There’s nothing quite like car trouble when you’re a long way from home to put life’s worries into their proper perspective.

Just yesterday, I was driving up I-75 through the boonies of southern Georgia when my ’97 Isuzu Rodeo started bucking going up a hill just as the cruise control engaged the accelerator. After turning off the radio, I could hear the engine was running hard.

Fortunately, I was only three or four miles from the next exit and I pulled into a truck stop where I was told by a waitress inside the diner that the nearest place to go for auto repair required me getting back on the interstate and traveling another three-five miles before exiting onto a country highway and driving seven miles into the little town of Griffin.

I ordered a cup of coffee and a B.L.T. as I waited for the car to cool down, thinking this would help, and, sure enough, when I went to start it back up everything seemed okay.

Once I made it to the auto repair shop they forwarded me onto a transmission service joint. A guy there drove me and the Rodeo around town for about five minutes and said he couldn’t tell that anything was wrong.

There was no transmission fluid leaking so he recommended I “not mess with it” and just keep driving! While I was certainly pleased with his no-fee diagnosis, this made for a nerve-wracking rest of the way home as I drove four hours (through heavy traffic in Atlanta, etc.) in fear that I’d have trouble again.

I still have no idea what caused the problem and I’m now thinking I better just trade in my poor old $3,000 gas hog before it really winds up costing me a bundle!

*****

Inside the guest bathroom on the sink counter at Pastor Beckemeyer’s house was this delightful little tract written by Bible scholar E.W. Bullinger. He wrote that the greatest need of the Christian—one many aren’t even aware they’re lacking in—is to know God: who He is, how He thinks, what His plans are, what does He want in our relationship to Him, etc.

Of course, God designed for this information to be thoroughly laid out in His Book. Through faithful study of what He’s written, we can internalize more and more of Him—His essence, His being, His character, on and on—in an inexhaustibly deep way.

As Bullinger points out, unbelievers and Christians who don’t know God’s Word can only rely on their imaginations and thoughts to tell them who God is. God is therefore based on their own tastes. How boring and useless is that!

*****

Here’s a great passage on this same matter from a recent sermon by my pastor, Richard Jordan:

“Do you understand that if God didn’t tell you His wisdom, you wouldn’t figure it out? People don’t believe that, but that’s exactly what made the heathen ‘the heathen’ in Romans 1. They rejected the revelation of God and said, ‘We’re going to do it our way.’ And, as Paul says, ‘Professing themselves to be wise they became fools,’ or people without God’s wisdom.”

Paul says in I Cor. 2:9, “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”

Jordan explains, “These are the three ways you know everything you know: your eye gate, heart gate and ear gate. Your eye gate’s what you see. In philosophy, we call that empirical evidence: I can see it, feel it, touch it. That’s the scientific method of replicatible events and phenomenon.

“There are some things you can’t know by the eye gate but you know them by the ear gate. You hear them. Words communicate to you thoughts, reason. We call that rationalism: I think it through and I use words and reason it out.

“Now, the heart gate, or the faith gate, is what Paul is refers to in Romans 10:10: ‘With the heart man believeth.’

“So, everything you know you know either through empirical evidence, rational evidence or faith evidence. And Paul said, ‘Based upon the way you know everything you know, you can’t know what God’s planned, but God hath revealed them to us by the Spirit.’

“You see God has made His will and purpose known. It’s objective, real evidence. I couldn’t have discovered it had He not revealed it. But then when He revealed it, He didn’t just say, ‘Okay, Tom, I think I’ll tell you this. Don’t tell anybody else.’

*****

By what Peter says in Acts 1:16—“Men and brethren, this scripture must needs have been fulfilled, which the Holy Ghost by the mouth of David spake before concerning Judas”—we know that while David penned the words, it was God the Holy Spirit who was the penman.

Similarly, when Paul says in Acts 28:25, “Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet unto our fathers,” and then quotes Isaiah 6:9, he’s telling us Isaiah was the pen that wrote it down but it was really the words of the Holy Spirit.

Jordan explains, “When Jesus said, ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,’ that’s what inspiration is! The words written are the w-o-r-d-s God caused to be written down.

*****

Attending the Southern Baptist-affiliated Mobile College in the 1960s, Jordan says he had a professor who tried to convince him for three solid years that “the word of God was not the Word of God; it just contained the Word of God when it spoke to my heart.”

“That’s what you call neo-orthodoxy,” says Jordan, “and what saved me from all of that—and from becoming a modernist—was this verse of scripture in Matthew 22:31 where Christ Himself asks, ‘Have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’

“Jesus is quoting Exodus 3:16 and notice what He says: What is the scripture? It is that ‘which was spoken unto you by God.’ Is that inspiration? Sure. Did Jesus Christ here think He had the inspired Word of God? Yes, He did because He said, ‘Have you not read?’

“Now, tell me something? Were they reading from the original manuscripts and autographs? Exodus 3 was written by Moses 1,500 years before this. And those Pharisees didn’t have the original copy. If they had the original manuscript they would have had it somewhere in a museum under glass with guards around it. They had copies of it, and yet when they had the copy, Jesus said, ‘You’ve got that which was spoken to you by God.’

“What is the Word of God? It’s that which is spoken unto you by God. It’s the words on the page, not just the message, the thought, the idea or the content when it strikes your heart. It’s some words that God chose to put on a piece of paper that He said, ‘These are my words because these words communicate my thinking to you.’ Folks, thinking is communicated through words. There’s a basic starting place here!”