Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (56 page)

It’s where the study of culture comes into play. If you’ve done your homework on a society, you should have some idea of what matters. You should know where the flashpoints are, where the wounds are festering, where the breakdowns have come, where the pain is great. You should know who feels alienated from God, who is in doubt about Him, who is angry at Him, and who is deceived about Him. You should have a good idea of where God’s people are active today, where they have stepped in to meet needs, and where they have dropped the ball.

In short, if you’ve become a perceptive student of your culture, you should know where the needs and problems are. And knowing that, you can begin looking for general truths from Scripture that might apply to the contemporary situation. They may have been used differently by people in the ancient world; but they are still true, and therefore still applicable to the issues people face today.

For example, one man initiated a study of Nehemiah. One of the first things he encountered was the prayer in chapter 1, the one that we looked at earlier. He noticed that Nehemiah was talking to God about the people in distress back in Jerusalem. And it dawned on him, “When was the last time I ever prayed for the people in my company?”

He was the owner of a small manufacturing plant. So he made a list of all of his employees. Then he listed his vendors. Then he listed his competitors. And then he began praying, talking to God about his relationship with each person, and mentioning his or her needs. That began a regular practice that continues to this day. But it began with this man’s recognition of a simple principle from the Word—that God wants us to pray about the people and problems around us—and then his application of that principle to his own situation.

The late management expert Peter Drucker pointed out that the best ideas in the world are useless until someone goes to work on them. Sooner or later they must produce action. That’s certainly true of biblical principles. To be effective, they must produce action.

It’s easy to remain hypothetical, to scrape the Milky Way with theological speculation. That was the problem Paul ran into in Athens (Acts 17:21). The people there loved to sit around and shoot the philosophical breeze. But God’s Word was given not to tease our curiosity, but to transform our lives. As we ferret out principles from Scripture, we constantly need to ask,
What am I going to do with this truth? When, where
, and
how am I going to apply it?

I’m going to suggest a simple template for that in the next chapter. First let me tell you how this worked in one man’s experience. I remember one of the Dallas Cowboys who was in a Bible study I was leading on the book of Ephesians. We came across the passage on marriage in
chapter 5
, the section I mentioned in the last chapter. I’ll never forget the amazement of this huge, hulking fellow as he finally grasped the significance of what Paul was saying.

“You mean I’ve got to love my wife?” he asked incredulously. “You mean I’ve got to tell her?”

He was really getting a clear picture of how Paul’s exhortation might look. I don’t know what the men in Ephesus who first read the text made of it. But this guy was extracting a basic principle about marriage. And he was about to apply that principle in a very specific way to his own relationship.

He went home with a determination to tell his wife that he loved her. Not bad for a guy who hadn’t said that since the day of his wedding. But all afternoon he hesitated, trying to work up the courage to tell her. And all through dinner he kept swallowing the words. Finally he decided to take the plunge. So he got up, came around the table, grabbed his wife, and literally lifted her off her chair. (She told me later that she thought he’d lost his mind.)

“Wife,” he bellowed, “I just want to say one thing . . . I love you.”And he gave her a big kiss.

That may not sound like much to you, but for this man it was a completely new experience. It represented significant life-change. He took a major step forward in his marriage by taking action in response to a biblical principle.

Second Peter 1:20 says that “no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation.” In other words, if you find someone with an inside track on the truth, claiming that his take on Scripture is the one and only way—watch out! That’s someone who is building a cult, not a communion of the saints.

The collective wisdom of God’s people is a marvelous check on error. It’s why the church councils during the first centuries after Christ were so important. They weren’t always pretty, but they did manage to weed out heresy.

We should pay attention to that same protective community today. As we formulate principles from God’s Word, we should check our thinking with other believers who know the Word and are walking with God. We need them to not simply agree on our principle, but agree that our principle is consistent with biblical truth.

And we should also check our thinking with what godly people from history thought and said. That’s a great protection against the “irrelevance of trying to be relevant,” of formulating a principle that only serves whatever is fashionable during this particular nanosecond. As C.S. Lewis wrote, we need intimate knowledge of the past not because the past has any magic about it, but because the past reminds us that so many of our conclusions about “the way the world is” are, in fact, merely temporary. “A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar [i.e., the student of the past] has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
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I once attended a lecture by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In his remarks he talked about the explosive nature of events in the global arena. Everything operates in crisis, he said, which of course poses a severe challenge to leaders. How can they keep up? He explained that things happen so quickly, you don’t have time to think, you only have time to react. Therefore, you have to operate on whatever reservoirs of knowledge and experience you bring to the job. You don’t have the luxury of intensive, unhindered study.

I think there’s a lesson in that for living the Christian life. Certainly we
must take the time to study God’s Word intensively. But often we face situations that don’t afford us the luxury of reflection, only reaction. For instance, we find ourselves in a confrontation with a coworker. We’re tempted to deceive a customer or a competitor. Our kids ask us a penetrating question just as we’re dropping them off at school. We get a phone call from a friend who has to make a difficult decision, and wants our input.

In situations like these, we have to rely on whatever reservoirs of knowledge and experience we bring to the moment. Sure, given enough time, we could probably come up with an elegant, refined response. But life frequently denies us time. So the question is, what familiarity with the Word, what biblical database, do we bring to the situation? We don’t have time for an intensive study. So what are we going to use in the moment?

If we stock up on principles from Scripture, we’ll have a powerful set of resources to deal with the situations of life. You see, principles enable us to multiply truth. They take advantage of our proposition that
interpretation is one, application is many.
We may not have a specific verse to plug into the circumstances of the moment. But we can still navigate a godly path by extrapolating from the truth we already know.

NOTE

T
he church retreat had come to an end. Participants were packing bags into cars and saying their good-byes. What an outstanding weekend they’d had, with lots of fun and good food and a rich time of study in the book of Philippians. Pastor Jones wore a wide smile as he received words of appreciation from grateful members.

Up came Larry, one of the congregation. “Pastor,” he said, “this weekend has been … well, it’s really changed my life. I’ll never be the same.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Larry,” replied the minister. “Tell me, what was the most significant thing?”