 2 Timothy chapter 3, one of my favorite chapters, one of my favorite texts. I want to read the last four verses. 2 Timothy chapter 3, beginning in verse 14. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and it's profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. Bless us now, Lord, by Your Spirit, through Your Word, in Jesus' name, Amen. I once read where a Gutenberg Bible, one of the first books ever printed, sold to a Japanese buyer at a Christie's auction house in London for $5.4 million. You might have downloaded your Bible from a free app, or maybe forked over $49.95 for a hard copy. But trust me, your copy of the Bible is every bit as valuable. Speaking of a Gutenberg Bible, two men were seated next to each other on a crowded bus. One fellow was staring out the window while the other man was reading. He was engrossed in the daily newspaper. Suddenly, the guy with the paper in his hand, he shouts, get a load of this, a rare 550-year-old Gutenberg Bible just sold for $5 million. Well, the other fellow, he kind of turns, and he mutters, he says, yeah, I used to have one of those Gutenberg Bibles, found it at a garage sale while I was stationed in Germany. Well, the fellow with the paper was shocked. He says, you gotta be kidding, what'd you do with it? The man replied rather nonchalantly. He said, oh, I threw it away. You threw it away? How could you have thrown it away and done a stupid thing like that? That Bible was worth millions of dollars. The fellow said, not mine. He said, well, how can you be so sure? The guy replied, well, some fellow named Martin Luther scribbled his name all over the cover of mine. Hey, like this fellow on the bus, a lot of people today don't realize the value of the Bible they possess. The Bible, the one book that reveals the true God. In the Bible, all the lines of history converge and make sense. The Bible maps out the only way to heaven. The Bible even answers the practical daily questions how we live our lives successfully. Read and believe the Bible and it will settle for you, your eternal destiny, as well as garner for you a priceless cache of spiritual treasures both now and forever. The Bible, it's unlike every other book ever written, investigated, and you'll conclude it has but one explanation. The Bible is a book from God to us. Here in chapter three, Paul is concerned with perilous times. They're a coming. Don't think temptation is gonna weaken or opposition is going to lessen. Oh no, expect trials and tribulations. They're only gonna intensify. Living the Christian life is only gonna get harder, not easier. And Paul tells Timothy this is especially so for men. Notice verse one of chapter three. In the last days, perilous times will come for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, the list goes on. Notice in the last days, it's the men who go off the rails. And sadly, that's not only true of the last days, it is also true of our day. For men have lost their way. Where are the godly men today who love and lead their wives and sacrifice for their families and step up in their churches? In 1912, when the ocean liner, the Titanic, sunk, the death toll was 1,450 people. But of those who died, only 103 were women. That's amazing. Compare that though with the wreck of the Costa Concordia in 2012. Only 32 people died in that sinking, but of those who did, the percentage of women was much higher. And why is that? Well, it seems that the women and children first policy that the men observed in 1912 had vanished by 2012. You see, a century ago, men respected women and children. Women weren't considered equal, they were seen as more valuable and worthy of our protection. It was a man's duty to put the safety of women and children ahead of himself. Yet today, this women and children first mentality has been replaced with every man for himself. Sandra Rogers, a passenger on the Concordia, she recounts how she was pushed aside by, as she quotes, big men and male crew members who climbed aboard the lifeboats, leaving her and other ladies on the deck of the ship. As Paul said, for men will be lovers of themselves. Today, men feel the freedom to disrespect women as they would other men. I hope the feminists are happy. They finally have the equal treatment they've wanted. The problem though is that the new equality has only diminished, rather than enhance the status and the welfare of women. And this is an indictment against us men. A real man like Jesus, he lays down his life for others. He sacrifices for his wife and his kids and the weak and defenseless of his church. In contrast, the average guy today, even some Christian guys act like boys, not men. They're selfish. It's all about me, myself and I. They use women for their own gratification. They put off commitment. They fail to hold down a job. They lack discipline and godly initiative. They live an irresponsible lifestyle. They are lovers of themselves. Hey, and you can recognize a boy. The boy is the one who's always opting for shortcuts. A boy wants a wife and a job and kids and a house that earn a lot of work. He might as well believe in Santa Claus. He doesn't exist either. Here's what a boy says. I want money, just not a regular job. I wanna own a business, but without the long hours it requires. I want sex, but just without a commitment to a marriage and to a family. I want a cool church. I just don't wanna have to give anything or do anything. And it is the immaturity of men today that is paralyzing the cause of Christ and ruining the health of our families. Yo, perilous times are here. In contrast, here in chapter three, Paul instructs this young disciple, Timothy, to take a stand, to be a man, to go against the grain. He is to continue in what he's been taught to not forsake the holy scriptures. What he has known from childhood should remain his life's preoccupation. No man ever outgrows their Bible. Even Paul, at the end of his life, on death row in a Roman prison, he instructed Timothy to bring me the parchments. Even Paul, the apostle, needed his Bible. And here at the close of chapter three, Paul tells Timothy, even after he has learned the scripture, after he has been assured of it, he should still continue in it. Never put it down. The Bible is always something for everybody. It's been said the Bible is a river shallow enough for the smallest child to find firm footing and yet so deep the most brilliant theologian can never touch bottom. There's book smart and there's street smart but the Bible makes you God smart. As Paul put it, wise unto salvation. He sums it up in a single word, profitable. Men, the study of the Bible is worthy of your time in toil, your concentration and your exploration. If your goal is to be a man of God in perilous times, fit and fitted for godly living at home and at church and in the world, then the Bible needs to be your cornerstone. Paul makes that clear. Here in verses 16 and 17, he says that the scripture alone is able to thoroughly furnish the man of God with all that he needs to be fruitful and faithful and fearless. David brought it up in the last session. Psalm 119, verse nine, I love that verse. It asks the question, how can a young man cleanse his way? And I love the logic behind that verse. The Psalmist doesn't ask, how can a little child cleanse his way? How can a middle-aged woman or an old man cleanse their way? No, kids and grandmas and old geezers aren't usually known as rebel rousers. So you clean up the way of a grandma. No biggie? How dirty could it have been in the first place? But young men, oh my, adolescent men are cocky and they're reckless and they're stubborn and they're independent and they're hot-headed and they're hormonal and they're impulsive and they're obstinate. I know cause I was one. But here's the point. If you can cleanse a young man's way, you can cleanse anybody. And so how can you cleanse a young man's way? Well the Psalmist answers this by taking heed according to your word. This is why the Bible is so important. God's word alone has the ability to renew a mind and to transform a character and create a new outlook and break the chains of old habits and produce sensitivity and spawn self-discipline and to develop faith. Paul tells us faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. What can tame a young man's lusts and passions and impulses? Oh, there are a thousand shortcuts. Oh, we need to pray over. Let's cast the demon out of him. Let's slay him in the spirit. Let's enroll him in an accountability group. The list goes on and on. But the only hope for that young man, actually any man for that matter to live a pure and godly life is a steady diet of the Bible, the word of God. It is the continual washing of the water of the word that removes the grimeous grime in the dirtiest dirt. Oh, you remember King David's mighty men? They were the special forces of the day. Second Samuel chapter 23 verse 10 describes the exploits of one Eleazar. He arose and attacked the Philistine until his hand was weary and his hand stuck to his sword. The Lord brought about a great victory that day. The face of the enemy, the last ounce of energy. Eleazar tightened his grip on his sword and he kept fighting so much so his hand literally froze to the handle. And this is how we should handle the sword of the spirit, God's word. We need to clutch onto it and use it effectively and never let it go. The Bible will make you a man of God in perilous times. This is why Paul admonishes Timothy, probably for the 99th time, to never neglect the scriptures. And this morning I wanna issue to you that very same challenge. Realize what you have in the book that you hold in your hand. I hope you appreciate the Bible's power and vitality and its uniqueness. It is like no other book written. Imagine suddenly us in this room hearing a loud whistling noise in the air. We rushed outside to see this boulder barreling through the atmosphere at breakneck speed, heading straight toward us. A huge meteorite hits the roof of this building and lands and sinks a crater right into the center of this room. As the smoke clears, we all gather around still gazing at this glowing cosmic rock. When all of a sudden one of us notices a metallic envelope, it's attached to this meteor. Somebody retrieves it and opens it and we find a letter inside that's signed Love God. It's a word from God. We'd be thrilled, wouldn't we? We would study that letter, we would trust in it, we would give it our utmost attention. And yet that is exactly what you possess in your Bible. The Bible is a message from God to us. And if we understand this truth, we will continue in the scriptures. We'll let it teach us and instruct us. We'll let it take us to task and correct us. We will become men of the Word of God. Obviously the Bible didn't come to us on a meteor, or in a metallic envelope, but the fourfold process by which it did arrive is no less supernatural. And this morning, I want us to appreciate that process. Paul lays it out for us here in verse 16. He says, all scripture, that's a word that we'll call canonization. All scripture is given. That giving process includes transmission and translation and it's by inspiration of God. To appreciate your Bible for what it is, a message from God to us, we need to understand how it arrived. Inspiration, canonization, transmission and translation. Let's begin with inspiration. All scripture is given by inspiration of God. Oh, you can go to a Shakespearean play or a Beethoven symphony or even a U2 concert and you'll remark afterwards at that performance. It was inspired in the colloquial tongue. We use the word inspired to describe human creativity and genius. That's not how it's used in reference to the Bible's inspiration. It's meaning is much more profound. The Greek term theonustos is a compound word. Theo means God. Nustos means breathed. Inspiration is the supernatural process by which God breathed and spoke his word into existence. Second Peter chapter one tells us, knowing this, that no prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation. For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. The miracle we call the Bible occurred when holy men were moved by the Holy Spirit. And this is why it's of no private interpretation. Don't say of the Bible, oh, you have your interpretation and I have mine. No, the right interpretation is the intent that God had when he breathed it into being. What did the original authors mean when they put it on the page? Of course, this doesn't imply that the authors of the Bible were given the words in some mechanical fashion. Inspiration is not spiritual robotics or dictation. The Holy Spirit superintended the composition of the Bible using the individual writer's style and vocabulary and even his cultural setting, even retaining traces of his personality. And yet the Holy Spirit oversaw and directed all that was pinned to ensure that it was exactly what God desired and intended. Think of the living word, our Lord Jesus. He was fully God and fully man. Jesus was 100 proof God, but I imagine he had dark hair, maybe a Jewish nose. He looked like his mom. The divine had worked through the human. And this was also true of the written word. The spirit moved so that what we have on the page is 100 proof God, yet it still reflects the style and the vocabulary and the culture of the men who mothered it. When we talk about the inspiration of Scripture, we use four words to help us define what we mean. The first is the word literal. What the Bible says it means. Now certainly there are passages that were written as poetry and meant to be taken figuratively. And when that occurs, it's usually apparent in the text. Yet the Bible speaks plainly about many, many issues and when it does, that's how we should treat it. When the Bible tells us that Jesus is coming again and when God created the earth in six days and when Jonah was swallowed by a fish and that Jesus is the only way to God and that marriage is for a man and for a woman, then that is exactly what it means. It's not to be diluted or reinvented or spiritualized. The Bible's meant to be taken literally. The second word used to describe inspiration is verbal. Verbal inspiration means that every word of the Bible is inspired, not just the thoughts or the intent. In Jeremiah 26, verse two, God told Jeremiah, stand in the court of the Lord's house and speak all the words that I command you today. Do not diminish a word. Every word of the text is strategic. All 774,746 words found in your English Bible are God-breathed. The Jewish rabbis used to say, when Messiah comes, he will not only interpret the passages for us, he'll interpret the very words. He'll even interpret the letters. In fact, he will even interpret the spaces between the letters. The rabbis believe that even the spaces between the letters were God-breathed. This is what Jesus taught us in Matthew 5, verse 18. There he says, to heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or one tittle will by no means pass away from the law to all is fulfilled. The jot was the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The tittle was the smallest stroke on the smallest letter and thus Jesus is telling us that the scriptures are inspired down to their very markings. The third word used to describe inspiration is the word plenary or the whole of scripture. It's not just the portions of the Bible that deal with theology or ethics that are inspired, but all the Bible is God-breathed. Even the Bible's historical and scientific statements. You know, some folks today have a Dalmatian theology. You only take seriously a spot here and a spot there and they ignore the rest of the Bible. But Paul says all. Leviticus is as inspired as Luke. Job is God-breathed as James. Oh yes, Old Testament Israel was an ancient, agrarian, eastern culture. We live in a modern, urban, western culture. And it might take a little bit more effort for us to see how that laws relating to our neighbor's donkey apply to us today. But it's doable. In fact, Paul told Timothy it's profitable. In Acts chapter 20 on the beach in Meletus, Paul mentioned to the Ephesian elders, what he had seen as his duty, I have not shunned to declare to you the whole counsel of God. I believe it takes the whole Bible to make a whole Christian. Paul's job was to preach it all. Too many believers today have what I call a Pandora approach to scripture. Have you listened to music on Pandora? Have you done that? Got that on my phone. You type in an artist or a song that you like and an algorithm creates a playlist of similar sounding music. And as each sound plays, Pandora allows you to either thumbs up or thumbs down that song. And this sort of helps the algorithm further tailor the music to your likes and your dislikes. And this is how some Christians treat the Bible. Some pastors do it too. Oh, they read of God's love and they click like, thumbs up. But then there's the Bible's stance on sexuality. Oops, that's a thumbs down. The parable of the prodigal son. Man, I like that. The slaughter of the Canaanites. Woo, wait, wait a minute, that's a thumbs down. Hope for the hurting, that's a like. Sobriety and holiness. Oh, wait a minute, let's not go there. Thumbs up and thumbs down. And as with a Pandora's playlist, this shapes a person's Christianity rather than deal with the whole council, they gravitate to only what's easy and what's pleasant. And as a result, the church is a mile wide and an inch deep. Believers are anemic and sickly, even Christian men. This is why we need all the scripture, not just part and parcel. The third word, plenary, means the whole of scripture. And then the fourth word used to describe inspiration is inerrancy. The Bible teaches that in the autographs, the original docs, the scripture is free from all error. In John chapter 17, verse 17, Jesus prayed to the Father, your word is truth. In John 10, verse 35, he said the scripture cannot be broken. This means you can lean on this book. It should supply you with confidence, trust in what it says. Nothing is as pathetic as a believer who has lost confidence in the scriptures. He's like a sheared Samson, wrapped in Philistine twine, unable to shake loose. The secret of his strength has eluded him. Don't you become prey for the enemy. It is the inerrant, infallible, unfailing word of God that makes us strong. Inspiration, it's literal, it's verbal, it's plenary, and it's inerrant. And yet inspiration is just the first stop on the Bible's journey from God to us. Next was canonization. The word canon means read. In ancient Israel, reads from the river bank were used as measuring sticks, and thus the canon is the standard. It's the official list of inspired books. When Paul says all scripture, it was by canonization that the church defined all. The Old Testament canon was determined by the Jews. Romans 3 verse 2, Paul tells us that God appointed the Jews as the custodians of the Old Testament. Josephus, a Jewish historian, listed the canonical books recognized by the Jews at the time of Christ, and his list consists of the exact books we have today. This list is important since Jesus accepted the Jewish canon of his own day. In Luke 24 verse 44 he said, all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the Psalms concerning me. These were the three divisions, the law, the prophets, and the Psalms. These were the books that made up the Jewish Bible. Roman Catholics accept 14 additional books called the Apocrypha. We as Protestants reject these books as inspired for two significant reasons. First, and most importantly, Jesus didn't accept them. Jesus never quoted from the Apocrypha, though he quoted or referred to every other Old Testament book. And second, the Babylonian Kalman, which was a Jewish commentary at the time, it stated, Malachi was last written and the spirit departed. The Apocrypha was written after Malachi and thus not accepted by the Jews. Actually the Apocrypha wasn't included in the Catholic Church's Canon of Scripture until 1546 at the Council of Trent. It was added because the church needed a source of support for its practice of praying for the dead. And since they couldn't find it in Scripture, they appealed to a passage in the Apocrypha. The New Testament Canon was also established by Jesus but in advance. Jesus clarified the Canon by limiting those who could write it to the 12 apostles. In Matthew 18, Jesus gave the apostles special authority to bind and to loose. He told them, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Binding and loosing were rabbinical terms. They referred to the authority of prohibiting or approving. In Judaism it was the rabbis' role to bind and to loose but in the church Jesus bestowed this authority on his first 12 apostles. And this allowed them to establish the faith in the practice of the early church through binding and loosing. The apostles set out in the writing of the New Testament the terms of the New Covenant and weaned those early Christians away from Judaism. This is why the New Testament Canon was limited to the books that were written by either one of the 12 apostles or at least under the apostle's supervision. And I believe Paul also had this apostolic authority. I believe he was God's 12th apostle. He was the replacement for Judas. Peter says as much when he mentions Paul in 2 Peter chapter three, he says also our brother Paul according to the wisdom given to him has written to you as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things in which are some things hard to understand which those who are untaught and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do also the rest of the scriptures. Peter talks about how Paul had twist people were twaking Paul's teaching and they were twisting and comporting it but in doing so he equates Paul's letters with the rest of scripture. They too were part of the Canon. This is why John the last apostle to die knowing that he was the last person bestowed by Jesus with this special authority to write sacred text, close the final book, the revelation with a serious warning. Revelation 22 verse 18 reads, I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book. If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book. And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the book of life. And with that verse, the last of the apostles sealed the sacred Canon and thus no new books had been added since John. The final two steps that the Bible took to come from God to us are transmission and translation. All scripture is given and it's not a gift that we've taken for granted. Over the centuries, the Bible has been cherished and preserved and now served up all over the world. The apostles wrote the original parchment, but then they were meticulously and they were numerously copied. Today, 5,600 plus copies of the ancient Greek New Testament have survived. When you speak of documents from antiquity, this is an enormous unprecedented number. We have a fragment of John's Gospel from 130 AD. There's a complete New Testament, 1700 years old. And there's similarity with today's text corroborates the Bible's reliability. Certainly, the scriptures can be trusted. In addition to the thousands of New Testament manuscripts we possess, we also have over 36,000 New Testament quotations that appear in the writings of the early church fathers. These quotes tell us that the Bible read by Christians today in the 21st century is the same Bible that was read by the church in the second and third centuries. You see this notion we hear so often that the biblical stories were passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation and along the way exaggerated or embellished or corrupted is an absolute farce. It flies in the face of the evidence. Beyond a shout of a doubt, today's Bible faithfully represents what was originally penned by the inspired writers. Not only did God oversee the Bible's inspiration, he attended to its canonization and its transmission. For a time, the evidence for the reliability of the Old Testament was not as compelling as that of the New. For years, the oldest copies we had the Hebrew writings were from the Masoretic text which dated to 900 AD. This meant that 1300 years separated our oldest copies from the original writings. Many skeptics wondered if the accuracy of our Old Testament had been compromised. Then in 1947, a young shepherd boy, he was just out wandering the hills near the Dead Sea. He stumbled across the greatest archaeological find in the 20th century. He threw a rock into a cave. We heard the crack of a jar. He went inside and he found numerous clay jars all containing rare and valuable documents from antiquity. The Dead Sea scrolls contain almost all the Old Testament dating back to 100 BC, knocking a thousand years off the time between the copies we had and the original writings. They took us back a millennium and showed us the reliability of the Old Testament that we've been reading. And we found that it was virtually unchanged. The very few slight variations that we noted were due to spelling or smudges. Hey, you need to know that our Bible today has been faithfully transmitted down through the centuries and it represents what was originally pinned by the prompting of the Holy Spirit. God not only supervised the Bible's inspiration, he has also attended to its transmission. And then the fourth step in which the Bible has come from God to us is translation. Here again, all Scripture is given. The Bible is a gift and that gift is even more special when it comes to us in the language that we can read. Realize, if you were given one of the original manuscripts of the Bible, you wouldn't be able to read it. You'd just take one peek at it and you'd say, well, it looks Greek to me. That's why the Bible had to be translated to be given. Did you know the Bible was the first book ever translated? It's also the world's most translated book. Today, there is a portion of it in at least 2,800 languages. Don't ever take your English Bible for granted. Paul says all Scripture is given and it comes to us as a costly gift. For centuries, the Roman Catholic hierarchy preferred that the Bible remain in Latin and Greek so that only the priests could read it and know God's will. The religious establishment tried to keep the common man ignorant. They feared the undermining of their own authority if Christian men read the Bible for themselves. We now call that time the Dark Angel Ages and I wonder why. But then men, men like John Wycliffe and the 1300s and William Tyndall and the 1500s sacrificed their very lives to bring the Bible to the English speaking world. Tyndall once taunted a stubborn theologian. He says, if God spare me my life, I will cause the boy that drive at the plow to know more of the Scriptures in you. That is exactly what happened. Despite fierce resistance, Tyndall smuggled his English translation to the British people. In 1536, he was strangled and his body burned at the stake for his courageous activities. Boy, don't ever take your English Bible for granted. A high price was paid to gift it to you. Tyndall's last words were, Lord, open the King of England's eyes. His prayer was answered three years later when Henry VIII ordered every church in the land to have an English Bible available for its members to read. Several years ago, my son and I, we took a trip to Germany where we visited the Vortberg Castle, the place where Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German, the common language of his period. We entered the room where he set at his desk and where he worked. We even saw the ink spot on the wall that he threw the ink at the devil. It was Martin Luther who said this. Oh, that this one book were in every language, in every land, before the eyes and in the ears and in the hearts of all men. And the work of translating God's gift continues. There are still 180 million people without a Bible. Thank God for the believers who still risked their lives to travel to remote regions to translate God's word. They carry in their chest the flame of Wycliffe and Tyndall and Luther and long for the day when everyone on earth has a Bible in their mother tongue. So what is the Bible? It is a message from God to us and it comes to us supernaturally through inspiration and canonization and transmission and translation. But then what does that Bible do? Paul tells us it's profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Doctrine is what to believe. Correction is what not to believe. Instruction is how to live. Reproof is how not to live. All of that is found in the Bible. The Bible is profitable that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. The Bible has faith and life covered from all angles. Obviously there are facts not mentioned in the Bible. Nowhere in the Bible does it tell us that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or that a sneeze exits your nose at 100 miles per hour. I mean, the Bible may lack facts, but it is not short on truth. All that humans need to know about God and about themselves and about life are in the Bible. The Bible doesn't contain everything there is to know, but it does provide us everything we need to know to live holy and healthy lives. Oh, the Bible refers to itself as a fire, a hammer, a sword. It's a purifying flame. It can crack the hardest heart like a surgeon's scalpel. It belays our motives. I'm sure it breaks God's heart whenever he sees a child of God confused and doubting. Whenever he watches us worry and wonder, fear and fret, all the while, that book that holds the answers sits on our shelf collecting dust, causes God to cry. Hey, when a man of God has the word of God, he has all that he needs to succeed in this fine art of living. I'll never forget sitting on the 18th green at Augusta National one year, watching the Masters. I was talking to a fellow who owned a bar in Missouri. He was telling me how he bartered beer kegs for Masters badges. Well, after we talked for a while, this fellow he asked me, he said, what do you do for a living? Well, I said, I was a pastor. Suddenly got excited. He had lots and lots of questions for me, but I'll never forget his first. He said, man, he said, I had a friend who wanted to be a pastor and he went to one of those places. It's a seminary, I think you call it. He went there for three or four years and I've never figured out why you need that much schooling. All you guys got is one book. I walked away thinking that that Missouri bartender was more insightful than a lot of Christians. When will we realize God has made it so simple? He's compiled the whole course in a single book. Here's how to be a man of God in perilous times. Be mighty in the scriptures. Once there was a lonely elderly lady, she bought a pet parrot to keep her company. She figured she could always chat with her parrot. But after bringing the bird home from the store, she couldn't get the thing to talk. So she went back to the pet store. She complained to the store manager. He told her, he said, well, does the parrot have a mirror in the cage? You know, parrots love mirrors. So she bought a mirror, took it home, put it in the cage. Still no chit chat with the parrot. So she returned to the pet store again. This time the owner asked her, does your parrot have a ladder? You know, parrots love ladders and a happy parrot's a talkative parrot. So she tried a ladder. Still not a peep from the parrot. Finally, she went back a third time. The owner said, well, get him a swing. You know, parrots, they love swings. Set him swinging and he'll talk up a storm. So she bought a swing. Two days later, she returned to the pet store. When the manager asked her about her pet parrot, the woman said, man, he's dead. Well, the owner was shocked. He's, I can't believe it. He said, did your parrot ever say a word before he died? The woman replied, well, yes. Yes, as a matter of fact, he did. In a very soft, faint, weak little whisper, he asked me, don't they sell any food at that pet store? And here's a warning for you. Rather than grow the church God's way by feeding God's people with God's word, Christians today have resorted to mirrors and to ladders and to swings. Folks are invited to look into the mirror. Self-help has replaced scripture. Ladders and rung-by-rung formulas have replaced faith. Swinging music and entertainment have replaced spiritual, scriptural substance. People today are like that parrot. They're told to explore their inner self, climb the rungs of some man-made wisdom, swing on an emotional roller coaster all the while they're dying for lack of food. The Bible. In a given year, Thomas Nelson Publishers will use 15 million tons of paper, two million square inches of gold leaf, 100,000 zippers, and one million square feet of leather in the publishing of its Bibles. Since the invention of the printing press in 1456, over seven billion Bibles have been printed worldwide making the Bible the world's all-time bestseller. The Bible's 66 books have a unified theme. They're packed with fulfilled prophecies. The enduring Word has outlasted all its opposition. There's but one possible explanation for this book. It's of supernatural origin. This book is a message from God to us. And this is why Paul tells Timothy to continue in what he's been taught to never forsake the Scriptures. And this is my prayer for you and me. Guys, let's be men of God in perilous times. Let's be a man of God's Word.