ARME 3: Leoni Meadows, CA - Aug 2010

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ARME Bible Camp

Don Mackintosh

How To Study the Bible

Well, for those of you who were not at my yesterday seminar, the breakout seminar, that was probably my most important seminar so far.

And we talked about the real, real meal deal in terms of witnessing and really in terms of coming in touch with the heart of God and being effective in witness, and that is to give the heart to God.

And you don't have to know much scripture.

I mean, they're going to hate me at Army for this, but you don't really have to know much scripture if you've given your heart to God.

I mean, you'll want to know more scripture if you do that, but even just a little bit will totally make you a powerful witness.

My little girl, she really loves Jesus and she only knew 1 text and the text was do not rebel against the Lord.

So she followed me around the house and she kept saying that all day, do not rebel against the Lord.

It was the most convicting day probably at our house in a long time.

When I went to the refrigerator, do not rebel against the Lord.

Sitting by the television, do not rebel against the Lord.

Going down the road, tempted to go a little faster to get there more quickly, do not rebel against the Lord.

And I'll tell you what, I still remember it.

It was a powerful message, Do not rebel against the Lord.

I think it was Martin Luther who said, just 1 little word will slay the devil, right?

Peter said, help me Lord, I'm sinking, help.

So, you know, even if you're connected to God in heart, You can say 1 word and people will respond to the message.

I remember a story of another time in communism in Romania where They had told everyone they couldn't have God and couldn't have religion, and they were making it very clear that nobody could worship and this and that, and they went on 1 of the holy days of the church to give a two-hour talk why God didn't exist.

And then after that, they asked the Orthodox priest to come up, even though I'm no friend of how the Orthodox have treated some other groups, but this was the Christian representative, and he got up, and he only said 3 words, Christ is risen.

And when he said that, everybody went crazy clapping.

The central pivotal message of scripture in terms of the miracle of the resurrection.

Yesterday in our little seminar on the heart, we recognized that you can have great eloquence, you can have very connected words, and you can be a good homiletician, but if you're not connected at heart with the Lord, it does not matter.

You're not gonna have much success at all, because God looks on the heart, and man looks on the outward appearance.

Okay, so having said that now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and do our best in preaching and I think there needs to be a real revival of preaching today and I want to in this seminar inspire you but also teach you some practical things.

Can I hear an amen from Dave in the back there?

Yes, Dave and the Army Group are really into not so much inspiration for you folks as perspiration.

Father in heaven, we're thankful for these few moments that you've granted us on earth.

And then the very few moments inside, those few moments here at Army.

It's really nothing in terms of eternity.

Yet you can make it everything in terms of eternity if we give you our hearts and our lives.

We could make a decision here that would cause us to live eternity.

We could learn things here that could cause others to live throughout the ceaseless ages of eternity.

1 of my favorite non-Adventist preachers, and I don't listen so much to that, but 1 of my favorites is Martin Lloyd Jones, the late Martin Lloyd Jones.

He was a physician first, and then he turned to being a preacher.

Not actually the crown, the thing right under the crown, which was the queen.

And he was just a wonderful physician turned homiletician.

And he went about ministry as he had medicine, in a comprehensive, logical fashion.

In fact, he still kept his script pad, and after church, people would come to his office and he would write out a script from the Holy Scriptures to them.

This is what I want you to do, this is your treatment.

And he wrote a timeless book called Spiritual Depression.

If you ever want to learn something about how the Psalms deal with depression, that's it.

And I wish I could talk about that the whole hour.

And I could, but it wouldn't match the title on the tape, so we better not.

So he had this book and I was reading his autobiography and this is what he said about preaching.

We're living in an age which is questioning or querying everything And among those things that it is questioning is the place and value and purpose of preaching.

In increasing numbers, people seem to be depreciating the value of preaching and they're turning more and more to singing of various kinds and types, and coming with various types of instruments.

So he said, look, this is what's happening.

They're going back, he continues, to dramatic representations of recitals or recitals of Scripture.

And some are even going back to dancing and various other forms of external manifestation of the act of worship.

All this is having the effect of depreciating the place and value of preaching.

So he's saying, now this was written back in the, during his lifetime, it would be sometime right after World War II, maybe the 60s was when he retired, so this would have been back then.

He goes on, we now know that the Reformation, now we know that the Reformation, even before you come to the particular Puritan emphasis, swept away all such things.

He said when the Reformation came, no dancing, none of this stuff, no dramatic presentation, swept it all away.

It swept away the medieval mystery plays.

You may wonder, why is it that some churches are getting into passion plays?

Why is it that they're getting into all these representations?

They weren't the first ones to get into it.

The first ones to get into that was the Catholic Church.

The Reformation got rid of all that and it's very sad to observe, he continues, that people who claim to have an unusual degree of spirituality should be trying to lead us back to that which the reformers saw so clearly had been concealing the gospel and truth from the people.

Now how many of you think this sounds up to date?

Even today there's more and more of that.

He continues, if you mime the scriptures or give a dramatic representation of them.

You are distracting the attention of the people from the truth as conveyed in the scriptures.

Whereas preaching is essentially concerned with bringing out the truth of the scriptures.

I don't know about you, but when I read that, first time I said, man this guy is like alive today.

He's saying we need to get back to preaching the Word, right?

And then he says he makes it plain as to where it all came from.

Under Roman Catholicism, preaching had been at such a discount, in other words, not done much, it was marked down, that there were very few preachers left in this country.

All the emphasis was put on the sacraments, and on the priests, and on various things which I have referred to, plays, etc.

Kind of like the emergent church movement today is going back to all these things that supposedly are the outer manifestations, right?

I don't think we need the emergent church because it's really the submergent church.

What we really need is the detergent church.

What we need is a Daniel 8, 14 movement where the cleansing of the sanctuary comes down to the cleansing of our hearts.

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