GOD'S greatest gift, after the gift of of our Lord Jesus Christ as our Saviour and sin-bearer, is his Holy Word, the Bible. In the Bible God speaks his truth to the world. This precious gift is rejected totally by the world, and trashed in the visible church. Because of this, where the Bible authority is questioned, the Holy Spirit has withdrawn from the visible church, and this effect can be seen in the state and condition of the visible church, with notable exceptions, at the present time. How has this terrible attitude to the Bible occurred? This erosion in the attitude to the Bible has been an ever increasing virus spreading in the world and the church over the last 150 years or more. In the world of most human beings the Bible is a totally neglected book. Even if households possess a copy of the Bible, it will be found hidden away gathering dust.

In the visible church, in all its expressions, the Bible's authority has steadily been eroded. In an attempt to make Christianity more and more acceptable to the world, gradually and more and more, parts of the Bible have been rejected in the hope that the world will listen and accept this reduction of faith, because it is more acceptable or believable to the thinking in the world. Has this proved successful? When the situation today is reviewed it is plain that the opposite effect has taken place. Far from attracting more people into our churches, the effect has been quite the reverse. The number of worshippers have dwindled, the resources of the church have also diminished. This attempt to make Christianity more acceptable to the world by trashing much of the Bible testimony has had the reverse effect. It is only where the authority of the Bible has been upheld and defended has there been any growth in blessing from God.

What has been the cause of this thinking and this trend? In the first place it comes from the pontifications of science. It is a fact that science has opened up for us much greater knowledge of our universe, but from this has occurred belief in chance rather than belief in almighty God. Chance as the definer of evolution has promoted belief that the universe and our world has been developing by chance, and so millions of years have to be declared for the development of our universe to take place. Matter is assumed to develop, without any idea how matter began. It is assumed that the world has always been, and will always go on. But there is no explanation of how this can be. Life is assumed to develop by chance if the environment is right.

The other cause of the attitude of the world and in the visible church expressed in the present is the exalting of human reason to the position of god. Humanity has exalted itself to the position that it is capable of deciding what is true and what is not; what is believable and what is not. It may be accepted that reason is not infallible, but yet in practice it is taken as such. However unreasonable this may be, human reason is still believed and accepted as the arbiter of our fate, and what can be accepted as true. It does not seem to matter that by human reason there is multitude of different opinions, still human reason is exalted to be capable of defining what is true and what is false. The fallibleness of human reason can be seen in the fact that it has never been able to solve the problem of all the defects in the world and in society. Far from growing to a solution, it is evident that things have not improved in any way whatsoever.

In contrast to this disaster in the world, the Bible, when it is really believed and learnt, has an answer to all these troubles and speculations which science and reason are unable to solve. The Bible is God speaking to this troubled world, and when faithfully approached the limitations of chance are replace by the rock of the truth of God.

In opposition to the thinking of the world, and much of the church, we have in the Bible a rock of faith which is impregnable. This rock can be found in many places in the Bible, but is particularly expressed in the two sentences from the New Testament that I have chosen as the motto for the year 2026. Let us now look closely at these two Scriptures. God is speaking and has spoken to the world and his church.

In contrast to belief in chance which is at the core of worldly thinking and reasoning, the Bible tells us that God is the origin and source of all being. It tells us that God is everlasting, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, and that he created all things, sustains all things, and rules over all things, in heaven and earth. The opening verse of the Bible expresses this fact. Genesis 1: 1 tells us that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Whereas science and reason are silent about the origin of the universe, the Bible tells the truth. In this first verse of the Bible we are told that God is everliving, without beginning or end, and that he created all that we see in our universe. The Hebrew word for created has the meaning of bringing matter into being.

The argument of science and reason is that we have no proof that God exists. This is true, we accept it by faith, and when we do we find it explains all our difficulties. Even if we argue that there is no proof that God is, it is very much better than putting our trust in 'chance'.

With this beginning let us look at our two Scripture statements. The first declares that all Scripture is God-breathed. What a profound statement. The meaning of the word Scripture is the words of the whole Bible as we have them passed down to us in the Bible.

The next statement speaks of all Scripture. This tells us that Scripture means all the Old Testament and all the New Testament. No part may be excluded. The crucial word in this statement is the hyphened God-breathed. Nobody questions the fact that each book of the Bible has a human writer, but this word God-breathed tells us that the Bible, unlike all other literature which is subject to the limitations of human fallibility, has been so protected and ordered by almighty and all-wise, one and only, eternal God, that He has protected the fallible human writers from failing to express his truth in purity. This does not mean that God turns human writers into type-writers, by taking them over so that they cease to think for themselves, but that God so enters the thinking of the Bible authors, so that though they express their own thoughts, and write in the way which is part of them, God has protected them from writing anything that deviates from the truth of God. So we are able to affirm that although each Bible writer writes his own thoughts, the origin of these thoughts come from God, and in their own style of writing they express the truth which God wants to be made known.

When we look at the various writers of the Bible text we can see they vary in education and mental ability. Some are much more educated and clever than others. We can see this in Paul who wrote a great number of the New Testament letters, and Peter who was simply an uneducated fisherman. But although there is an obvious difference in style of writing, they express the same profound and spiritual thoughts and truths, which makes clear that God-breathed into them his truth, and brought about the miracle of the unity of Bible truth found in the Bible.

Satan, motivates the world, expressed in and out of the church, so that all sorts of questions and doubts have been raised as to this fact that the Scriptures are God-breathed, yet never has these doubts been effective in casting doubt on this truth that ALL Scripture is God-breathed. When the Bible is faced with honest searching for the truth it has never been overthrown by the thoughts Satan has brought into the minds of human beings who want to trash the Bible and its divine authority.

The Bible tells us why this is so in the world in the words that Satan has blinded the eyes of the unbelieving lest they see the truth and be saved from his dominion. John tells us that the whole world is under the control of the evil-one. However clever a human being may be, their thinking with regard to God and his truth, the truth of God will always be withheld from them.

Then as we look at the other Scripture sentence in the message for 2026 we have this fact about the Scriptures, and the writers of the various books of the Bible confirmed and made clear. The words written by Peter in 2 Peter tells us 'men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit'.

Who is the Holy Spirit? This question can only be answered from the Bible itself, where God reveals truth about his being which is beyond human wisdom to conceive. This is the truth of what is designated as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This doctrine can only be revealed by God himself, for its beyond human understanding and imagining. It is made clear in the Bible which speaks of God in three persons – the Father, and the Son (our Lord Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. All three persons are revealed in the Bible, specially in the New Testament, as being God, with the added revelation that these three persons make up the truth that there is only one God, though revealed in the Bible in these three persons.

The Bible tells us that as God, the Son is our advocate with the Father, the Holy Spirit is God's advocate with us. So when we read that all Scripture is God-breathed, we are being told the same truth as this fact that all the writers of the Bible books have been carried along by the Holy Spirit. This is telling us that God was in their thinking making sure that they expressed his holy and perfect truth without defect.

This is the wonderful grace of God, to shine the light of his truth into the darkness with which Satan has encompassed this world, and which holds all mankind in his darkness. Jesus tells us in John chapter 1 that in the Word (Jesus Christ before he became incarnate), was life, and that life was the light of men, and then in chapter 8: 12 Jesus tells us he is the light of the world.

The world lives in darkness, and this is why the Bible's authority is trashed and rejected, but Jesus in the great prayer he utter in John 17, and in verse 17 declares 'Sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth'.

This tells us that although the Bible is God's truth for all the world to read, receive and believe, its purpose is for the blessing and nurture of all those the Father gave to Jesus to save and be blessed with eternal life.

When Jesus prays to his Father in this 17 verse of John 17 sanctify them in the truth, he is declaring that this wonderful revelation of the truth of God is given for these blessed people who have been chosen before the foundation of the world to be conformed to the image of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1: 4).

When we read the history of Jesus in his ministry on earth, we find Jesus using the Old Testament Scripture to defeat and confound the temptations of Satan when the Holy Spirit carried him into the desert after his baptism for forty days. In all the confrontations which Jesus endured from the hate and malice of the Jewish leaders, the weapon Jesus used was the truth expressed in the Old Testament, showing he received, accepted and used the Scriptures as the truth of God.

So we see that the Bible is a blessed gift given by God to declare his truth for the salvation of human beings who are born under the dominion of Satan, and cursed with the darkness of Satan. As the Bible is received as God speaking his sure truth, understood in its true meaning, and believed, a soul is delivered from Satan's thralls and raised from death, and given new life in the kingship of God in his kingdom of light and life. So let all of us who have been given the grace to believe, never be ashamed of the Scriptures, for it is truly the truth of God breathed into the darkness of this world.