"The Bible in Your Hand, Head and Heart"

By Dr. Mickey Anders

South Elkhorn Christian Church

Lexington, Kentucky

May 31, 2009 

Text: Deuteronomy 6:4-9 4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

I am a gadget person so it is surprising that I do not yet own one of the latest high tech gadgets, Amazon's new e-book reader called the Kindle.  It's a little pricy for me, and I am not yet completely sold on it.  But it is an amazing product. 

This little battery-powered device is only 1/3 of an inch thick and weighs 10 ounces.  But it can hold 1500 books!  When you buy a new book, it is downloaded from cell phone towers in less than 60 seconds! 

The Kindle allows you turn pages, dog-ear pages, highlight text, mark passages - most everything you'd want to do with a conventional book.

Amazon is working on deals with college textbook companies.  Imagine the money saved by college students who buy their books for the Kindle.  And they won't have to lug all those heavy books around.

Amazon hoped to sell two hundred thousand in 2009. It's May, and they've already exceeded that projection. 

Some say that the Kindle is the future!  Maybe it will be true in church as well.  Can you imagine?  Imagine a Sunday morning when the pastor says to the congregation, "Will you please turn on your Kindle and select John 14 in the New Revised Standard Version? No wait, please go to John 14 in the New English Bible. Thank you."

And how about congregational singing? Why throw the lyrics on a far-away screen when people can simply pull the Kindle out of the pew rack, and have a screen with music right in their hands? The leader might say, "Hey, let's sing 'The Church's One Foundation' from the United Methodist Hymnal, and then we'll sing 'On Jordan's Stormy Banks' from the Pilgrim Hymnal, and then, we'll get happy and turn to the Hymnal of Everlasting Joy, and sing 'Jesus Is the Rock and He Rolled My Blues Away.' You've got those hymnals bookmarked, don't you?" 

The Kindle is a device designed to hold words and to make words readily, easily and cheaply accessible.  It is only the latest in a long line of efforts to put the written word into people's hands.  Nowhere has that process been more notable than in the effort to make the Bible available to everyone.

Today's sermon has a very simple outline.  I am suggesting that we should have the Bible in our hand, in our head, and in our heart. 

First, we should have the Bible in our hand.  Not every generation has had the Bible as available as we have.  The earliest Bibles were written in Greek and Hebrew, when those languages were thriving.  People heard the Bible read in their own language.  Then Latin became the predominant language.

The Bible was translated into Latin in 380 A.D. in a version called "The Vulgate."  It was the standard text in the Western Church until the Protestant Reformation.  Over the millennia Latin became a dying language.  John Wycliffe made the first English translation in 1380. 

For most of the first 1500 years after Christ, hardly anyone owned a Bible.  They went to church to hear the Bible read.  Before the invention of the printing press, books were copied by hand.  Most books and especially the Bible were copied by medieval monks who often made very elaborate manuscripts.  Bible's were very expensive.  People only saw Bibles at church.

John Gutenberg produced the first printed Bible in 1456, and that opened the doors to individuals owning the Bible.  Since that time, the Bible has been a perennial best-seller.  Today, we can't imagine a home without at least one Bible, and most of us have many. 

The Gideon's are famous for distributing Bibles in hospitals, hotels, and schools.  Since 1908, they have been distributing free Bibles.  Their website proudly announces that they have given away 1.5 billion Bibles... and counting.

The bible is now accessible, and accessible in our own language.  The Bible has been constantly updated with new translations.  More recent translations include The Revised Standard Version in 1952, The New English Bible in 1970, The Living Bible in 1971, The Good News Bible in 1976, The New International Version in 1978, The New Revised Standard Version in 1989, and The Message in 2002. 

All of these were efforts to make the Bible available to the common person.

The Bible is a treasure that is available to us and we should carry it in our hand.   Of course, modern technology has changed the way we carry the Bible.  I have already talked about the Kindle which could have many, many translations in one device.  I have the Bible on my cell phone/personal digital assistant.  Mary Louis Phelps, the volunteer leader of our senior adult program, has an audio version of the Bible on her iPhone.  Almost every version of the Bible is easily accessible on the Internet.  My favorite Bible site is at bible.oremus.org.  I use it all the time in my sermon preparation. 

With all of these efforts to make the Bible available in every conceivable convenient manner, we have no excuse for not carrying the Bible with us.

Our text from Deuteronomy says, "Keep these words... Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." 

We can't read it if we don't have it in our hand.  We can't memorize it if we don't have it in our hands.  We can't apply it to our lives if we do not have it in our hands.  Tremendous effort has been made to make the Bible available.  We need to have it in our hand.

Secondly, we need the Bible in our head.  It is not really good enough just to have the Bible in our hand.  We can carry it with us and never read it.  But if we have it in our head, nobody can take it from us. 

One of the notable characteristics of all of our denomination's founders was their incredible knowledge of the Bible.  Alexander Campbell was a Bible scholar of the first degree.  His normal day started at 4 a.m.  He read the Bible in Greek for one hour; read the Bible in Latin for one hour; read the Bible in Hebrew for half an hour; and he memorized ten verses a day.

Barton Stone and Walter Scott were mostly self-taught, but they knew the Bible from front to back.  Our denomination was founded as a back-to-the-Bible movement.  We were known as a people of the Book.  

But somehow, Disciples of Christ have lost their love of the Bible.  Today many Disciples are Biblically ignorant.  We have not taken Bible study seriously.  There is no excuse for being Biblically ignorant.  All we have to do is come to Sunday School.  There, week-by-week, we will examine the texts and apply them to our lives.  We never graduate from Sunday School.  Our church offers a wide range of small-groups for more in-depth study throughout the year.

We need to be like the Christians in Berea as described in Acts 17, "These Jews were more receptive than those in Thessalonica, for they welcomed the message very eagerly and examined the scriptures every day to see whether these things were so." 

Like Campbell, we need to memorize the Bible.  I want to urge you to have the Bible in your head.  Every Christian should have memorized John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."  And we should not forget to add the very next verse, which seems equally important to me, "For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved."

Every Christian should memorize Psalm 23, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his names sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever." 

Romans 3:23, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

Romans 8:28, "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." 

2 Corinthians 5:17, "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."

1 Peter 3:18, "For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God..." 

Having these kinds of verses in our heads will make those texts come alive for us.  Once we memorize them, they can never be taken away from us.

Finally, the Bible needs to be in our heart.  Having the Bible in our hand is good, but that doesn't mean we have read it. Having the Bible in our head is important, but that doesn't mean we have applied it to our lives. We need to also have the Bible in our hearts.  

The Christian life is about more than just memorizing facts.  You can be the world champion at Bible Trivial Pursuit, able to name every one of the twelve disciples, all the tribes of Israel, every king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and still be as mean as a snake.  It always astounds me that some people who have gone to church all their lives still harbor the most prejudice and are the most hateful people I've ever met.  Just because we know the facts doesn't mean that our character has changed.

Romans 12:2 is another passage to memorize and appropriate, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect." 

This week, one of our members recommended to me a church marketing web site which reported the findings of a recent report from Christian pollsters the Barna Group with some bad news for churches.  They found that today's young people, ages 16-29, have a more critical view of Christians than previous generations.  Well over 75% of them said that they think Christians are judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned, too involved in politics and anti-homosexual.

The writer of the website concluded, "Forget polishing up that web site, planning your next series or training your greeters. Because if we can't effectively live the gospel, how can we hope to communicate it?   All our well-laid marketing plans, all our stellar designs, all our clever copy are just noise if we don't have the love we claim to have.  It's time for the church to be the church. And I'm not talking about better sermons or finely tuned worship sets or snazzy videos. I'm talking regular pew-warmers like you and me actually living our faith and over-turning these negative realities. That won't happen through brilliant projects and new ideas. It will happen one tiny act at a time. It will happen through daily, mundane, boring acts of love."  (http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/archives/2008/03/forget_marketin.html) 

The Bible needs to so permeate our lives so that it's values seep into every corner of our lives.  We need to live by the Bible.  The Bible is our guide for our faith and practice. 

Our text from Deuteronomy says, "Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart." 

The Kindle is a device designed to hold words and to make words readily, easily and cheaply accessible.  The Kindle can hold millions of words.  Like a Kindle, we, too, are Word-bearers. When people get their hands on us, or have a chance to observe us, we have the effect of making the Word accessible, intelligible and desirable.  We're Kindle Christians.  We have God's Word in us, and it transforms us.

I want you to think a moment about the meaning of the word "kindle." The word means "to ignite, enflame, to light a fire; or to inspire and generate enthusiasm."  I have chosen to mention the Kindle on Pentecost Sunday because the book of Acts explicitly mentions the image of flames of fire.

Acts 2 says, "When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them." 

The Bible often compares the Word of God to a fire.  Jeremiah 23.29:"Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" Jeremiah 20.9: "... within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot."  Hebrews 12.29:"for indeed our God is a consuming fire."

If we have the Bible in our hand, in our head and in our heart, we, too, will kindle a fire for God!