Shepherd the Flock

“If one is looking primarily for a book of stories designed to teach a moral lesson, the Bible may not be as good as Aesops’ fables. All of the biblical heroes represent sinfulness, disobedience, half-heartedness and pride as well as faith and obedience. The real hero is God, who remains faithful to His promise in spite of human sin. No, moral instruction comes easily to us, but the gospel is not in us by nature; it must be revealed from heaven. This is chiefly why we have the word of God.

“To preach the Bible as ‘the handbook for life’, or as the answer to every question, rather than as revelation of Christ, is to turn the Bible into an entirely different book. This is how the Pharisees approached scripture; however, as we can see clearly from the questions they asked of Jesus, all of them amounting to something akin to Trivial Pursuits: ‘What happens if a person divorces and remarries?’ ‘Why do your disciples pick grain on the Sabbath?’ ‘Who sinned -this man or his parents- that he was born blind?’ For the Pharisees, the scriptures were a source of trivia for life’s dilemmas. To be sure, scripture provides God-centered and divinely-revealed wisdom for life, but if this were its primary objective, Christianity would be a religion of self-improvement by following examples and exhortations, not a religion of the cross.” – Michael Horton: Repentance, Recovery, and Confession, The Formal Papers of The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals’ Summit, quoted in Spirit Empowered Preaching, by Arturo Azurdia