A Subtle Lie: We Should Live By The Teachings of the Bible

"You should live by the teachings of the Bible." Sounds good, huh? We'll I don't believe it. I know this is where I will really get on thin ice with some people! How can anybody disagree with believers living by the teachings of the Bible? As strange as it may seem at first, the idea that you should live by the teachings of the Bible is false.

There’s a subtlety in it that is dangerous. I certainly believe the Bible is inspired by God, and I will tell you that as Christ lives through us, we’ll never live in a way that contradicts what the Bible teaches. The Bible is “profitable,” Paul said, for “instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Possession of our Bible is probably the greatest material blessing we can have on planet earth. But I still contend that God’s purpose is not that we live by the teachings of the Bible.

The Bible teaches us, yes. But if we listen to The Word, we are not living by the teaching of the Bible. We are living by the life of Christ within us. Listen carefully to the distinction there. The source of our life is not the Bible. The source of our life is Jesus Christ. The Scripture says, “In Him we live and move and exist.”
Christ is our life source. “Christ living in and through me” is how we live. Christ animates our lifestyle. We learn about the ways Jesus Christ wants to express His life through us through the written Word, but the source of our life is the living Word of God — Jesus Christ Himself. The reason it’s important to know this, is because if you believe that we live by the teaching of the Bible, then the Bible can become a guidebook, an instruction manual, and you can become like the Pharisees and study the Scripture, simply so that you can learn what you have to do.

It’s easy for modern Christians to imagine that the Pharisees were committed to being bad people who were against God. But nobody in Jesus’ time would have thought that. To first century Jews, the Pharisees were the best Judaism had to offer. They were experts in God’s Law, intellectuals, the moral leaders of the nation, and the most dedicated and self-disciplined religious people around. According the Jesus, though, they missed the point. He told them,

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life (John 5:39-40).

Jesus told them that the life they were looking for was in Him, not in the Bible. The Bible pointed to Him, but they missed that. A person may be able to read Hebrew and parse Greek verbs and still miss Jesus.

The Bible is not a textbook. Neither is it a guidebook, a handbook for living. The Bible is a grace book that points us to Jesus Christ. If we are not led to the Person of Christ and to faith in Him, we are missing the point of the Bible.

I've spent most of my life studying and teaching the Bible. I love the Bible more than I have words to express, but it’s a paradox. As much as I love studying the Bible, and as much as I love teaching it and helping other people discover how great a blessing it is, learning the Bible is not the main thing.

In fact, here’s a different way to say it: The purpose of Bible study is not Bible knowledge. The purpose of reading the Bible is to be led to know Jesus Christ, and have Christ transform our lives as He lives in and through us.

As we live in Him and He lives through us, we will approach the Bible in the right way, knowing that Christ is our life source, and the Bible points us to Him. Through the Scriptures, Christ the living Word will reveal Himself to us, teaching us how He will live his life through us. Of course, we love our Bibles, but we live by the life of Jesus Christ.