Ask And It Will Be Given To You

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Well good morning, and we are in a new series called, Misquoted, How Not to Use the Bible. Basically how to avoid misusing the Bible, and it's going to be for the next six weeks that we are in this series. And you might say, well, that was pretty obvious, you know, this little humorous video that he was misusing the Bible. But I have a feeling you know a lot of times it's done, and it's easy to fall into. We've all probably done it, whether we realize it or not. I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about this in the 1930s when he saw it going on. He said this, we prefer our own thoughts to those of the Bible. We no longer read the Bible seriously. We read it no longer against ourselves, but only for ourselves. That last line is important. We read it against ourselves. Too many people just read it to validate what they already want, or what they already believe. He wrote this in the context of the popularity of Nazism in Germany. And he was speaking out against it when most Christians, because Germany was dominated as a Christian by Christians, most Christians sat back and just let things happen because it was more comfortable, it was more convenient, and they even justified it with different Bible passages. Yeah, they did. We see that throughout the history of Christianity, and it's often misquoting those passages. So what Bonhoeffer was talking about is a fancy-schmancy way of saying something that we're going to get to, but before we go any farther, I probably need to let you know we can get the notes for this message here with this QR code, and you can even get that quote from Bonhoeffer. All right, so what Bonhoeffer was talking about has been called the difference between exegesis and eisegesis. I know. You know, right, Victor? You remember this from New Testament? Yeah, we teach this. I get to teach this at the university, actually, the difference between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis is when I look and get out of the text what the text actually says. Eisegesis is when I read into the text what I want it to say. And by the way, we're all eisegetes. We all like to read into the text what we want, just like that video did. Now, in her book, The Ballot and the Bible, a worthy read, by the way, by Caitlin Schleiss, she lays out case after case the history of the United States wherein this has happened, when a passage is either misapplied, misquoted, or misinterpreted to fit our political whims. It's a worthy read. Now, you might go like, well, yeah, we've made mistakes. It's not just making a mistake, and it's not just that we misrepresent God, although that's bad enough, right? And it's not that we might be foolish when we do this. It's that this can be damaging. This actually can be destructive. What happens often is when I misinterpret or misquote the Bible, I'm either setting up a false understanding of who God is, a misbelief in who God is, or I'm going to set myself up for despair over the fact that God doesn't fulfill what I think that passage is saying. One way or the other, I'm going to end up either in a false belief and a self-aggrandized sense of myself, or a false belief that ends me in despair going like, oh my gosh. And you might know some people who have basically said, yeah, you know, I prayed and prayed and God didn't answer my prayer, and you know, I guess it's not true, this whole God thing. And they end up in despair. So we're not going to be able to, in this series, go through all of the places, or even the top, like, 20 passages in the Bible that get misquoted at times. Any of you got some ideas, though? Because after our vacation, towards the end of July and August, before the new school year starts, we're going to come back to this series. And if you've got a Bible passage you've heard misquoted that you want to have as part of a message, just let me know, okay? Because I'm coming up with a few ideas, but I'm not sure if they're the ones that are probably the most important of them at that time. But hopefully, what we're going to do in this series for these six weeks is hit some of the highlights, but as case studies, so that you understand a little more how better to interpret or quote the Bible, or understand how to apply it, so that we don't fall into misquoting the Bible. Today, we're going to start with a popular verse that's used, I think, and I've heard, by the Prosperity Gospel Preachers, which is not a gospel at all, by the way. We're going to be reading from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 7, 7-12. Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives, and the one who seeks, finds, and the one who knocks, it will be opened. Or which of one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent...