March 1, 2020

2 Timothy 3:16-17: Why the Bible Is So Precious

Preacher: Josh Tancordo Series: 2 Timothy: Faithful to the End Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:16–17

2 Timothy 3:16-17: Why the Bible Is So Precious

Please turn in your Bibles to 2 Timothy 3. If you’re using one of the Bibles we provide, that’s on page 835. We’ve been working our way through Paul’s second letter to Timothy passage by passage, and today we find ourselves in 2 Timothy 3:16-17. 2 Timothy 3:16-17: 16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. 

Now, these verses are probably the most well-known verses in the entire Bible that teach us about the Bible. In just a single sentence, Paul helps us understand why the Bible is so precious and so essential for our growth as Christians. In fact, the Bible is just as essential for our spiritual well-being as food is for our physical well-being.

A few months ago, I read a story in the news of a teenager in the U.K. who actually lost his eyesight because of a poor diet. When he was 14 years old, the boy went to the doctor and complained of being tired all the time. Then a year later, he had begun to lose his vision. Then by age 17, he was legally blind. And all of this came about not because of any genetic disorder but simply because he was an extremely picky eater. I mean, I thought I knew some kids who were picky eaters, but this guy was really picky. His diet consisted almost exclusively of French fries and Pringles potato chips. He told doctors that he didn’t like the texture of other foods. So that’s all he ate. And it turns that if all you eat is French fries and potato chips, you eventually get what’s called “optic neuropathy” and you can’t see anymore. And that’s a good picture of our spiritual condition if we’re not nourished by the truths of the Bible on a regular basis. Christians without a steady diet of biblical truth will inevitably become weak and malnourished. 

I mean, there’s a reason why so many men throughout church history have risked their lives and, in many cases, given their lives to translate the Bible into a language people could understand. Just take our own English language for example. John Wycliffe was the first to translate the Bible into English and did so in the 1380’s. Now he didn’t have the aid of the printing press, so he and his associates were only able to produce a few dozen handwritten copies of the Bible. And it was extremely dangerous work since many people in the Catholic church hierarchy didn’t appreciate Wycliffe’s efforts. They preferred that the Bible only be available in Latin, the language of scholars, because then the scholars would be the only ones who could read it and tell everyone else what it did and didn’t say. So even though Wycliffe managed to avoid execution, a later pope—44 years after Wycliffe died—order his bones to be dug up, crushed, and then scattered in the river. Apparently, he wasn’t a very big fan of Wycliffe’s work. 

However, one of Wycliffe’s followers named John Hus continued to promote the idea that everyone should have access to the Bible in their own language. And Hus unfortunately didn’t live to a nice old age like Wycliffe but was burned at the stake in 1415, with copies of Wycliffe’s manuscript Bibles used as kindling for the fire. And by the way, throughout this time, anyone who possessed a non-Latin copy of the Bible was likewise threatened with execution.

Then, after the invention of the printing press in the 1450’s, a man named William Tyndale continued to defy English law and bravely attempted another translation of the Bible into English. Not surprisingly, he was persecuted and forced to flee the country and take refuge in Germany, where he finished his translation and managed to have thousands of English Bibles smuggled into England. However, it wasn’t long before his actions caught up with him and he also was burned at the stake in 1536. 

And as we think about these men, let’s remember that there’s a reason why they risked their lives and even gave their lives to translate the Bible into a language people could read. That’s not the kind of thing you do just because you feel like doing it. No, these men understood how precious and indispensable the Bible is for the Christian life. And that’s likewise Paul’s main point here in 2 Timothy 3:16-17. The Bible is a precious and indispensable resource for the Christian life.

And we see in the beginning of verse 16 the chief reason why the Bible is so precious and indispensable. It comes from God. Paul states, “All Scripture is breathed out by God….” Think about what that means—“breathed out by God.” Whatever you find written in the Bible comes from the mouth of God himself. Now God did use human authors to put his words into writing. In fact, he even used the unique personalities of these authors and their writing styles and their vocabulary. It’s not like God dictated the words that these human authors were supposed to write and they just robotically copied down what they heard. No, as we look at the Bible, we see Paul, for example, using a noticeably different vocabulary than Luke. We find Peter using a much more sophisticated writing style than John. Each author writes in a style all his own. Yet, even though the human authors of the Bible did have a role in the writing process, the final product was exactly what God desired. God superintended the whole process so that every word of the Bible ultimately comes from him. It’s all “breathed out by God.” 

And that means that it all carries his authority. The words of the Bible have God’s authority behind them so that to disbelieve or disobey any of them is to disbelieve or disobey God himself. And that’s important to remember as we gather here on Sundays and listen to God’s Word being preached. In and of myself, I as the preacher have no authority. Like…zero. If I just get up here and just talk about my own experiences or opinions or ideas, you’re not bound to embrace any of that. However, to the degree that I correctly handle Scripture, each one of us is then accountable for embracing and obeying the things we hear.

And not only does the fact that “all Scripture is breathed out by God” imply that the Bible’s authoritative, it also implies that it’s inerrant. It’s without error in everything it affirms. The logic goes like this: God knows everything. He never lies. Therefore, everything he says in the Bible is truth without any mixture of error. As Proverbs 30:5 says, “Every word of God proves true.” Also, Jesus says in John 17:17, praying to the Father, “Your word is truth.” By the way, notice Jesus doesn’t say, “Your word is true.” His statement is stronger than that. He says, “Your word is truth,” meaning that God’s words are truth itself—the very standard by which all other truth claims are judged. There’s no truth more foundational than the truth of the Word of God.

Now let me give you a few caveats here that Wayne Grudem helpfully points out in his systematic theology book. First of all, the Bible does record people telling lies, such as when Satan lies to Eve in the Garden of Eden. That’s why I defined inerrancy a moment ago the way I did—that the Bible is true in everything it affirms. Even though the Bible records lies, it doesn’t affirm them. Also, the Bible does utilize the ordinary language of everyday speech. So we read about things like the sun rising because, even though the sun doesn’t technically rise, that’s what it appears to do from the perspective of a human being here on earth. And finally, the Bible will sometimes give approximate figures when it records measurements or statistics. So it might say that 8,000 men were killed in battle when, in fact, the exact number was 8,003. So it’s okay for the Bible no to be exact in everything it says. It’s enough for it to conform to the degree of precision implied by the speaker and expected by the readers in their original context. So none of these issues that are sometimes cited actually undermine the inerrancy of the Bible. The doctrine of biblical inerrancy is nuanced enough to take into account all of these things. 

Yet there is another question that someone might legitimately ask. How do we know that the Bible truly comes from God? How do we know that it really is breathed out by him? Are we just supposed to believe it based on its own claims? I mean, that kind of sounds like circular reasoning. So why should we believe that what Paul’s saying here is true and that the Bible really is “breathed out by God”? And that’s a question that we’re actually going to tackle in-depth next month on Easter Sunday. But for now, let me just give you a very brief and very simple idea to think about. We know that the Bible’s true ultimately because of the self-authenticating power it possesses and the self-authenticating glory of God it reveals. Now a lot of Christian scholars seek to defend the Bible with sophisticated arguments and historical research and things like that. And there’s a lot of good in those things. Those kinds of arguments are often valid and helpful. However, perhaps those arguments shouldn’t be the first things we turn to as we seek to defend the Bible. I love the analogy that the great nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon uses. He compares the Bible to a lion. And he observes how silly it would be for a group of men to stand outside a lion’s cage and seek to defend that lion against someone who might attack it. Lions aren’t weak creatures. They’re more than able to defend themselves. So Spurgeon recommends that, instead of trying to defend the lion, the people around the cage should simply stand back, open the door of the cage, and let the lion out. That would be the best way of defending him—just let him out of the cage so he can defend himself. And likewise, the best way of defending the Bible is simply to let it out of its cage by sharing it and proclaiming it with conviction. It can take care of itself. It will change people to the core of their being and radically transform their lives and so prove its claims of divine origin to be true. 

So “all Scripture is breathed out by God,” Paul says. And because it’s “breathed out by God,” it’s also profitable. Again, verse 16: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” That word “profitable” can also be translated “useful.” And we see here that Scripture is profitable or useful for four things. First, “for teaching.” The word translated “teaching” is a pretty general word that simply refers to giving instruction or helping someone understand something better. Then we see that Scripture’s also profitable for “reproof,” which carries the idea of rebuking someone and calling them out for a deviant belief of behavior. Scripture has a way of penetrating our defenses and convicting us of our sins. Hebrews 4:12-13 describes it like this: 12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. That’s what God’s Word does—it convicts us of our sin. And we need it to do that. That’s how we grow as Christians. The Spirit of God uses the Word of God to show us the sin in our lives and help us repent of that sin. And of course, repentance involves not just forsaking the sin but also replacing it with the corresponding mindset or behavior that honors God. So praise God that his Word is “profitable…for reproof.” Then, closely related to that, we see that Scripture is also “profitable…for correction,” which refers to restoring something to its proper condition. The word translated “correction” was also used for setting upright an object that had fallen down. So the Bible not only points out what’s wrong in our life by rebuking us, it also helps us be right again. Then, finally, Paul says that Scripture is “profitable…for training in righteousness.” When I think of the word training, I think of someone doing strength training by lifting weights in a gym or training for a sport by practicing the movements of that sport over and over. Likewise, the Bible trains us to live righteously. Reading it is like exercising our spiritual muscles, if you will, so that we can live the way God wants us to live in our day-to-day lives.

And by the way, this is why we encourage you to make the Bible central to your discipling relationships. You may remember that, as we’ve been working our way through 2 Timothy, we’ve been reminded over and over again of the importance of discipling relationships—where Christians who are more mature in the faith spend time regularly with Christians who are less mature in the faith in order to help them grow. It’s almost impossible to overstate how beneficial those kinds of relationships are for growing spiritually. And we recommend that the Bible be front and center in many of your meetings together. That means your time together will often involve talking about what you’ve been learning during the past week in your personal devotions. Perhaps you’ve been journaling your thoughts throughout the week, and you can share those journal entries. It’s also good to be memorizing Scripture and holding each other accountable for doing that by reciting to each other the portions of Scripture you’ve memorized during the past week. And the reason why we encourage you the make the Bible such a large part of your discipling relationships is because of how “profitable” it is for all of these things that need to be happening in our lives as Christians—teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness.  There’s unique power in the Bible to transform our lives in all sorts of ways.

Now if you’re anything like most Christians, you probably struggle to be as consistent as you’d like to be in reading the Bible. Frankly, there may be some days when you don’t really feel like reading it. And perhaps you sometimes read it and don’t even perceive any ways in which it’s changing you. That’s okay. A great deal of the transformation the Bible brings in your life happens so slowly and incrementally, you don’t even realize it’s happening. Kind of like a young child growing older and bigger. If you’re around a child every day, you probably don’t notice much growth—because that growth is happening so slowly. But then, when you put that child up to the growth chart on the wall every year or so to measure how much they’ve grown, you see that they’ve actually grown a lot. Or let’s say the child’s not your own. Maybe it’s a niece or a nephew that you only see once every few years. If that’s the case, then, whenever you see them, they’re so much bigger than you remember them being, right? And in a similar way, the transformation that reading and studying and memorizing the Bible brings to our lives is likewise very gradual. Sometimes, it may even be imperceptible. But that doesn’t make it any less real or any less radical. So just understand that the vast majority of your spiritual growth doesn’t happen through dramatic, mountaintop experiences with God but rather through the daily spiritual meals you eat in which you receive nourishment from the Word of God. 

The Bible is indeed “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” And as we see in verse 17, the result of this is “that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Think about the significance of that word “complete.” It means that if we devote ourselves to studying the Bible and build our lives on a biblical foundation, we won’t be lacking anything that’s necessary for salvation and a godly life. We’ll have all we need to live the life God wants us to live. The phrase that’s commonly used to describe this is “the sufficiency of Scripture.” Scripture is a sufficient guide to life. 

And of course that includes telling us the most important thing we need to know in our lives, which is how we can be right with God and dwell with God for all eternity. The Bible tells us that each one of us has been alienated from God by our sin. Our sins have cut us off from God and have made us deserving of God’s righteous judgment. However, the good news of the gospel is that God loved us even in our wretched condition. In fact, he loved us so much that he did something unthinkable. He sent his own Son to come to this earth and die on the cross in our place. Instead of us suffering God’s judgment like we deserved, Jesus suffered God’s judgment on the cross. And as a result of his death and subsequent resurrection, you and I can be right with God and enter into an all-satisfying relationship with God that will culminate one day in us being resurrected to heavenly glory and spending eternity with God in heaven. And the way we experienced that is by repenting of our sins and looking to Jesus alone to rescue us—and to do for us what we have no way of doing for ourselves. That’s the central message of the Bible. And that message is sufficient for our salvation. 

Yet the sufficiency of the Bible means even more than that. It means that the Bible not only tells us all we need to know in order to be saved, it also tells us all we need to know in order to live the full and abundant life God has for us. Unfortunately, it seems like some professing Christians seem to ignore this reality and look beyond the Bible for answers to life’s struggles. Perhaps they turn to various ideas and practices that have their roots in Eastern mysticism such as mindfulness or transcendental meditation. Or perhaps they turn to various New Age approaches that clearly contradict the Bible. Or perhaps they give more weight to the theories of secular psychologists—such as the so-called “cult of self-esteem”—than they do to Scripture. All of these things are examples of living in a way that undermines the sufficiency of Scripture by turning to theories and practices that add to and, in many cases, clearly contradict what God’s revealed in the Bible. Now that doesn’t mean you’ll never gain any useful knowledge about life or other topics from reading books written by non-Christians. However, it does mean that everything you need to know for a life of godliness is contained in the pages of the Bible. Whatever situation you’re facing, there’s something in the Bible suitable for that situation. In Paul’s words, the Bible was given so that we can be “complete” and “equipped for every good work.”

And let me just say that this is especially true when it comes to times of difficulty in our lives. When we’re faced with suffering and adversity, nothing will help us get through all of that better than the precious truths and promises of the Bible. It’s those truths and promises that are our lifeline in the midst of the storm. David says it like this in Psalm 119:50: “This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life.” “Your promise gives me life.” One reason why it’s so important for us to immerse ourselves in the Bible day after day after day is so that we’ll have that reservoir of biblical truth to draw from when the going gets tough. That’s what this verse in Psalm 119 shows us. In order for the psalmist to experience the life-giving benefits of God’s promises in the midst of his affliction, he had to first know what those promises were. He had to be intimately familiar with God’s promises before the affliction presented itself. 

It’s a lot like what has to happen in order for some kinds of medicine to have their intended effect. I’m told that there are some pain medicines that don’t relieve pain immediately but rather have to build up in a person’s bloodstream for a couple of weeks before they have their intended effect. It’s only when the person takes the medicine every day for a couple of weeks that it builds up in the bloodstream enough to provide relief from pain. And I think that’s a helpful picture of the way things often work with trials in our lives. If we wait to open our Bible until we’re in the midst of a crisis, that’s certainly better than not opening our Bible, but the reality is that there hasn’t been time for the Bible to become rooted in our hearts and for us to become established in biblical truth and have our thinking shaped by biblical truth. And so, many times—from what I’ve seen—things don’t go very well spiritually. People struggle to hold on to their faith and sometimes, from a human perspective, lose their faith. But if we make it a habit to immerse ourselves in the Bible on a regular basis for a decent period of time before we go through a difficult season, it’s like biblical truth has time to build up in our bloodstream so that we’re ready for that difficult season when it comes. The Bible has had time to saturate our hearts and shape our thinking, and we now have that reservoir of biblical truth to draw from. And as a result, we’re able to continue trusting in who we know God to be even in the midst of the most difficult seasons of our lives. “This is my comfort in my affliction,” the psalmist writes, “that your promise gives me life.” So if you’ll start reading the Bible on a daily basis and get into the Bible until the Bible gets into you, then you’ll have the spiritual reservoir you need to get you through difficult times. Instead of it just being you holding on to biblical truths, you’ll discover that those biblical truths are now holding on to you. 

So the appropriate response to our main passage of Scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 is quite clear and simple: read the Bible. Study the Bible. Memorize the Bible. Get into God’s Word until God’s Word gets into you. Think about it like this: you can’t be changed by teachings you don’t know. You can’t be strengthened by truths you haven’t grasped. And you can’t be comforted by promises you’ve never heard. This morning, you have a choice to make. Do you want to be a spiritual dandelion that can be uprooted by the least disturbance, or do you want to be an oak tree that remains rooted and strong for generations? The oak tree may take a while to grow—there’s nothing instantaneous here—but over time it grows larger and larger until its branches eventually extend over the entire area and its roots run deep into the ground. That’s what you can be spiritually if you’ll commit yourself to being nourished by Scripture on a daily basis.

other sermons in this series

Apr 19

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Mar 15

2020

2 Timothy 4:6-8: Finishing Well

Preacher: Josh Tancordo Scripture: 2 Timothy 4:6–8 Series: 2 Timothy: Faithful to the End

Mar 8

2020