When Jesus left his apostles, he gave them a commission, a job to do. We are probably familiar with the Great Commission verses in Matthew 28:19-20. I'd like to read them from the Contemporary English Version, just to use a version we are a little less familiar with:

The commission, as Matthew reports it, focuses on teaching. They are to make disciples — that's people who are students, people who learn. They are to teach these disciples the commandments of Jesus — the sayings and the parables and the other instructions that Jesus gave his disciples. They were to continue his work. He was a teacher, and he told them that they should be teachers, as well.

Now, when we turn to the beginning of the church, it should be no surprise that we find the apostles teaching the new believers. Let's turn to Acts, chapter 2, the day of Pentecost, when Peter preached Jesus and the resurrection to a large crowd, and with many words he exhorted them to repent and be baptized.

And in Acts 2, verse 41, we come to a summary verse: "On that day about three thousand believed his message and were baptized. They spent their time learning from the apostles, and they were like family to each other. They also broke bread and prayed together."

They spent their time learning from the apostles. Or, as other translations say, they were devoted to the apostles' teachings. They wanted to learn what the apostles had learned.

Now, the book of Acts tells us what happened, but it doesn't always tell us whether it was good or whether it was bad. That's one of the challenges we face when we read the narrative portions of the Bible, the parts that just tell a story. We have to read between the lines to see whether that story applies to us today, and how.

Luke, like any historian, doesn't just give us a jumble of facts. He uses his judgment as to which facts are important, and he decides how to organize them to help us understand the significance of things that happened. He gives us facts, and he gives us his interpretation.

In the book of Acts, Luke gives us several stories of what happened, and he intersperses these with some summary statements of his own. These give sort of a conclusion to the story, wrapping it up and pointing out significant results of what happened.

Acts 2, verses 41 and 42 happen to be in one of those summary statements. By its placement in the story, Luke is basically saying that what happened was a good thing. He was writing history, and he doesn't include many commands, but he does present this in a positive way, as a good example.

And if we follow the story, we will see that Luke continues to do this. He continues to show teaching as a normal and important part of what the early church did. It was part of the way the church functioned as it grew.

In the next chapter, Luke tells us that Peter and John healed a lame man, and Peter used the occasion to preach a sermon, and the sermon goes to the end of chapter 3. In chapter 4, we see Luke's summary of the sermon, and we see that he put it in the category of teaching:

Acts 4, verse 2: "The Jewish leaders were angry because the apostles were teaching the people that the dead would be raised from death, just as Jesus had been raised from death."

In the next chapter, Acts 5, verse 20, an angel told the apostles to tell the people about salvation. And in the next verse, Acts 5, verse 21, we see Luke's description of what they did, and again he uses the word "teach": "So they went into the temple before sunrise and started teaching..."

And if we drop down to verse 42 we'll see it again: "Every day they spent time in the temple and in one home after another. They never stopped teaching and telling the good news that Jesus is the Messiah."

I just breezed through these verses. I'm not here to expound on these particular verses — I am just citing them to show a pattern in the book of Acts. Luke is presenting these things not as a point of historical trivia, but as a normative practice, something that should characterize the church down through the centuries. The church should not only tell the good news; it should also teach. We should all be disciples, willing to learn, devoted to the apostles' teachings.

Throughout the book of Acts, we see the importance of teaching. In Acts 6, we see that the apostles put their priority on prayer and the ministry of the word. Later, Paul and Barnabas when to Antioch, where they preached and they were teaching. In Corinth, Paul stayed a year and a half, teaching them the word of God. In Ephesus, he said that he taught publicly and from house to house. In Rome, at the end of the book, he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.

The pattern seems to be this: Preach the gospel, and teach those who accept the gospel. The church needs to teach people who have become disciples. This is part of the commission Jesus gave us, one of the five major functions of the church. Discipleship is one of the church's responsibilities, and a responsibility that every member has. We are all disciples. We are all learning. Even those who teach must also be learning.

And what are we to learn? The apostles' doctrine. We are to be devoted to the apostles' teachings. We need to spend our time learning from the apostles — that means the stories they have told us about Jesus, and the explanations they have given to us about the significance of Jesus for us today. That is, roughly speaking, the four Gospels, and then the letters written by the apostles. We are to be devoted to the apostles' teachings.

Perhaps I could illustrate our need with a simple skit - a conversation between two guys named Joe and Frank. I'll play both parts, and with my body language hopefully you will be able to tell who is speaking each time.

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Joe: "Frank, I'm glad to see you. I've got good news — I'm in love."

Frank: "That sounds great, Joe. Who is she?"

Joe: "O Frank, her name is Kalidia. Isn't that a lovely name?"

Frank: "Well, I suppose that is a nice name. What kind of person is she?

Joe: She is wonderful, and beautiful...

Frank: Well, can you give me any more specifics?

Frank: Well, now that sounds more substantial. What did she write?

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Do we do that with Jesus? Sometimes we do.

Sometimes Christians like to talk about Jesus and sing about Jesus, even when they don't know enough about who he is. They don't listen to what he says — I mean really listen. They don't read the letters he has given us. They like him the way they have heard that he is, they like him the way they imagine him to be. They are in love with a mythical Jesus, more a product of their own imagination than of reality.

Now, we don't do this all the time, but we all do it some of the time. We get comfortable with our mental image of Jesus and think we have heard enough. We coast on feelings and imagination and hunches, and don't really want to know more about him. We don't want him to say anything to us other than the things we already know and like. I think for example of Jesus' teachings about hell. Many Christians don't like to hear that part of what he says, but yet that is part of what we need to know.

Good feelings don't give us an anchor for the soul. To have an anchor, we need something that stays the same from day to day and year to year. We need something that is written down, a constant checkpoint for how we are proceeding in our walk with Jesus. Are we really walking with Jesus, or are we drifting off in some other direction? How can we know?

By Scripture.

Jesus said that we should live by every word of God. Our entire lives should be rooted in the word of God. All of the word of God should be correctly applied in our lives — but we can't apply it if we don't know it, and we won't know it unless we study and listen and think — and remain open to learning more each time.

The responsibility is on each of us — a responsibility we need to take seriously — and a responsibility we need to take joyfully — because we are in love with Jesus and really do want to know all that he is saying to us. We need to read these letters — every word — for instruction from the One who loves us.

Jesus is the center of our lives. It is in him that we live and move and have our being. It is from him that we draw strength. He is our wisdom and our holiness and our righteousness. He is our goal in life. Our lives are hidden in him, Paul tells us. He is the source, and he is the goal. We are to be conformed to his image. Church leaders are supposed to work until Christ is formed in us. We are to be renewed in the knowledge of the image of our Creator.

Christ is the goal. We need to know what the goal is and keep touching bases with that goal. We need to keep our eyes on the goal, to fix our eyes on Jesus so that we do not drift away. We need to be anchored to Jesus. How do we do it? Through Scripture. Through study. Through discipleship. Through doctrine — the apostles' doctrine, doctrine that is anchored in Scripture.

Alister McGrath says this in his recent book, A Passion for Truth: "There is an inextricable and intimate connection between the word of God incarnate [that's Jesus] and the word of God in Scripture, in that Jesus Christ is made known to us through the witness of Scripture.... Scripture, when rightly interpreted, leads to Christ; [and] Christ can be known properly only through Scripture.... We cannot encounter Christ in any form other than that which we find in Scripture. Faith accepts Scripture as a testimony to Christ, and submits to Christ as the one of whom Scripture speaks. Christ is therefore known only as he is proclaimed in Scripture."

That's the only Christ we have — we cannot make up a new one in our own image — we have to accept the one that Scripture reveals to us. That means that the church has to teach Scripture. That's the only way we can obey the Great Commission. We as a church need to teach what Jesus taught, we need to believe what he said we should believe, and we need to do what he said we should do.

If we love Jesus, Jesus says, then we will obey what he commands — and that means that we have to keep studying what he commands. We can't remember it all, so we have to keep reading it, studying it, thinking about it, and applying it in our lives.

That means that we as individual Christians need to study Scripture. That's the only way we can be conformed to the right image, that is, the image of the Christ who is revealed to us in the Scriptures.

That means we need to study the Gospels. It means the epistles, too, because they are the teachings of the apostles. The apostles help us understand what Jesus meant — not just the meaning of his words, but also the meaning of his life, the meaning of his death, and the meaning of his resurrection and his life and his coming again.

Jesus commissioned his apostles and inspired the apostles for this very thing, so that they might give authoritative teaching to the church, and they wrote it down to tell us what Jesus meant — and they keep pointing us to Jesus and telling us what he means for us today.

The Bible is the closest thing we have to the actual words of God. Paul tells us that Scripture — that means the Old Testament, too — is useful for teaching, for doctrine, and for our training in righteousness. He tells us that we are to be transformed into the image of Christ by the renewing of our minds. Our thoughts must be shaped by God, and that means putting ourselves before his word in a responsive frame of mind, listening for what he says.

The Bible is our foundation. Paul tells us that the church's foundation is Jesus Christ, but he also says that the church is founded on the apostles and the prophets. Jesus himself, and Scripture. That is how we learn about Jesus Christ. We can learn about Jesus by experience, too — and we should — but Scripture remains the standard for us of whether our experiences of Jesus are imagination, or reality.

Now, most of us here have been Christians for a while. We've been studying the Bible, off and on, for ten or more years. We have seen the Bible misused. Verses have been taken out of context to say things they never really said. Verses have been misquoted and misapplied.

We have all been hurt — sometimes badly hurt — by people speaking in the name of God but not really speaking the message of God. We felt betrayed — jilted — dumped — used — by our first love. It hurts, and it hurts our enthusiasm and our willingness to study again.

But when we are hurt by a love gone sour, we should not give up on love itself. We simply want to do it better the next time, a little more sensibly but no less joyfully.

In the same way, we have all been hurt by a misuse of the Bible, but we should not give up on the Bible itself. If we do that, we just set ourselves up to follow some other person — whoever happens to be the most persuasive speaker. What we need to do is not to ignore the Bible, but to study it better. We hope that our discipleship classes that start today will help us study better, with a more comprehensive view of things.

Let's go back to Joe and Frank, and see how things can develop in time.

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Frank: Not bad, Joe. How are you?

Frank: Joe, I am no expert in marriage. I wish I could do better, too.

Frank: Well, it's...it's good to talk. Maybe you could do more of that.

And do you also listen?

Frank: Joe, you need to listen every day. If you want a relationship, you've got to listen to what she says. Every day.

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In the same way, we need to study, to listen to what God has to say to us in his written word. And we can't just leave it to once a week, not if we want to grow in our relationship and to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It takes work, and it takes time, and it takes a certain amount of persistence.

The importance of discipleship is shown by history, by experience, by reason, and by Scripture itself.

Christians down through the centuries have seen the importance of Scripture in spiritual growth. Even when Bibles were too expensive to own, people would memorize parts of scripture to meditate on. Bible study was one of the pillars of spiritual formation. The Bible is even more important in the Protestant tradition, and again more important in the evangelical tradition.

Luther said that his conscience was bound by the word of God. Even at the threat of death, he refused to go against his understanding of Scripture — and no wonder: It was through Scripture that he received his assurance of salvation. These are the books that tell us of eternal life. These are the books that tell us of our destiny in life. These are the books that tell us why we are alive. These are the books that reveal a Father who is so loving and so awesome and so beautiful that we will never be able to learn enough.

Our own experience shows us that we never learn enough. We will always have more to learn from the Bible, and that's why we need to keep at it, and not to quit.

In the Worldwide Church of God, the catchphrase was, "Don't believe me — believe the Bible." We were a people who believed the Bible. Our focus on Scripture is probably the single most constant factor throughout all our decades. No matter whether the subject was makeup or Jesus, we wanted to know what the Bible said. It was our authority — and it still is. Sure, we made mistakes, serious mistakes, but the reason we changed is that we kept reading the book. It finally got through to us.

In my own experience, I can see the need for continual study of the Bible. When I worked on the Correspondence Course, I compiled a 100 page notebook full of verses relevant to various topics of importance to the church. The whole arrangement was skewed by our doctrinal misunderstandings, but the notebook is still useful to me, because it still lists the relevant scriptures. It is amazing to me to go back and see that I failed to see some really obvious things even though I had all the relevant evidence in front of me. I was partially blind back then —

— and I am still partially blind. Twenty years from now I will probably look back on my articles and learn something new from the same scriptures. I don't think it will be as dramatic a shift as it has been the past ten years, but I do expect that I will continue to learn and to grow — and this is not just for my own intellectual stimulation — it is something that God wants all of his children to be doing.

You see, when I collected relevant verses, I saw them in a particular doctrinal grid, and I put them in that particular framework. I even forced them in when I didn't see what else to do with them. I had a bias, a conclusion that I was trying to support.

Now, everybody has a bias of some sort. We all have conclusions we try to support. Some of them are right, and some of them are wrong. Theologically speaking, we are all mentally impaired. We don't think straight. Sin has distorted our vision and our thought processes.

We are not intelligent enough to come to all the truth on our own — we are not clever enough to put all the facts together to say everything there is to know about God. We don't ever get it all -- and we certainly don't get it all the first time.

The reason that God keeps saying the same thing again and again is that we don't get it the first time, or the second time, or the third time. We are like Jesus's disciples, who so often failed to understand. So we need to keep at it, to be devoted to the apostles' teachings.

We have a lifetime need to study the Bible, to be rooted in the Bible, to continue touching bases with the Bible, so that we can hear what God is saying to us.

Now let me take one minute just to repeat the main message of the Bible. This is the focus for us. This is what Paul said is of first importance — it's in 1 Corinthians 15, verses 1-4:

01 Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. I want to remind you, he says. We all need reminders.

02 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. So we need to hold firmly to the word — in this case, the word is the gospel itself. We need to hang on to it.

04 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, The gospel message is doubly rooted in the scriptures.

The foundation of our faith and life and purpose is Jesus Christ and the Scriptures. If we are devoted to Jesus Christ, then we also need to be devoted to the Scriptures that testify of him. We need to be devoted to the apostles' teachings. We need to be disciples.