This transcript was generated by whisper.ai. This is day four together of our look through 1st Corinthians chapter 2. I'm going to focus on verses 13 to 15 today and I want to begin by reading those verses. Paul wrote, "This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught us by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, for he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgment about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment. " Now, we read in these verses and Paul talks about the difference that in other places the scripture talks about the difference between something called the natural person and the spiritual person. Natural or worldly minded, that's a person whose decisions are based on this world, on selfishness, on getting ahead, on what I look like to others. It's just how everybody does things. That's being worldly minded. Here Paul talks about being spiritually minded or godly minded. My decisions then are based on God's will, God's direction for my life. How do you do that? How do you begin to make decisions based on God's will? You see, God's wisdom means nothing if it doesn't change the decisions that I make. We're talking this week about what God's wisdom looks like. It looks like new decisions in my life. How do I make decisions based on God's will? I have to know God's word. Paul says we talk about spiritual truths in spiritual words. To enjoy God's wisdom you have to understand God's word. And these verses remind us that understanding God's word is not a matter of our logic or our intellect or even our effort. These verses remind us that you understand God's word spiritually. Not logically, but spiritually. Now it's logical often. Sometimes it's above our thoughts, but often God's word is very logical. But you don't understand it logically. You understand it spiritually. What does that mean? What does the word spiritually mean? We have a lot of misunderstanding about that. Spiritual here is not talking about a feeling, "Oh, I feel spiritual. " Our philosophy, spiritualism, is talking about a person. Spiritually means you understand it through God's spirit. When we talk about spiritually as believers in Christ, we're not talking about some philosophy of Eastern religion. We're talking about God's spirit, the person of God at work in your life helping you to understand God's word. This reminds me, and today I want to focus together, on two truths about every believer in Christ. The first of them is clearly in these verses, the first of these two truths. That is the truth that the Holy Spirit makes every one of us, makes you, makes me, every one of us able to understand the Bible. That is true for every believer. Let me focus again on those verses we just read in the New Living Translation. I want you to hear this again. Verses 12 to 15, "And God has actually given us his spirit, not the world's spirit, so we can know the wonderful things that God has freely given us. When we tell you this, we do not use words of human wisdom. We speak words given us by the Spirit, using the Spirit's words to explain spiritual truths. But people who aren't Christians can't understand these truths from God's spirit. It all sounds foolish to them because only those who have the Spirit can understand what the Spirit means. We who have the Spirit understand these things, but others can't understand us at all. " It takes the person of God to understand the words of God. That's what Paul is saying in these verses. Have you ever read a book and wished that the author was there to explain what you just read? These verses remind us that the author of the Bible, for you as a believer, the author of the Bible, God, is always available. His Spirit has been put into your life as a believer. And God didn't go to the trouble of sending his Spirit into our lives, only to have us leave our Bible on the shelf. We pull it off the shelf and we read it, and as we read it, he personally talks to us. John 16-13 talks about this. Jesus said, "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. " I love that word "guide" because that's how it works. This is what we began to talk about yesterday, how the wisdom of God is revealed in your life. As you read God's word, he guides you into truth. Sometimes we think that understanding just sort of washes over us all at once, but it doesn't work that way. He guides us. If I need a guide to get me through a jungle, he's going to guide me through that jungle step by step. If he tried to tell me all at once on one side of the jungle, "Here's what you need to do, everything I needed to know," I would forget much of what he said. I wouldn't understand because he'd be talking about places I hadn't been yet. God guides us through his Spirit. He's with you every step of the way. Step by step through the jungle of life, he is there. You take a step, he shows you truth. You take another step, he shows you more truth. Every one of us as believers, the Holy Spirit makes us able to understand the Bible. That's what these verses mean. And there's a second truth to remember behind these verses, and that is the Holy Spirit makes me responsible for understanding the Bible. Not only able, but responsible. These verses indicate we all are supposed to know the truth through the Spirit. First John 2, 20 and 27 remind us that that responsibility is a commanded responsibility as a believer in Christ. I don't let just teachers figure it out. I need to read God's Word and see what it has to say to me. You have, in verse John 2, 20, an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. Verse 27, "This anointing you receive from him remains in you. You don't need anyone to teach you as his anointing teaches you about all things. That anointing is real. It's not counterfeit. It has taught you so you remain in him. " Not only these verses are telling us, not only are you able to understand the Bible, you are responsible to understand the Bible. Now God has given us great teachers and great preachers and great writers to help us to learn and to apply God's Word, but you cannot depend on them alone. You are responsible to learn the truth of God, God's Word for yourself. In these days, most of us in America have three or four Bibles in our homes, and that's a wonderful gift, but it's also an incredible responsibility. You and I have the opportunity to know more truth than most believers down through history have had, and God's going to hold me, he's going to hold you accountable for that. We need to take that responsibility very personally, very seriously. We are responsible to know the truth, and that means the whole truth. Now one of the questions behind that is how much of the Bible have you taken the time to know and to understand? By being a part of drive-time devotions, going through the Bible chapter by chapter, you're saying, "I want to know more and more of God's Word, and I definitely honor that. " You see, many of us, we just have a few favorite parts of the Bible, and that's good, but if that's all the places that we go, we're missing out on so much that God wants to say to us. One old preacher by the name of Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse used to say, "Lots of Christians possess a very small Bible. They have John 3, 16, and the 23rd Psalm, and a few other little passages, and they keep going back and forth from one to the other, maybe grazing these little spots down to bare rock, and that's all they have. But God says, 'Go walk through the length and breadth of the land. Every place you set your foot on will be yours, full of wonderful truths just for you. '" I love that quote because it reminds us, "There are deep truths to be found in places in the Bible that I've never looked, and as I've grown in God's Word, I've found that to be true again and again and again and again. There are familiar passages that I go back to that refresh me again, but there are new things He wants to say in new passages. " Now, as we talk about the value of God's Word for God's wisdom, let me just say a personal word to some of you, to all of us at times in our lives. What about those times in my life when I might have doubts about what God is saying in the Bible? Well, what about some of you who you're struggling with real doubt about the Bible at all? You're just listening to this as one last chance. Is this really true? Is this really real? Somehow you've happened upon this on a day when you have real doubts about the truth of God's Word. Maybe you're not quite ready to take a leap of faith because you have some logical questions that you just can't quite seem to get answers. So the idea of trusting in all of the Word of God, it's very, very scary to you. The truth of the matter is the Bible is not a textbook. It is meant to be read in relationship to God. God wants to answer your questions, but it begins with a relationship to Him. So you don't go and say, "I'll check you out, God, and then I'll begin the relationship. " No, based on that relationship, you say, "God, would you show me? I believe you can answer my questions. " The Bible says faith comes through hearing. So first you trust, and then He will show you. If you have doubts, join the club. We've all had doubts. So what do you do? You take those doubts to God. You say, "God, here it is. Here's my doubt, and I trust you with this doubt. " Now if you've ever found yourself struggling with doubts about the Bible, you're in some pretty good company. At the time that a preacher by the name of Billy Graham, who you may have heard of, was about to see his ministry explode into national prominence, he found himself wrestling with real doubts about the reliability of the Bible. One of his respected friends in ministry had told him that it would be intellectually dishonest to accept all of the Bible as truth. And Billy Graham was troubled over whether the Bible was actually the word of God or just the words of man about Jesus based on his friendship with this person. While he was speaking at a youth conference up in the mountains near San Bernardino, he decided to take a walk in the forest to settle his heart on this issue. In his biography, he says as he walked, he talked and he said, "Lord, what shall I do? What's going to be the direction of my life? " He was seeing that intellect alone could not resolve the question of the Bible's inspiration and authority. Ultimately, it became an issue of faith. And he thought of the faith that he had in many everyday things that he didn't understand, like airplanes or cars. And he asked himself why it was only the things of the Spirit of God that he considered wrong. So Billy Graham says, "So I went back and I got my Bible, and I went out in the moonlight, and I got down to a stump. I got to a stump and I put my Bible on that stump and I knelt down and I said, 'Oh God, I cannot prove certain things. I can't answer all of the questions some are raising. But I accept this book by faith as the word of God. '" And from that time on, Billy Graham's ministry did nothing but expand. It exploded. And if you've heard him preach, you know that one of his most familiar phrases is, "The Bible says. " We all struggle with doubts. The question is, what are you going to do with those doubts? What about you? Let's pray together. And as we pray, I encourage you to affirm or reaffirm right now your trust in God's word. Just to say, right now, God, I accept or I reaffirm my acceptance, my trust in your word. God, you want to give me your wisdom personally and reveal it to me through this gift of your word. So I reaffirm my trust in your word, the power that it has, to deepen my love, to increase my hope, to strengthen my faith. Jesus, I thank you for your word to me and I thank you that you've given me a word that I can trust. In your name I pray, amen. Tomorrow, we're going to talk together about an amazing promise from God's word about his wisdom for your life.