Scripture Trek: Understanding the Importance of Guides in our Spiritual Journey

Unearth the buried treasures of Scripture with us and Pastor Jason Hubdy, our guide for this episode of Truth Trek. Offering an exciting exploration of the Word of God, we delve into the biblical narrative of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. Recognize the critical role of the Holy Spirit as we journey through Scripture and underline the importance of being flexible, submissive, and open to learning from our guide.

Wrestling with the concept of submission? Discover how it intertwines with our faith and spiritual growth. Together, we'll take a closer look at the term "guide" and its biblical references, acknowledging Jesus as our ultimate guide in the new kingdom. Heed our discussion about the significance of selecting our guides with discernment, as a reminder of the cautionary tale that not everyone who presents themselves as a guide may have our best interest at heart. 

Personal Bible study is more than just a solitary act—it's a testament to our responsibility as Christians. Join us as we compare trusting a mechanic to fix our car with trusting a guide to instruct us about the Word, emphasizing the need to verify the teachings we receive. As we wrap up our discussion, we share a sneak peek of our upcoming holiday specials focusing on Bible prophecy. Anticipate riveting episodes during the Advent season, and we invite you to subscribe, share, and join us on this enlightening journey.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

To complete our mission, we must be flexible and submitted, and we must have the right guide. Welcome to Truth Trek, where we dive deep into the Bible to uncover the treasures there. I'm Pastor Jason Hubdy and I will be your guide as we journey together into Scripture, god's Holy Word. In this episode, we're going to take a look at who our guide is and how. We do need a guide In order to complete our mission. We must be flexible and submitted to a guide.

Speaker 1: 0:44

There are many examples in life where we have needed a guide. One example is for those who drive cars, which is most adults these days. At some time we had to be taught how to drive a car, and not only that. We had to be taught how to drive well enough to pass a test and to know the rules of the road so that we could get licensed. And as we did that, many of us went to a Driver's Ed course. And then, after the Driver's Ed course, we had a time probably, where there was a permit where we could drive with another responsible adult and eventually get our full driver's license. When we had that permit, the driver that was with us was supposed to be a guide. They would tell us mistakes we were making, gently correct us, hopefully, or, when needed, urgently correct us, and so we had that guide. Many other examples exist of times where we've needed a guide, and I could go through a bunch, but I'll leave it there for now. But some other examples may be if you've gone into a career and you've needed to learn your trade or your occupation, you had a guide. Perhaps you were an apprentice before you could become a master worker in your field, whatever that is.

Speaker 1: 1:56

But the point is that we need guides. And when it comes to understanding God's Word, how do we go about it? While it is true that we can read God's Word and for the most part, what we need to know is simple enough and clear enough for us to understand, we also need others to read the Bible alongside of us and a guide, especially when we're new in the faith, to help us to learn how to study the Bible. And this is really important because sometimes we don't understand fully, until we've grown in the faith, how much our unbiblical worldview affects how we try to read God's Word. In other words, as we're still coming into the faith and we're still learning and maturing in the faith, we may not completely have the biblical outlook we should. And so we may read a passage and we don't know what it means, and so we go to some source outside of the Bible often to try to determine what that means, and there can be some danger in that. And so we want to have a guide. We want to have Bible studies where we can sit and learn God's Word together. We want to listen to good preaching, we want to listen to Bible teachers that are people who can guide us.

Speaker 1: 3:12

And a great example of this scripturally and how important the guide was, is a man who was reading Scripture but had no idea what he was reading and how to make sense of it. And this is the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch found in Acts, chapter 8. And it's a great story and a great reminder to us of how important it is sometimes to have someone come alongside of us and explain to us what the Scriptures mean. So I want to read the passage very quickly here, and it's again in chapter 8 of Acts, from verse 26 to verse 40. Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza. This is a desert place. And he rose and went and there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candus, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah. And the Spirit said to Philip Go over and join this chariot. So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah, the prophet, and asked Do you understand what you are reading? And he said how can I, unless someone guides me? And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

Speaker 1: 4:36

Now, the passage of Scripture that he was reading was this Like a sheep, he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer is silent. So he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation, justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth. And the eunuch said to Philip About whom, I ask you? Does the prophet say this? About himself or about someone else? Then Philip opened his mouth and, beginning with this Scripture, he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they were going along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said See, here is some water what prevents me from being baptized? And he commanded the chariot to stop and they both went down into the water Philip and the eunuch and he baptized him. And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away and the eunuch saw him no more and went on his way, rejoicing.

Speaker 1: 5:34

But Philip found himself at Azotus and as he passed through he preached the gospel to all the towns until he came to Caesarea. This is a great story, and this is a good example of a man who really needed someone to guide him. He was almost there, he was almost at the place of faith. He just needed someone to unveil the scripture to him a little more clearly. And, of course, we need to always remember that nobody comes to full understanding of Christ as Savior unless the Father draws them according to Jesus himself. And so we must realize that God's Holy Spirit is involved in every conversion, and God gets the credit for every conversion. But God also uses people to guide us and to help us to understand scripture. So let's note some things about this passage.

Speaker 1: 6:24

I think the main idea that I want to focus on is that there's a pattern of submission in this passage. So first of all, let's look at Philip. Philip was submitted. He had been a deacon, which means a servant. He was submitted in that way to the apostles, to the church leadership. So Philip was submitted in that way. He was submitted also that he listened to the angel. Remember, the angel told him to leave where he was going and he had to leave a place where there was actually productive ministry going on and he was to leave that behind. And also, philip obeyed the Holy Spirit because he was prompted by the Holy Spirit to approach a Gentile, this Ethiopian eunuch, to present to him the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1: 7:15

Now let's look at the submission of the Ethiopian eunuch. He was submitted. He had been a pilgrim to Israel to worship Yahweh. He was submitted to the true God even though he didn't fully understand everything about that. So people would travel to Jerusalem. There were other people besides the Jews who would go and worship Yahweh. They would go and make a pilgrimage to worship Yahweh. So he was submitted to knowing the true God. He was also submitted in that he recognized his need for a teacher. Now, this was a learned man. The Bible says he was very smart. He was the head of the treasury for Candice. He was no slouch when it came to thinking and understanding and processing things. He was reading, and yet he was wise enough to know his limitations. So he was submitted to the fact that he needed someone to guide him and show him as well. He was submitted to the gospel. He responded enthusiastically and immediately wanting to demonstrate his submission to Christ. So there's the two main characters, other than the Lord himself, who was a character in the story, but the two men who are characters in the story were submitted in various ways.

Speaker 1: 8:37

So, as we consider that we want to think about ourselves, are we submitted? What are some of the things that we are to submit ourselves to? Well, first of all, for the believer, we need to submit ourselves to God's Word. The biblical authority that we find there is God's own Word himself that he gave to us, and so it should hold a very high position in our lives, in our study, daily study of the Bible, so that we can understand God better and that we can help others to grow together with us, that we are being guided by others and also, hopefully, learning to be guides as well. So we want to definitely submit to God's Word and then, in the church, we want to submit to each other and also to church leaders. The Bible is very clear on this. We need to submit to those who are proper authorities over us, but also we need to submit one to another, and so we need to care so deeply for each other that we put each other's needs above our own that we consider everyone else to be more important than ourselves. So we need to be submitted to that as well. We also need to be submitted to God's great commission that he gave us to evangelize, to share the gospel with others, and we need to be submitted to grow and mature in Christ.

Speaker 1: 10:02

I've often said and I ripped this off from someone else that I heard from years ago that sadly, many Christians go through one year of growth 40 years in a row. We don't want to be those kind of Christians. We want to grow and mature so that when we look back each year, we can say I've come a little way further with Christ. I'm a little bit more mature, I can understand things a little bit better and I have a better biblical worldview, and so we want to always be maturing in that way.

Speaker 1: 10:31

Now let's take a look for a moment at the word that's in this passage I read that was translated into English for us to the word guide. This word was also used in Matthew 15-14, where Jesus refers to blind guides who make rules for other people that they don't want to follow themselves. In John 16, jesus tells about the Holy Spirit that's going to be coming, and he uses the word guide there as well. He says when the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak and he will declare to you the things that are to come. In Luke 6-39, this word again was used as blind guides. That's a parallel to the Matthew place where it says that as well. And then finally, in Revelation, chapter 7, we see the word guide, and we find it in this context of verse 17. It says for the lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd and he will guide them to springs of living water and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. So Jesus himself will be our guide in the new kingdom that he's going to bring about. So here's our reminder.

Speaker 1: 11:53

We always want to begin with Scripture. That's what Philip did here, and he had the great opening because the Ethiopian was already reading the Scripture, and so we see that he begins there. He takes the very spot where the man was reading and begins there. And Jesus did the same thing. In Luke, chapter 24, at verse 27,. This is after the resurrection. Jesus is walking down the road with these men. It's called the Road to Emmaus. There's been books written on this and studies done off of this.

Speaker 1: 12:27

But it says that in the beginning, with Moses and all the prophets, he, jesus, interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. So Jesus himself, to tell about himself, goes to Scripture. John 5, 46, and 47. Jesus said If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? So we see again. Jesus himself gave a pattern of referring to Scripture Always go to Scripture to find out what you need to know. In Acts 1327, it says For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him nor understand the utterances of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him. In other words, these men that had Jesus put to death were actually doing what was prophesied about them. But because they did not fully understand the Sabbath or they did not believe it or recognize Jesus as the Messiah who was coming, they actually fulfilled their part because they didn't know. So again, it says those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him nor understand the utterances of the prophets which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him. So, as we consider this passage, we've looked at together Acts, chapter 8, where we've seen Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch.

Speaker 1: 14:06

I hope that you will, with me, recognize our needs for a guide. We need to be guided ourselves and we need to be practicing and learning the faith better ourselves so that we can also guide others. But we need to ask ourselves a few questions. Are we willing to be guided? Are we willing to be guided by Jesus? Are we willing to be guided by the Old Testament prophets? Are we willing to be guided by the Holy Spirit and are we willing to be guided by those God sends us to guide? So a great question to ask is who is your guide and how do you choose a guide?

Speaker 1: 14:48

Well, it's not always as easy as we'd like it to be. Nobody goes around wearing a sign that says I'm a heretic, don't listen to me. They don't wear a sign that says I'm a false teacher, don't listen to me, I've got bad education, don't listen to me. Nobody wears signs like this right, and it's not always obvious immediately. So we have to be really careful. Who is our guide going to be?

Speaker 1: 15:14

And sadly, some of us have followed bad guides for a while before we had the truth revealed to us. Many people in the church today have been under bad guides at some point, and so how do we follow the right guides? Well, I would say that there are some marks of a good guide. One of the marks of a good guide is someone whose life represents and exemplifies the life of someone who's living for Christ. It's easy to quickly go after some of these multi-millionaire preachers out there that do the gospel, the prosperity gospel and all of those things, and say that that's clearly a bad guide. But that's not even as clear to some people as maybe it should be. Because there's many people who follow these people and because their lives make them appear to be very attractive, then many people say I want that life too, and so they think that if they follow that kind of gospel, then they will likewise be rewarded with wealth, health or other things like that or influence.

Speaker 1: 16:27

But sometimes false teachers are not as obviously false teachers and they will use scripture and they'll use a very good voice or they'll use a great appeal or they'll seem very humble, but their teaching on some points, or maybe a lot of points, is way off from scripture. But how can the average person tell? I mean, you go to listen to a preacher, for example, and you assume he's been to Bible college or seminary or he's got a master's or even a doctorate some preachers have and you think they must know what they're talking about. And who am I to really know what they're talking about? And so many people find themselves in a difficult place. I am a preacher and so I can appreciate this myself, but maybe if I give it an application outside of the church for a moment, that might help you.

Speaker 1: 17:17

I'm not the greatest mechanic in the world, but I know some mechanics that have been very helpful to me in different ways. Let me put it this way If you took your car to a mechanic's shop and they told you hey, I plugged your car into the computer and it gave us these error codes, so here's the three things you need to have done on your car, and you aren't really sure because you're not a mechanic, you don't have the computer to plug in, and so what do you do? How do you know whether you're actually going to pay for a repair you really do need or that that's a repair that you don't need? Well, you might do what I do sometimes. I have a friend that has a code reader and he can tell me whether those codes are real or not, and sometimes they're codes that can be cleared off of the computer without really needing repair, and some of them actually do need a repair, and so you get a second opinion. You go and find out.

Speaker 1: 18:09

But there's a step further I could take. If I didn't trust my friend or if I didn't trust the shop, I could actually go and buy my own code reader. In fact now they have them where they connect to your cell phone and they have an app and it'll tell you exactly what the codes are that you need to figure out. And then you can go online and you can research them and you can read about your particular car and what other people have had. With that experience, you can actually start diving in on your own. So any person that's literate and has access to the internet and could get one of these code reading machines, I believe, could go and figure out what's going on there.

Speaker 1: 18:48

Well, that may be a comparison we can draw with knowing Scripture. We do have experts out there who are top experts and they'll give us a message and we'll listen to it and we'll process it and we'll assume that that's probably the right thing. But then maybe we want to check it out further. So we go to someone who knows the Bible a little better than we do and we determine whether that is something that's true or not, the doctrine that's being taught, and then we can also go on our own and we can go and study the Bible, read it, read different translations. We can pull out a commentary. Many lay people have access to commentaries.

Speaker 1: 19:27

There's many resources online. You can Google almost any verse out there and find somebody's comments on it, and what you will find is that usually there's some consensus on most doctrines. So you can find out what most people in the church have believed throughout history, what they believe today. You can find these things out for yourself. Also, if you really want to do that, you can get yourself some Bible software or use it online and do some word studies, and you can go even further and go deeper on your own.

Speaker 1: 20:01

So, just as I could, if I really wanted to do all that work to find out whether the mechanics being honest with me you can do the work to find out whether what you're being taught about the Bible is the correct teaching, you have the ability to do that, and not only that, I would argue. You have the responsibility as a Christian to do that, and this is why I tell my congregation over and over and over again, I tell everyone listening to this podcast, I'll tell it again and I'll tell you it again and I'll tell you it again you should be in your Bible every day. You should be reading the Bible every day and have a Bible reading plan where you can get through on somewhat of a frequent basis through most of Scripture, if not all of it, so that when you hear a teaching that doesn't quite ring right, you'll know If you've never looked at anything from the Bible before. And you just go on Sunday and listen to your preacher and he says five things and you think, well, that's, I'm not sure about that, but how would I know and how could I challenge it? If you've never been in the Bible yourself, you're not gonna know, just as if I've never done any mechanical work myself. And I bring it to the shop and they tell me I need some blinker fluid or I need some winter air in my tires or some of those other things that we kind of have joked about.

Speaker 1: 21:19

A lot of people would not know what they're being told when they go to the mechanic shop. There's been all kinds of exposés I remember seeing one years ago where one of the 60 minutes or one of those went into shops and found how all these guys will make up a lot of stories about what's wrong with your car and charge people more than they need to be charged and that kind of thing, and the average person does not have the time or the desire to go and research the problem. But today, with the internet and with the ability to get code readers, a lot of people can get those fairly cheap online. They can check now and see whether what they're being told by the mechanic is true. But they have to go to the effort to do it and, just like that with the Bible, you need to make the effort to go and know the Bible, to go and know the Bible for yourself, do some research for yourself, do some study for yourself. And if you don't have a desire for that, maybe you need to ask the Lord to give you that desire, and maybe that's something that you need to pray about. Say Lord, help me to have a better passion for your word, a more greater desire to know you better through your word, and that's a prayer I believe that the Lord will answer. So please think about these things, my friends. Who is your guide? You need to have a guide that can guide you through scripture. But, more importantly, we all need to be in scripture ourselves and so that we can be able to tell when we're being steered in the wrong direction, that we will know how to write the ship ourselves.

Speaker 1: 22:47

And there's a lot of perceptions that young Christians maintain. One third about 31% of young Christians describe the church as boring. A quarter indicate their faith is not relevant to their career or interests. They 23% say the church does not prepare them for real life. 23% say the church does not help them to find their purpose. 23% say the Bible is not taught clearly or often enough, and one out of five young people express that God seems missing from their experience of church. These might not seem like large percentages, but they represent millions of young prodigal kids and nomads and exiles from the church. So I encourage you to find a good guide and that might mean a little work to find out who is a good guide and then also check out your guide.

Speaker 1: 23:40

I tell my congregation all the time don't take my word for anything I preach. Go and check scripture to see if it's true. Church tracker listeners. I encourage you to do the same thing Never, ever, take my word blindly for anything, but go to God's word for yourself and find out whether it's true, and you will be blessed for that effort. And even though it might be hard at first to get into a habit of daily Bible reading, that will reward you in time and so it'll be well worth it. So that's my encouragement to you today in this podcast, and I've already gone a little longer than I wanted to, but, as you can tell, I'm very passionate about this issue. I want every believer to be dedicated to knowing God better through His word. So be blessed as you do that. Thank you for listening to this episode of Truth Trek.

Speaker 1: 24:37

I'm excited to tell you about some things that are going to be coming up here during this holiday season. This podcast is being published on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. On tomorrow, on Thanksgiving Day, I'm going to do a very short podcast. It's going to be a reading of Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Day Proclamation as well as a little bit from scripture about our need to be thankful, so that'll show up on Thanksgiving morning for you to listen to. It'll be really short and then coming up this Sunday and then every Sunday until Christmas, you're going to have a special bonus episode of me reading Christmas stories.

Speaker 1: 25:16

I did this last year on another podcast and people really enjoyed it, so I've re-recorded some of the ones that were most popular and done a more professional job of recording them, so it should be a little bit better sound for you this year. And then on the Wednesday podcasts that are being released each Wednesday throughout December during the Advent season, I'm going to do special focuses on how Jesus, at his birth, fulfilled some of the prophecies of the Old Testament. So I'm looking forward to presenting that to you as well, and so I look forward to having you join me for this holiday season on Truth Trek. So thanks again for listening. If you've enjoyed this, please like the podcast, please subscribe to it and please, please share it with your friends. I appreciate it so much. Have a great day.