting guys running into a Bob Evans and sitting down. And we were ordering like we were kings. We're like, you know, more of everything. And they're bringing all these plates out. They don't even fit. And we are just eating with our hands. And we were so excited to consume all this. Silly little illustration. But why do we not do scripture this way? Why don't we wake up in the morning just with this passion and excitement? I can't wait to consume this. I can't wait to understand and unearth the promises that the Lord has for me today. Instead, if we get to it, we get to it.
Spending time in Scripture is actually experiencing God through His Divine and inspired Word. Your loving creator. It should be exhilarating and refreshing. Kim and I just came off watching the show Alone. Some of you guys are passionate fans. I've never seen it. We watched the latest season on Netflix and if you don't know what it is, it's like a survival show. And it really is pretty simple where they just drop people in the backwoods in British Columbia in some pretty harsh conditions. And the last person to tap out wins half a million dollars.
And this guy won this season named Troy. We watched this little extra part after the end of the season. And in it, he talks about the feeling he had from his first shower after 74 days in these harsh conditions. He's like the shower had felt like nothing it had ever before, literally it was exhilarating. That's what spending time in the Word should feel like as well to us. All the grime and the grossness of the world all over us, that we get to dive into the Word and say, Lord, wash this from me. Refresh me. Remind me of where the real truth lies instead of just sitting in it. The refreshing shower that this guy had pales in comparison to what we can have spending time in the Word as God meets us in that.
God utilizes the Bible in our lives as a gateway and lens for us to all see Him, the world, our neighbors, and ourselves in the right way, the correct way. Think of how confusing it can get and how many lives we buy into if we bypass the Word and we trust to rely on our own instincts. We cannot truly know God in His fullness or the pathway to salvation apart from Scripture. David says God's Word is more precious and pleasurable than honey and fine gold because he has personally experienced its life-changing benefits. The secret to whatever greatness and fulfillment his life possessed was not due to his own cleverness or intelligence or charisma or power or influence, it was all the gift of the true God who disclosed himself personally through his written Word.
The Bible is a profound gift to all of us, and without it, we will be unable to experience the fullness of the love of God. God's Word is profoundly refreshing because it is personal and is graciously given to us so that we can fully experience firsthand his love. This gift has been offered to you, and it's been offered to me, the necessity of Scripture. Let's lovingly challenge ourselves. What would it look like for us to get up and consistently spend time with our Creator, to marinate in His Word?
I'll pray. Lord Jesus, thank you so much for this time. Thanks for folks making it out today. Lord, I pray that we leave here knowing you better than when we walked in. Father, I thank you for the gift of Scripture, for the gift of this playbook that you've given us for life. And I pray, Lord, that we are challenged to dive in and know you more intimately. In your name, I pray. Amen. Thanks for coming out. I appreciate you all.