The Bible’s Truth Works Out in Real Life
ROB O’NEAL, DIRECTOR OF CHURCH MULTIPLICATION
Brian Bethke started Tribes 4 Christ Community Church among the La Jolla band of the Luiseno tribe in southern CA. The people he has encountered there believe in God. He tells me that almost everyone on the reservation believes in some version of a divine being, but that’s where consensus starts to break down. It’s also where the beliefs of many people in the band begin to differ from the faith revealed to us in the Bible.
Brian is not unusual. In church multiplication, we frequently deal with people whose faith is self-invented or cobbled together from multiple sources. Plenty of people claim to have no faith. They have a worldview, but they do not have what we would recognize as religion or a relationship with God.
These same people have opinions; they speak about things like right and wrong and spirituality. They make moral decisions; eat some foods and avoid others, choose intimate partners, and decide how to behave in relationship to their co-workers. They have beliefs; will tell you with some confidence what they think happens to a person after they die, and will speak as if they know where humans came from and where we are going. This is the water our church planters swim in regularly as they try to help the people they meet follow Jesus.
People get these opinions, moral decisions, and beliefs from movies, philosophers, and experiences. Co-workers and commentators influence them. We are tempted to think they are sloppy in constructing their worldviews, but in reality they are careful shoppers combing the shelves of life, looking for products to buy. They are consumers of ideas and ideologies, and they look at us as just one possible supplier with no more right to shelf space than any other product.
Of course, Christian lives can be poor advertising for the truth of the Bible. We make statements about its truth, but don’t apply what the Bible says to our lives, frequently disobeying it as flagrantly as people who do not believe in it at all.
We know that the struggles many of us face to obey the Bible only points out the truth of Scripture. We are fallen creatures redeemed by grace through faith. We don’t earn our salvation. We don’t save ourselves. Even though we are saved, we are not fully sanctified, so we go on sinning. That’s all in the Bible too, and it comes as tremendous comfort even if it doesn’t convince outsiders that they want what we have.
However, the truth of the Bible is important to proclaim. The Bible is unique among religious works, because it is the revelation of God to us. God is not giving us opinions and suggestions in the Bible. He is giving us his Law and showing us His will. He is revealing Himself to us. The Bible is our guide for living. It is the basis for our theology, the underpinning of our opinions, and the guide for our actions. We are accountable to the Bible, and it is not accountable to us.
I am grateful for the way this Conference emphasizes the truth of the Bible. We want to lift up the place of the Bible in theology. We want to humbly but firmly build our worldviews and lives on the Bible. And we want to invite others to do the same.