Good morning family. I want to welcome you to 40 Days in the Word. You and I are living in a period in history where the world tells us that there are no absolute truths, believe whatever works for you subjectively. You decide what is true and what isn t. Go with your heart. Follow your gut feelings. And because that is the culture that we are immerged in its no wonder that modern day Christians don t feel inspired to pick up the Bible every day. That is why people seem to want to pick and choose which parts of the bible they will accept and reject those parts that they think are just too hard. We re starting this week on a six week drive to encourage everyone in the church to trust the bible, and love God s word and to get into the bible daily. My prayer is that at the end of these six weeks all of us are reading and understanding God s word on a daily basis. The heart of 40 Days in the Word is going to be what we do in our small groups. We re going to be looking at some material that will help you to unlock the Word of God for yourself, so that you re not dependent upon me or anybody else. So you re not having to say, well that s just your interpretation! We are going to learn how to interpret the Word of God yourself, how to feed yourself from the Word of God; so obviously you re going to want to be in a small group. If you re not in one yet it s still not too late. After the service you will see a list of small groups that are running the 40 days in the word studies and I want to encourage you to put your name down for one today so your group leader knows how many notes to request off Carole and Robert. The second component of 40 Days in the Word I ve already mentioned this to you is a daily video devotional on the Word of God. This is where forty of the top Bible teachers in America record to videotape a five minute devotional. What you need to do is go to 40ditw.com, or 40daysintheword.com and register. I want to really encourage you to join a small group for the next six weeks, and watch the daily devotions online and please make a real commitment to be here for all the six weeks of sermons on Sundays. The Bible is the most read book in history. It s the bestselling book in history. And it is the most translated book in history. Why is it the Word of God? How do we know it is the Word of God? We re going to look at that this weekend as we start. 2 Timothy 3, the Bible says this, All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching and rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, [I m going to explain that in another week] so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. We re going to look at this verse again next week, but I want you to look at the phrase All Scripture is God-breathed. Circle that word God-breathed. That word in Greek is theopneustos. Theo, meaning God, pneustos, meaning breathed. The Bible is God-breathed. What does that mean? Right now you are listening to the breath of Russell Watts. You re listening to my breath. Because what my voice is breath coming up over my vocal cords, vibrating those vocal cords
and coming out as sound. If I didn t have any breath, I wouldn t have any voice. So the breath of Russell Watts is the word of Russell Watts. It is the voice of Russell Watts. And the Bible says that God s Word is God s very breath. It s not just a good idea. It is God s Word to us. As a result of that, Psalm 119 tells us this All of your commands can be trusted. Everything in the Bible can be trusted as true because it comes from God. It s one thing for the Bible to claim that it s the Word of God. Its one thing for the Bible to say it can be trusted. But how do I know really? How do I know this is the Word of God? It s not just a bunch of myths, a bunch of stories that are put together. We need to settle that question before we ever start studying the Bible. How do I know I can trust it? This morning we re going to settle this issue. Because there are incredible proofs, evidences and facts that you need to know to help you make up your mind. So you re not making up your mind based on what you ve heard other people say, but what the Bible actually claims for itself and what history, science and all these other things teach us about the Bible. We re going to look today, to start off 40 Days in the Word, on inspiration How do I know I can trust the Bible? There are seven reasons. 1. It is historically accurate. The Bible is historically accurate. For that reason, I know I can trust the Bible. In other words, the Bible isn t just doctrinally correct. It s not just theologically correct. It s not just accurate regarding morals and regarding ethics. It s true history. Real people, real places, real time. It is true historically. Why is that even important? Because the Bible tells us this: God cannot lie. A lot of people ask this, is there anything God can t do? Yeah, there are a lot of things God can t do. God cannot deny himself. God cannot not be God. God cannot lie because God is truth. In fact the Bible says this in Hebrews 6:18 It is impossible for God to lie because God is truth. The only reason the universe works is because God is a God of truth which means stuff is true all the time. Can you imagine for instance if the law of gravity only worked on Tuesday and Thursday? It d be pretty weird. But the laws of physics are true. God thought them up. He created them. The laws of mathematics are true. God created the laws of mathematics on which the universe runs. So God cannot lie. 1-2
If this book has one lie in it, it s not a godly book. It s not a book of God. Because God cannot lie. Psalm 33:4 says this The Word of the Lord is right and true. That s not only true and right about salvation. It s true and right about history. So how do we know that the Bible is historically accurate? By the same way you know that any other history is accurate. You just go by the test of good history. For instance, one of the ways you test good history is, is it from eyewitness accounts? An historian would say is this written down by somebody who saw it or is it second hand or third hand, or is it a legend written down a hundred years later? The Bible is primarily eyewitness accounts. That s why it s good history. Moses was there when the Red Sea split. Joshua was there when the walls of Jericho fell. The disciples of Jesus sat in the upper room and saw the resurrected Jesus appear and then they wrote down what happened and we read about it. Matthew was there, he wrote it down. John was there and he wrote it down. Peter was there and he told a guy by the name of Mark, and he wrote it down in the gospel of Mark. And Luke talked to all of them, including Jesus mother and heard about what had happened. So its eyewitness accounts of what had happened. The other test of history by which we know the Bible is accurate is the extreme care with which the Bible was copied. You may have heard people say, I m sure it was right when it was first written. But it s been passed down generation after generation. All these changes have come in Ever heard that? If you ve heard that you know somebody just hasn t taken the time to study it, to look into it. When you look into it you find out the extreme care with which the Bible was copied. The Old Testament copyists, the scribes, when they would copy these scrolls from one to the other, they would copy like a Xerox copy. It had to be exact. They had this long list of rules they had to go by to make sure it was exact. Rules like, when they had a scroll, they had a specified number of columns throughout it so it would always be the same. And the length of those columns always had to be from forty-eight to sixty in length and it always had to be exactly thirty letters wide so they could always check it out. To make sure that it was always right, they had this rule that you had to copy letter by letter and not word by word. And they went by these tests to make sure it was right after they copied it. They knew in a book how many letters of the alphabet were in each book. So for instance our letter a, they would know that there were 1,653 a s in this book. And if it had 1,654 when they counted it, they threw the scroll away and started over. There are a lot of ways we can see how they were exact. But one of the ways we can see that they were exact is through something called the Dead Sea Scrolls. We ve all heard of those. What s so significant about the Dead Sea Scrolls? 1-3
The Dead Sea Scrolls were written about a hundred years before Jesus. They have in them copies of all of the Old Testament books except Esther. When they found those scrolls, the earliest copies we had before that were from nine hundred years after Jesus, many of those books. So there s this thousand years gap. All of a sudden we get to check out how much change came in in those thousand years. When they compared what was in these ancient scrolls with what we have in the bible they found that only a few names and words were spelt differently. There was no change in meaning anywhere. That s another proof of the historical accuracy of the Bible. Another proof is in archeology. You look at archeology and it proves again and again that the places and the people, all that the Bible talks about are true. It s not fiction. You can go find these places. Archeologists have dug up these places and we can see the remnants of so many of these places today. The book of Acts is all about historical accuracy. Luke, an historian as well as a doctor, he wrote the book of Acts. He talks about fifty-four cities, thirty-nine countries, and nine different islands complete historical accuracy. Not only is the Bible historically accurate, every time archeology backs it up. But it is scientifically accurate. That s the second reason. 2. The Bible is scientifically accurate. The Bible was not given to be a scientific textbook, obviously. You don t study the Bible to build a rocket. And the Bible doesn t use scientific language. But the Bible never, never, never gives bad science. Not once in over sixteen hundred years in which this book was written, does it give bad science. In fact it is always ahead of science. There are things in the Bible, the Bible says were true, that we ve just discovered a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago. Johannes Kepler, the famous mathematian, the famous astronomer said, Science is simply thinking God s thoughts after him. In other words, God established the laws of physics and then we discover them. God established the laws of biology and we discover them. God established the laws of mathematics and we discover them. One of the reasons why we know the Bible can be trusted is because it s scientifically accurate. And the reason it s accurate is because the laws of the universe were invented by God. So he obviously understands them even in years past when we didn t. Because for thousands of years we ve misunderstood different things. One thing about truth is it never changes. But one thing about science is it constantly changes. There s nothing more worthless than an obsolete science book. I guarantee you that the science book you had in the third form is not being used in year 9 today. A lot of things in that book are no longer believed or even taught. Nothing is more worthless than a five-year-old computer 1-4
book. You can find them in any garage sale and nobody wants them, because things get out of date so fast. How many articles have you read that now say that something you thought was good for you now causes you cancer? Or stuff that they said is fine for a pregnant woman to take and then ten years later they go it s not fine. If you had been reading the Bible a thousand years ago or seven hundred years ago or five hundred years ago, what the Bible says would not have matched the science of that day because it wasn t up to date. God understands stuff even when we don t and his rules don t change. The Bible says this in Psalm 148 Let every created thing [that s the whole universe] give praise to the Lord, for he issued his command, [God set these rules in motion, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of physics] and they came into being. He established them forever and ever. And his orders will never be revoked. The second law of thermodynamics doesn t work today and not work tomorrow. It always works because it was true and it was made by God. Truth doesn t change. In 1861 here was a very famous book that came out called Fifty-one Incontrovertible Proofs that the Bible is Scientifically Inaccurate. It s a very famous book. Fifty-one incontrovertible scientific facts that we know, this is in 1861, that the Bible does not agree with and we know that the Bible is scientifically inaccurate. The only problem is today, a hundred fifty year later, you can t find a single scientist on the planet who would agree with any one of those incontrovertible facts. They have all been disproven by science. Truth does not change. One of the proofs that we know that this book is not simply manmade, that this book came from God, that God directed men and women to talk and speak and write things down, and we know it s the Word of God is what s not in it. What s not in it? Because if this were a human book, you would expect it to be filled with scientific facts of the prevailing day. But they re not here. They re not in the book. For instance, for thousands and thousands of years, people believed that the earth was flat. It wasn t until Copernicus and Galileo and Columbus that people realized the worlds not flat, its round. It s a sphere. It s a ball. So you would expect the Bible to say the earth is flat because it was in existence and being written during those thousands of years when everybody thought the earth was flat. Not a single verse in the Bible says the earth is flat. Not at all. In fact it says the exact opposite. Two thousand six hundred years ago, God said this in the book of Isaiah 40:22 God is enthroned above the sphere on the earth. Two thousand six hundred years ago the Bible says the earth is round, the earth is a sphere, and the earth is a globe. Long before anybody knew it. 1-5
When that was written nobody believed it. But God said it and it was true, whether anybody believed it or not. For thousands of years, people believed that the earth had to be held up by something. Depending on the culture you were in, you got certain different beliefs on what held it up. For instance if you were Greek, in Greek culture you believed that the world was held up by a giant name Atlas. And we all know who Atlas is. Atlas held up the world. Part of the Bible is written in Greek. Atlas isn t in the Bible. Why? Because it s not true. So it s not in the Bible. You would expect that during that time it would have somehow found its way into the Bible but it s not there. The Bible tells us that Moses was skilled and schooled in all of the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians. Because Moses was adopted as the son of Pharaoh s daughter. So he went to the best schools in ancient Egypt and was taught what was the prevailing science of that day. The Egyptians were flat out brilliant. They built the pyramids; they were masters at architecture, at engineering, at astronomy. But the ancient Egyptians were dead wrong on what held up the earth. Because ancient Egypt believed that the earth was held up by five pillars. Certainly Moses was schooled in that science because he went to the best schools of the land as Pharaoh s grandson. Yet not once in Scripture do you find that the earth is held up by five pillars. Why? Because it s not true. So it didn t make it into the Bible. The prevailing science of the day didn t make it there. In fact, the oldest known writing to man is likely the book of Job. It s the oldest literature in existence today that we know about. Job was the first book written in the Bible. The books of the Bible are not in chronological order. Job is the oldest book. In Job 26:7 the oldest known literature in the human race says this God stretches the sky over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing. Who told Job? How did he know that? Everybody knows the earth is flat and it s on the back of pillars. Why? Because the Bible only, always tells the truth. I m reinforcing this because it is sheer nonsense to say that the Bible is scientifically inaccurate. That means you just don t know the Bible. During the Middle Ages there was the bubonic plague. The bubonic plague killed one fourth of Europe. One out of every four people died during the black plague. Because we didn t understand germs. We didn t understand contagion. And we didn t understand infection. And we didn t understand quarantining people. So they had sick people with the bubonic plague who were contagious sleeping right next to healthy people; and people just kept dying because we didn t know about germs and contagion. So it became an epidemic and then a pandemic. They should have read the Bible. Because thousands and thousands of years before the bubonic plague God had said in Leviticus 13:4 Put an infected person in quarantine for seven days. That s thousands of years before we even knew what germs were. God was saying here s how you take care of people who get infected with an illness. You put them outside the camp for seven days. If they re still sick, he 1-6
says in the next verse, keep them out there for another seven days. Nobody understood quarantine because nobody understood germs. But God was right. I could go on and on. The Bible is always scientifically accurate. It is always ahead of science. The Bible says this in Proverbs 30:5 Every word of God is flawless. Mine aren t, yours aren t, human beings aren t. But every word of God is flawless. It s not only flawless, Psalm 12:6 says The words of the Lord are flawless, like silver refined in a furnace of clay and purified seven times! We know we can trust the Bible because it is historically accurate, archeology confirms it. And it is scientifically accurate. 3. We know we can trust the Bible because it is prophetically accurate. What does that mean? It means that the predictions in the Bible always come true. The Bible is filled with literally thousands and thousands of prophecies where God says, This is going to happen at such and such a time, in such and such a way. Over all of the centuries thousands of these prophecies have already been fulfilled, every one of them exactly as God said. And some of them are still yet to be fulfilled. There are over three hundred prophecies in the Bible about Jesus, the Messiah, up to a thousand years before he was born. And over a thousand year period, three hundred prophecies said things like, This is when he ll be born, this is where he ll be born, this is how he ll be born. You can t control that if you re trying to make yourself the Messiah. You can t choose where you Will be born. This is how he ll die, the manner he ll die and what he ll die from. Over three hundred prophecies. What are the odds of me making three hundred predictions about you and every one of them coming true? The odds are so astronomical you couldn t write that number down. It takes more faith to believe it was all just a coincidence than to believe that God planned it. It takes enormous faith to believe it s all just random, that it all just happened, without a designer, without a creator. A thousand years before Jesus came and died on the cross, David in one of his psalms describes what death by crucifixion is like. He didn t use the word crucifixion because nobody knew that word. But a thousand years before the Romans are even thinking of crucifixion, David describes what the death of crucifixion was like. How did he know that? Only God could have told him. The Bible says in 2 Peter No prophecy ever originated from humans. [In other words guys just didn t sit around and say, Let s think this one up, and write it down.] Instead, it was given by the Holy Spirit as humans spoke under God s direction. It s prophetically accurate. Jesus said this in Matthew 26, But this is all happening to fulfill the words of the prophets as recorded in Scriptures. Jesus said it s all coming true just like God predicted. 1-7
Revelation 22, John said The angel said to me, These words are trustworthy [you can trust them] and they re true. [why? Because they re from God] The Lord sent his angel to show his servants the things that must soon take place. It is prophetically accurate. And the odds of all these prophecies happening just the way they did, over thousands of years, are astronomical. 4. The fourth reason I know that the Bible is trustworthy is it is thematically unified. It is thematically unified. What do I mean by that? It has the theme through the entire book from cover to cover, from Genesis to Revelation. It is the same theme of redemption from Genesis to the end. Jesus is the star. It is a thematically unified book. What s the big deal about that? I know a lot of books that carry the same theme from beginning to end. Written over sixteen hundred years, by forty different authors? I don t think so. This book was written over one thousand six hundred years, from the first book to the last, by forty different authors, on three different continents, in three different languages, and they didn t know about each other. How do you think they all got the same story? It wasn t even collected in one book until a thousand years later after they d died, in the Old Testament. How do you think they knew that? It d be one thing if one person wrote this book. The Quran was written by one person Mohammed. The Analects of Confucius are written by Confucius. The writings of Buddha are written by Buddha. You would expect them to be uniform. The Bible was written by forty different people, in every age and stage of life, as I said on three different continents, in three different languages, over one thousand six hundred years. And they got the same story. This book was written by poets and prophets. It s written by princes and kings. It s written by sailors and soldiers. This book was written by attorneys and a doctor. It s written by prisoners. It s written by common people. It s written by prophets. All kinds of people wrote the Bible. And it was written in all kinds of locations. Some of the Bible was written in a cave. Some of the Bible was written on ships. Some of it was written in homes. Some of it was written in palaces. Some of it was written in prison. And they all come up with the same theme. You ve got to be kidding me! It has the same theme of redemption from cover to cover, over one thousand six hundred years. You couldn t get a more diverse group who just happened to up with the same story. It would be like me taking a piece of paper. Then asking 50 people to tear a piece of and fold it into any shape they wanted then hand them back to me. Then when all the pieces are put together where they fit exactly, together they form an exact map of NZ. Impossible. But the Bible is more than that. It was many places, many people and many centuries and yet it all fits together with the same unified theme. Jesus said in Luke 24 Beginning with Moses [that s the first five books of the Bible Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy the first five books of the Bible written by Moses] and all the Prophets, [that s the rest of the Old Testament] Jesus explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. 1-8
Did you get that? Most people think the New Testament is about Jesus and the Old Testament is about Israel. Wrong! The New Testament wasn t even written when Jesus said that. He s talking about the Old Testament. It says he went through all the Scriptures and showed what it said about him. The story is about Jesus from beginning to end. The pictures, the metaphors, the analogies, the illusions everything in Scripture from beginning to end is about God s plan to redeem people and build a family for eternity. It all began with him. The star of the story is Jesus. You can see him in every book. John 5:39 Jesus says You search the Scriptures because you believe they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me! Remember: the New Testament hasn t been written when Jesus said this. He s talking about the Old Testament. All the Scriptures point to me. 5. The fifth way I can trust the Bible is because it s confirmed by Jesus. Jesus trusted the Bible. You may have heard somebody say, you may have even thought, I trust what Jesus said, I m just not so sure about those other guys. Here s the challenge to that: Jesus trusted the rest of the Bible. So if I trust Jesus then I have to trust the rest of the Bible, because Jesus trusted the rest of the Bible. Jesus proclaimed the Bible as a unique book above all others. Matthew 5:18, Jesus said, I ll tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished! Jesus looks at the Bible and says, it s going to last until the end of time. It s going to accomplish what God wants to accomplish in this world. In John 10:35 Jesus said Scripture is always true. Jesus proclaimed the truth of the Bible. And when Jesus talks about the truth of the Bible, I ve got to listen to that in my own life. When Jesus says that every sentence and word of the Bible is true, that s why I believe that every sentence and word of the Bible is true. When you read how Jesus talked about the Bible with people, he would often base his argument about the truth of the Bible on a single sentence or even a single word from the Bible. So he believed every single sentence, every single word. So why wouldn t I, because I trust Jesus? When Jesus talks about the Bible, he doesn t just talk about poetry and history. He talks about it as something that is life changing. Luke 11:28 here s what Jesus had to say: Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it. Do it. Not just read it like poetry. But obey it because God wrote it to our lives. Jesus, as he talked about the Bible, he talked about it as a real book, talking about real people, and real places by a real God who s really at work in our lives. Augustine said, If you believe in the Bible what you like, and you don t believe what you don t like, it s not the Bible you trust, but yourself. I don t know about you, but I ve found that my emotions, my opinions are not always trustworthy. I trust Jesus. He trusted the Bible. That s one of the main reasons why I trust the Bible. 1-9
6. It has survived all attacks. That makes it an unusual book. The Bible is the most despised book, the most derided, the most denied, the most disputed, the most dissected, the most debated, the most outlawed, the most destroyed, the most banned book ever in history. Millions of people have died because they refused to give up their Bible. People were killed. It was illegal. It s still illegal in some countries. Today if you take a Bible into North Korea you can get killed for it. This Bible has been under attack for century after century after century by everything you can imagine. Yet it is still the most read book in the world, the mot published book in the world, the most translated book in the world, the bestselling book in the world and it is still making a difference in people s lives. Jesus said this in Mathew 24:35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. The only thing on this planet that s going to last is the Word of God. It s eternal. Everything else is going to burn up, but the Word of God is eternal, because truth is lasting forever. Voltaire, the famous French philosopher, was a brilliant man, a flat-out brilliant man. He was an atheist but he was flat-out brilliant. He wrote a number of tracts deriding the Bible. Voltaire made a very famous statement in which he said One hundred years from today the Bible will be a forgotten book. Everybody s forgotten that quote! After Voltaire died, for nearly one hundred years, his homestead was used as the book depository for the French Bible Society. They sold Bibles out of his house. It s now a museum. People have forgotten Voltaire. Nobody forgets the Bible. Heaven and earth will pass away; my word will never pass away. 1 Peter 1:24-25 The grass withers and the flowers fall, [in other words temporary stuff just wilts. Today s news is worthless tomorrow. You don t read last week s newspaper. It isn t worth anything. The temporary stuff doesn t last. The grass withers and the flowers fade ] but the word of God stands forever. And the truth will always be the truth. Whether I believe it or not, it s the truth. I could say I believe the moon is made of cheese. We know and it s proven that the moon is made of rock. We ve brought rocks back from the moon. And no matter how much I say I believe the moon is made of cheese, it doesn t change it. It s still made out of rock. I don t want that to be called immoral. It doesn t matter whether I want it or not. What God says is moral is moral and what God says is not moral is not moral. It s not my choice. He s God and you re not. The seventh one that excites me the most. It s the most subjective one but it is the one I have seen personally the most. 1-10
7. It has transforming power. It has transforming power. Nothing can change the lives of people like the Bible. Your life has been changed by it. Billions of lives have been changed. I ve seen alcoholics, drug addicts, get their life clean and sober because they start reading the Bible. I have seen the most self-centered, narcissistic, it s-all-about-me men who abuse and misuse women and think only of themselves and would rip off anybody simply to make themselves feel better, read the Bible, have their lives transformed and become godly husbands, wonderful dads and upstanding citizens in the community. I have seen marriages saved and transformed because of something one spouse read in the bible. If I thought that you could change human behavior by laws, I would become a politician. But I have zero faith in politics to actually change the greatest problems on the planet. Because you can make all the laws in the world, it isn t going to change the heart. You can make a law that outlaws racism and bigotry, but no law is going to turn a bigot into a compassionate person. God s got to do that. God s got to change the heart. I ve invested my life in the heart changing business and I ve seen it happen hundreds of times because of this book. It changes people you would never imagine it could change. Jesus said it like this in John 8:31-32, If you continue in my Word, then you are my disciples indeed; And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free! I want you to be free. You know what the most amazing thing is; secular universities all around the world have the second half of this verse printed in stone on buildings in universities all over: The truth will make you free. Then they ignore God and ignore the Bible. They forget the first part: If you continue in my Word, you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. Not just if you go out and make up your own opinion, you watch Oprah and write an article that will set you free. If you continue in my Word, you will know the truth Because this book never lies to you. Even when I don t like what it says, even when I disagree with it, even when it hurts, even when it s uncomfortable, it will always tell me the truth. That s why it s called Holy Bible! Do you believe everything you read online? No. Do you believe everything you watch on TV? No. Do you believe everything you read in the newspaper and in magazines? No. Why do we spend more time reading and watching stuff we know is a lie than reading what we know is the truth? The fundamental question, the most important question you re going to ask yourself in life is, what is going to be the final authority for my life? You need to decide that. I recommend you decide today. Is it going to be the Word? Or is it going to be the world? Am I going to listen to what God says is true? Or am I going to listen to public opinion or my own set of feelings? Who s going to be the authority in my life? God or me? The Bible says in Romans 12 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, [it s talking about the world s way of thinking, the world s worldview, the opinions and the attitudes 1-11
of the world] but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. [You re either a conformist or you re a transformist. You re either conformed to the way the world thinks or you re transformed by the truth.] Then you will be able to test [you ll be able to know. That s how you make good decisions] and approve what God s will is his good, pleasing and perfect will. God s plan for your life is good. God s plan for your life is pleasing. And God s plan for your life is perfect. But you re only going to know it through the perfect Word of God. Colossians 3:16 is our memory verse for this week.. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Remember: To memorize, you always say the reference before and at the end and you say it aloud. We learn orally. So let s say this verse aloud. Colossians 3:16 Let the word of Christ dwell in your richly. And where is it? Colossians 3:16. By the way what is Colossians 3:16? Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. And where is that verse found? Colossians 3:16. 1-12