I have mentioned it more than once in the past that one of the best things we can do, at least now and then, is to look and think about what we already know. I’ve made, or at least attempted to make, the case several times that it is looking at what we already know that we discover that no matter how well we know it (whatever “it” might be) and we do know it . . . we can find new things. After more than twenty years of marriage with the usual ups and downs I am still learning new and wonderful things about Heather. One of the ways I have considered this is with the image of an art critic helping you to see things in a familiar work of art that you have never noticed before but I thought of another way to think of it, which I’ll talk about in a second.
Today we looked at Scripture, which is something that we all know. We don’t know all there is to know about Scripture, we probably don’t even know all that we want to know about it but we do know about it. We know, and we know it from our Epistle reading today, that all Scripture is God-breathed so we know that it special in a way that our favourite book is not. This is where the other image comes in, presented in dialogue form, just ’cause.
“If you take a balloon, just a regular birthday party balloon nothing sacred or sanctified, and you blow into it until it is inflated is it full of air?” I ask.
“Yes, of course it is,” you say.
“If you blow more are into it is it full now?”
“Yes of course,” you say again, perhaps giving me the same look you give a ostensibly crazy person you encounter on mass transit.
“So it wasn’t full the first time I asked?”
“Yes it was, don’t be a witling.”
“But isn’t ‘full’ full?”
“Yes it is,” you explain patiently, the same way you explain things to children, “but just because something is full it doesn’t mean that you can’t add more to it. If you want you can say it is ‘more full’ if that makes you happy.”
And scene!
What I am getting at is that adding more knowledge to what we already have makes us more knowledgeable without minimizing our previous knowledge nor suggesting we were ignorant.
And so I present you some thoughts about Scripture. I hope you enjoy them!
Knox Presbyterian So it is Scripture, so what?
St. Mark’s Presbyterian So it is Scripture, so what?
Oh, by the way, these two sermons are recorded on a different device than I have been using for the past few years. If you are so inclined as to provide any feedback as to whether these are better than the others, please let me know in the comments. And if you are interested in helping me with an experiment, the two files were converted with different bit rates (or something like that) so if you have a few extra minutes to listen to at least part of the “other” sermon than the one you listened to in its entirety any feedback about that would be very welcome too.
Blessings,
The Knox recording is noticeably better in sound quality. It’s much more present and has significantly less echoey bits on hard consonants. Could be recorder location too, but definitely liked the Knox sound better.