LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1995, Page 85

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listeners to see me not as one standing above them, nor,
God forbid, standing above the Word, rather that they see
in me, and hear in me, a fellow pilgrim, a fellow learner.
And one who is trying to be like the Old Testament patri-
arch Jacob, a wrestler with God.

The wrestling occurs during the sermon’s writing. With
patience.and persistence and determination. I will not. let
God, who is present in the biblical text go until He blesses
me. That is, I want the victory of having received some
morsel of understanding from His Word for my spiritual
growth.

- Then my congregation will hear in my voice my having
been admonished by some word from God in the biblical
text. And they will also see by the smile on my face and the
lilt in my voice that God through His Word has gifted me
again with forgiveness, comforted me, and thereby raised
me up to better serve them with some nourishment from
God’s banquet table of salvation.

One of the greatest compliments I feel I ever got from a
young parishioner is when he said to me after a service, “It
sounds like you really believe that stuff.” I do!

Well, these are just some of the things I want to receive
personally and professionally through growth in the Word:
Power emanating from God’s presence in the Word, Confi-
dence! Courage! Spiritual authority! In summary, I want to
be an effective instrument of the Word.

Part 2
How It All Comes About

How does this all happen? To use some bad grammar,
“It ain’t easy.” Yet when I am faced with the choice of ei-
ther taking the stairs or taking an escalator, I think you
know which one I prefer. But, as many of you business peo-
ple out there already know on the road to success, the first
sign you will see is “be prepared to stop and pay the toll!”

Christ tells us to be prepared “to bring forth fruit with
perseverance” (Luke 8:15). Perseverance is a form of pa-
tience. We need to pray often for the gift of patience. We
need to be patient with the way God is working in our life,
and we need to be patient with ourselves and others as
well! Growth takes time. (When God wants to make an oak
tree, He takes a hundred years. When He wants to make a
mere squash, He requires only two months.) We all are still
work in progress.

Sometimes I’m asked, “Is there one best way to grow in
the Word?” Meaning. “Is there one best way to study the
Scriptures?” .

Realtors tell us that there are three things that help to
quickly close a sale on a property: location, location, loca-
tion.

_ (A) There are also three things that we always need to
do to successfully grow in the Word: read, read, read.

But with this continual reading there must always be a
certain attitude.

We need the attitude that we have not uncovered all the
nuggets of truth that God has in the text, for there is al-
ways something new that we can learn!

Our purpose in reading is not to “master” the biblical
text, but that God, through the biblical text, would “mas-
ter” us. We come, therefore, to the Scriptures, always with

CONVENTION ESSAYS 85

a prayer to God that He would open our ears to hear and
hearts to receive whatever new thing we need to be taught.

Only then will we have come to any section of the Scrip-

tures with the necessary “teachable spirit.”

You remember that Jesus said to His disciples, “You
must become like little children” (Matt. 18:3). Those with
the most teachable spirit are young children. They have no
difficulty with putting themselves into a Bible story. They
come to a text with such innocence of eye that by their
questions they get us to look at the text from an entirely
new perspective.

I'll never forget the time a child asked me, during a les-
son regarding the priest Zechariah in the temple, “Where
did all the smoke from His incense go?”

Since then, I, too have attempted to adopt the child’s in-
volved attitude toward a Bible story. I’ve thought, for ex-
ample, about the little boy whose lunch Jesus used for the
feeding of the five thousand. When he went home and his
mother asked him if he had eaten all the lunch she packed,
what did he say? “Mom, I think you better sit down—lI got a
whopper of a story to tell ya!”

And there are other questions you might come up with,
such as, “How did the wisemen feel kneeling in worship be-
fore a crib? And whenever Joseph was praying to God, did
he ever look up and wonder why Jesus was listening so in-
tently?”

The more you meditate upon the Word, the more you
savor it like a good wine, the more its richness will unfold
upon your palate. After all, we are invited to “taste the Lord
and see that He is good!” (Ps. 34:8).

(B) Doesn’t He want to be good to us?

The answer will be given to you through knowing what
the Bible’s primary purpose is. It is like the setting for a
great diamond. When for some reason that “diamond?” is not
seen in its center, as for example, when the Bible is treated
merely as a book that encircles us with moral laws, then
the most precious purpose for its existence is missing from
our sight.

One way or another, all that is recorded in the Scrip-
tures is related to God’s redemptive plans, centered in, seen
most fully and accomplished forever in Jesus Christ. For
this reason Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures because
you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is these
that bear witness to me” (John 5:39).

There can be no growth in the written Word without a
continuous focus on the incarnate Word. For this reason the
apostle Peter tells us, “But grow in the grace and knowl-
edge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).

Through the Bible the Holy Spirit brings Christ to us.
So, whatever Christ would say to-us today, He says through
the Bible.

Do you know that of the 99 names of God in Islam, not
one of them says, “God is love”? That God has an intense,
personal, self-giving, totally involved love for us is the
unique revelation of the Bible and the focus of Jesus’ self-
communication: Because “God so loved the world He sent
His only begotten Son.” In so doing, our heavenly Father
has delivered to us the most precious jewel in heaven’s
crown. The only diamond that is forever.