(2 Timothy 3:16-17) “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
Amos was the Lord’s spokesman whom God sent to his people when they had turned aside from following His Word. Amos himself was a humble man who said that he was not a prophet, nor a prophet’s son, but was a shepherd and a caretaker of sycamore trees. He said that the Lord took him from tending the flock and commanded him to go and to prophecy to His people (Amos 7:14-15). For so long God’s people had turned aside from hearing and obeying the Word of God in their daily lives that He would send them a famine throughout the land of Israel, not a famine of food or water but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord and that men would stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east searching for the word of the Lord but not be able to find it (Amos 8:11-12).
Today we are living in times when throughout Israel and wider Christendom there is a famine for the hearing of God’s Word, not hearing it with the physical ears only, but having it penetrate deeply into the ears of the heart. Within many churches today leaders are seeking ways and means to stop the decline in Church attendance and opting in for many Church growth programmes of one sort or another. Then you have pastors and teachers walking around on centre stage in the spotlight and dressed in trendy outfits and giving motivational talks laced here and there with scriptures usually out of context “to keep bums on seats’ if the truth be known, and having so called worship services that are no different in reality from rock concerts.
It is not so much what some of these ‘pastors’ might be teaching although some of it is questionable when compared with scripture, it is what they are failing to teach or avoiding to teach which is the greater problem. Many pastors along with their ‘flocks’ within the wider denominational structured Church system and within many Charismatic circles hunger and thirst after miracles, signs and wonders or for personal prophecies of one sort or another, but how many hunger and thirst after that righteousness and holiness without which no-one shall see the Lord? (Hebrews 12:14). It is no longer ‘fashionable’ within wider Church circles to emphasise teaching on sin, hell, repentance, eschatology, the judgement to come and preparing God’s people for the tribulation that lies ahead.
When Paul was writing his second letter to Timothy he had spoken about the times of stress in the last days and lists the sort of people that would be found within many Assemblies. He starts the list with those who are lovers of themselves and lovers of money and ends the list with those who are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Added to this, Paul writes that these kinds of people have a form of godliness but in reality deny its power to change them deep down on the inside (2 Timothy 3:1-5). Clearly Paul is not speaking about those without the Church but those within the Church professing to be believers but not knowing the power of the Spirit to change them deep down on the inside. C.H. Spurgeon said concerning God’s Word that “the Word of God was the iron anvil upon which the hammers of men’s opinions are smashed.”
In fact Paul commanded and encouraged Timothy to preach the Word of God in all circumstances whether favourable or unfavourable and not to compromise. He was to correct, rebuke and encourage with great patience and careful instruction because the time was coming in his day when people in the assemblies would no longer put up with sound doctrine but instead, to suit their own desires, they would gather around them a great number of teachers to scratch their itching ears with what they wanted to hear instead of giving them what they needed to hear. The false teaching would be such that it would turn them away from the truth and turn them aside to myths or stories made up to impress the hearers.
Added to this Paul instructed Timothy to keep his sound thinking and not to be swayed to compromise the Word of God (2 Timothy 4:2-4). Today there is no lack of false prophets and teachers with their visions and dreams and personal prophecies performing centre stage in many church circles today, raking in the bucks and bathing in the euphoria of the adulation of the masses drawn to these stage shows with their mesmerising music and lighting that move the emotions, excite the flesh and offer spiritual experiences and manifestations that titillate the senses but have no exposition of the Word of God. In fact many of these New Apostolic ‘super apostles’ do not even know how to rightly divide the word of truth and that is a fact!
Now in 2 Timothy Chapter 3:16-17 we are told about the power of the Word of God and that when the Word of God is preached and taught in the power of the blessed Holy Spirit that nothing more is needed in matters related to life and godliness only found in the Lord Jesus alone and in a personal relationship with Him (2 Peter 1:2-3). What then are we told about God’s Word and what it has power to do?
1. God’s Word is Spirit-Breathed.
It is not the words of man even though men wrote the Bible. We are also told in 2 Peter that no prophecy of scripture came about by a prophet’s personal interpretation and did not have its origin in the will of man, but men spoke as they were carried along and moved or motivated or inspired by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:20-21). The Spirit Himself is the Spirit of truth and will never teach or endorse unbiblical doctrine or practices but He will only lead us into all truth as we find it in God’s Word because the whole sum of His Word is the truth and nothing more is needed (John 16:13) (Psalm 119:160) (2 Timothy 2:15).
2. God’s Word is useful for teaching.
While Bible commentaries and good devotional books have their place in our spiritual development there is nothing more spiritually illuminating than having the blessed Holy Spirit reveal the Word of God to one’s inner spirit on the personal level. Revelation knowledge of the Word of God only becomes revelation when it gets deep down on the inside enabling us to hear and obey its commands. To walk daily in the Spirit we must also walk daily in the Word of God. You cannot have one without the other. Now we can learn from Spirit-filled teachers and the writings of other godly men but there are some spiritual insights that we can only receive by the personal revelation of the Spirit to our human spirit (1 Corinthians 2:12-16). Only God’s Word will be able to lead us into all truth as it is illuminated by the blessed Holy Spirit. His Word will keep us on the right path (Psalm 119:105).
3. God’s Word is useful for rebuking.
When you consider the Lord’s true prophets in the Bible they all had a right balance between declaring God’s mercy and God’s judgement. When you look at men like John Wesley, George Whitfield, William Booth and many other men of God in the history of the Body of the Messiah (the true Church/Assembly) they first gave men the law of God and what He required of them and then gave them His mercy. We are told in scripture that “A false balance is an abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is His delight” (Proverbs 11:1). Just preaching about God’s love and avoiding ‘the weightier matters’ of the law or just preaching hellfire and judgement, and avoiding the love and mercy of the Lord, is a false balance. Men must be given the law and commandments of God but with it the love and mercy of God. This distinguishes a true prophet and teacher from a false prophet and teacher.
4. God’s Word is useful for correcting and training in righteousness.
Walking under the control of the blessed Holy Spirit will mean correction and training. All of us at times will have the tendency to go off at a tangent in our spiritual understanding and experience and through the Word of God the blessed Holy Spirit will correct our thinking and our daily walk. Sometimes He will use other Godly men and women to bring correction when He sees us going astray or going in a direction that does not please God even though we may not always be aware of the path we are taking.
This is why we need to have a sound knowledge of God’s Word. It will keep our feet on a level path that pleases the Lord and we will see the devil’s concealed potholes in the road and avoid them. We all need correction but also training in righteous living that pleases God. God’s Word is like a mirror. It shows us what we are really like on the inside of us and the areas that need to change but as we continue to look at it the Word it will also shows us how to change because by it we will be set free from those things that hinder us spiritually that displease the Lord and enable us to live in the power of the Holy Spirit to do those things that please the Lord. This is the path to true freedom and Biblical blessing (James 1:22-25). Correction and training in righteousness involves discipline.
As we read in the Book of Hebrews; “Our fathers disciplined us for a short time as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good, so that we may share in His holiness. No discipline seems enjoyable at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it yields a harvest of righteousness and peace to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 10-11). This is why we need to have a relationship with the Holy Spirit. He is God the Spirit and only He can reveal the things of God to us and empower us to do them (1 Corinthians 2:12-16) (Zechariah 4:6).
5. God’s Word will empower the man (or woman) of God by thoroughly equipping them for every good work.
While we are not saved by works, if we have been saved then works will naturally be the result. We will produce the fruit of the Spirit because the source of that spiritual fruit will be the blessed Holy Spirit Himself, “the divine sap of God” who lives within us if we have been born again (John 3:3). As Paul writes; “You, however, are controlled not by the flesh, but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” (Romans 8:9).
So then brothers and sisters as New Covenant believers in the Lord Jesus the Messiah let us tenaciously cling to, and stand upon, the unchanging unadulterated Word of God because it is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man or woman of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
