A WAY OF WALKING WITH GOD

JOE KUTTER

September 23, 2007

His name is Adonirum and she is Ann and together they are the Judsons.  They are the first missionaries that Baptist in American can call their own and I know that this story will be familiar to some of you.

Just before going to India, Ann and Adonirum were married in 1812.  You may remember an American event called the War of 1812. That was the year that they sailed.

In reading about them this week, I came across this paragraph that Adonirum wrote to his prospective father in law as he was asking her hand in marriage.

I have not to ask whether you can consent to part with your daughter early next Spring, to see her no more in this world; whether you can consent her departure, and her subjection to the hardships and sufferings of missionary lift; whether you can consent to her exposure to the dangers of the ocean; to the fatal influence of the climate of India; to every kind of want an distress; to degradation, insult, persecution, and perhaps a violent death.  Can you consent to all this, for the sake of Him who left His heavenly home and died for her and for you; for the sake of perishing immortal souls, for the sake of Zion, and the glory of God?

They were married in 1812 and sailed as missionaries of the Congregational Church to India.  When they boarded the ship, they were Congregationalists. When they disembarked, they were Baptists.  A close friend and fellow Congregationalist named Luther Rice had traveled on a different ship and he too became a Baptist, independently of the Judsons. They found an English Baptist missionary who was already in India and they were baptized as believers by immersion.  They wrote home to America to announce their change of denominational loyalty.

The British East India Company, which essentially ruled India in the name of England, decided that American missionaries were not welcome in India and the Judsons moved on to Burma while Luther Rice sailed back to the United States to raise money…since the Congregationalists could not be expected financially to support the Baptists. The missionary organization that Luther Rice formed was the beginning of Baptist denominational life in America. We were formed as a denomination for mission.

The question is, what happened on those two ships that caused the Judsons and Luther Rice to make the switch?  By their own testimony, it was an intense study of scripture!  They read the Bible carefully and each came to the personal conclusion that Believers Baptism was the form of baptism that was (and is) most faithful to the practice of the New Testament church.

At this point, I am tempted to talk about baptism. However, this morning I want to talk about the Bible.  We are talking about “A Way of Walking with God” and the role of the Bible in that walk. 

One more word about the Judsons: Adonirum was an accomplished scholar and a particularly gifted linguist. When he arrived in Burma, his first task was to translate the Bible into the Burmese language. He simply believed the Bible was an indispensable instrument in our walk with God and making the Bible available was absolutely essential to his ministry. He could not conceive of walking with God or teaching people to walk with God without it.

His wife, Ann, shortly before her death, translated the book of Matthew into the Siamese language. I think that she would agree that it is hard to walk with God without it.

Without preaching the previous sermons over again, allow me to summarize some of what we have said in this series.

·        Christ alone is Lord of the Conscience and every other thing must take second place to Christ.

·        God made us with the competency to relate to God. We do not need somebody else to do it for us.

·        Every soul must be free to respond to God or not.

·        The church is the body of believers who have decided to walk with God together. Every person is responsible before God to seek the mind of Christ in prayer, Bible reading, and thought and we come together to pray and think and study the scriptures, each listening carefully to the other in humility, as together we seek understand what Christ wants us to do in this time and place.

How do the scriptures fit into this way of walking with God?

The traditional phrase used to describe the Bible sounds something like this; it is our sufficient rule for faith and practice – our rule for faith and practice. Or others would say the same thing in a slightly different way. In matters of faith and morality, it is our primary written authority – our primary written authority in matters of faith and morality.

Why do we have the 66 books of the Bible? Why do we have the scriptures?

First of all, the purpose of the scriptures is to serve Christ as Lord. For example, the Gospel of John says this about itself,

But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. John 20:31 (NRSV)

While these words were written specifically about the Gospel of John, I believe that they apply to the entire New Testament and in the mind of God, to the entire Bible.

Let me come at the same thing from another place. When we say “the word of God”, we most often are referring to the pages of the Bible.  But that is not what the Bible says!  Listen to John 1:1.

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (NRSV)

Who is he talking about?  The Bible?  Is he saying, “In the beginning was the Bible?”  No, he is talking about Jesus the Messiah. Jesus is the word of God.

Listen to John 1:14John 1:14 (NRSV)

 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Did he say that the Word became a book?  Did he say that the word became paper and ink?  No, the word became flesh. Jesus, the flesh and blood Jesus, is the word of God and the Gospel of John and the whole of scripture is in service of the Word, the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

How does it fulfill its purpose in serving the Lordship of Christ?  By being read!  If it is not read, it cannot be of any use in our walk with God. I think, to speak the obvious, that the Bible must read in three ways. 1. It must be read in worship. Secondly, it must be read in individually. Your freedom to use the Bible as an instrument of your personal walk with God is useless if you don’t read it.  And thirdly, it must be read in small groups where we can pray, think, read, and study together in an atmosphere of mutual humility and trust.  Each person must be free to say what he or she sees and thinks without fear and each must be humble enough to listen. It is in those prayerful conversations that we are most likely to discover the Spirit of Christ moving among us.

Why this freedom necessary?  (If you were here Wednesday night, some of this will be familiar.)  There was a time when the Bible was used to justify slavery and the lynching of people of different races. Certain verses were lifted up and used as proof-texts to demonstrate the slavery and lynching was a part of God’s plan for the world.

But thank God that somebody held those passages of scripture up to the light of Christ! The scriptures freely read under the Lordship of Christ produced a very different insight. In the eyes of God, it is a despicable thing for one human being to own another.

There was a time when certain verses of scripture were used to prove the inferiority of women. Ephesians five has a verse that says that wives must submit to their husbands. That and other verses were used “to prove” that women were spiritually, physically, mentally and morally inferior.

But thank God somebody held those verses up to the light of the Lordship of Christ. And somebody read the verse that comes before the one about wifely submission. It says that we must “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”  If you look at Jesus and if Jesus is Lord, every notion about the inferiority of women must simply go away.

Every body must be free to read and if we are to walk faithfully with God, every disciple of Jesus must exercise the freedom faithfully.

Now allow me to be practical. Let me demonstrate one way to read. I have some of my Father’s old Bibles and some of the pages look a little like the page that is in your bulletin. Somebody convinced my Dad that the Bible becomes the Bible for you when you fully engage it. So when the Bible wrote, he wrote back! Words are underlined and notes are in the margins and he had a living dialogue with the pages of Holy Scripture.

That is what I pray for you, a living dialogue with the pages of scripture.

You have the first part of John 3: 16 in front of you.  If you look, you will find some words circled. They seem important. There are some question marks. There are some things that you simply will not understand. There may be a place where you disagree. Just say “NO.” God can handle it.

Notice the words born and birth in the margin. They appear over and over again. They must be important.  And as you read, I invite you to simply pray, “God, is there something that you want to say to me as I read these words.” 

Here is something that dawned on me this week about this passage. When Jesus said, “you must be born again”, Nicodemus replied like a scientist. He immediately began to think in terms of biology and physical life.  But Jesus was using another form of speech to talk about the renewal of the soul, becoming a new person, allowing the Spirit of God to transform you into the person that God has intended all along.

So what is the Bible to us? It is a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is our primary written authority in matters of faith and morality. It is the steward of the stories of Jesus and the ancient witnesses to the faithfulness of God.

It is vital in our walk with God.