(2 Timothy 3:10–4:8; Mark 7:1-13)

Bringing the sermon home:

One of the most common attacks on the Christian faith that we encounter today has to do with the reliability of the Bible’s transmission over time. Skeptics claim there are hundreds of thousands of variant readings among the surviving New Testament manuscripts and that we can therefore have no confidence regarding what the original documents contained. Even if you’ve never been confronted with this argument, many loved ones around you have. Also, these topics are necessarily raised when we get to the end of the Gospel of Mark (as we did a few Sundays ago) and notice that 12 more verses appear in double-brackets. What’s original? How can we know? These are some of the matters I discussed on Sunday.

However, while it’s important that we take the time to answer these objections, what really keeps people from accepting the Bible has nothing to do with concerns over its transmission history. As Paul explains in 2 Timothy 3–4, what leads people to distort and dismiss God’s Word are their own sinful passions. And what God uses to change hearts and minds with respect to the Bible are the words of the Bible itself. In his book Surviving Religion 101, Dr. Michael Kruger talks about the way that most Christians have come to believe that the Bible is the word of God: “It is not because they analyzed piles of historical evidences but simply because they read the Bible and recognized that God was speaking there” (145).

This relates to another key point that Paul is making to Timothy: lives transformed by God’s Word testify to its authenticity and authority. With Timothy, we are being called to look at the lives of faithful believers around us and to recognize the supernatural power of these writings.

Furthermore, as we consider the reason the so-called “longer ending” of Mark is still being printed in our modern Bibles, we must consider the words of Jesus in Mark 7:13 about challenging traditions. A foundational commitment of every healthy church is the commitment to subordinate all man-made traditions to the God-breathed Word.



Sermon Outline:

1. Sinful passions are what lead to the distortion & dismissal of God’s Word.
   
2. Lives transformed by God’s Word testify to its authenticity and authority.
3. Man-made traditions must be challenged by the God-breathed Word.