WE BELIEVE in God’s Holy Word

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. – Hebrews 4:12 ESV

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. – 2 Timothy 3:16,17 ESV

A well-made video thumbnail on YouTube caught my eye, so I clicked on it out of curiosity. It was mainline church’s livestream of their morning service. A beautiful meeting hall, appropriately decorated and seating for about 200 hundred people, filled my television screen. After a prelude instrumental selection, the crowd of about 15 people stood, a prayer was offered, and a hymn was sung. So far, so good. But what came after gave this preacher all the information he needed to know that what he was witnessing wasn’t a living church performing worship. No, what he saw was a dead corpse of a church experiencing the involuntary movements of a dead yet twitching body. Let me explain.

The minister took to the pulpit with Bible in hand. It was at this point everything went south. The minister said with a loud voice, “Listen FOR the word of the Lord.” Did you catch that? He told to the people to listen “for” the word of the Lord. You see, God’s Word ceased being, well, God’s Word, in that church building many decades ago. They no longer understand God’s Word to be a special revelation from God to humanity. No! They see the Bible as a human work grasping up at the divine, subject to error, inaccuracies, and outright lies concerning God. So, the best they can do is to ask the congregation to try to glean something from what they read, to listen FOR the word of God in the otherwise human book! How tragic! No wonder that poor meeting hall was 80% empty. They had nothing to feed true Christians! The storehouses were empty because they rejected the Daily Bread which is “every word which proceeds from the mouth of God.”

Once a church body sets itself up as the arbiter over Scripture itself, the rot is firmly set in the roots. Cherry picking at the pages of God’s Word leads to the obvious: men and women take to the passages that are least offensive to them, while ignoring vast portions of Holy writ. Ultimately, men end up doing what is right in their own eyes, everything in the church becomes subjective, the Gospel cannot be preached with authority (because who really knows ANYTHING if the very Bible we read is filled with human error?), and whatever theological vitality remaining in that assembly is quickly sapped up and exchanged for the more convenient lies of modernity and theological progressivism. If a church doesn’t truly believe the Bible is God’s Word, what can such a sorry group of people offer themselves or their communities concerning the things of the Spirit? In a word: nothing.

Redeemer Church believes God’s Word to be the inerrant, inspired Word of the Living God. We believe that God has preserved His Word for His people. We believe that the church is subject only to the Word of God. We believe the promises of God in Scripture are true! As a church family, we seek to honor God by faithfully teaching and preaching from the pages of God’s book, the Bible. And, God save me, I will never ask you to listen “for” the Word of the Lord when I read Scripture from our pulpit. NO! You’ll know you’re hearing from God’s Word simply because I’m reading from His book! “Hear the Word of the Lord!” At Redeemer, we believe in God’s Holy Word! – JB