December 29, 2025
The Year in Review - Part 1
Psalm 119:105
12/29/2025
105 Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my
path. (ESV)
This week, as we are counting down to midnight on New Year's
Eve, we are going to review some of the truth that you have heard
this year. This is much more uplifting than listing the
celebrity deaths in 2025, or the ten top natural disasters since
last January.
Let's start with the Bible. We believe, teach, and confess
that the Bible is the Word of God. The Bible does not merely
contain parts which may be the Word of God, nor does the Bible
contain parts not appropriate for our learning because of the
genre of the writing.[1] From the Genesis account through the
prophecies of Revelation, God inspired prophets, evangelists,
poets, and apostles to write His words, to give us the truth of
His love.
Psalm 119 says: ``Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light
to my path.'' So far, no one has made credible job of proving
the Bible wrong. Some may disagree with the creation account, or
the miracles, but their faith in evolution or the lack of God's
power requires more trust than does Christian belief.
The Bible is written for one purpose, as summarized by Saint
John the Evangelist:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the
disciples, which are not written in this book; but
these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is
the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you
may have life in his name.[2]
May our Lord open our eyes and ears to read and hear His
Holy Word for our salvation from sin and death. Amen.
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1. see: Fee, G. D., Stuart, D. (2014). How to read the Bible for
all its worth (4th ed.). Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, p.
215. ``In the same way, when the psalmist says, `And in sin
did my mother conceive me' (Psalm 51:5 NASB), the writer is
hardly trying to establish the doctrine that conception is
sinful, or that all conceptions are sinful, or that the mother
was a sinner by getting pregnant, or that original sin applies
to unborn children, or any such notion. The psalmist has
employed hyperbole -- purposeful exaggeration -- in order to
express strongly and vividly that he is a sinner, with a long
history of such. Thus the present NIV has put it well:
`Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother
conceived me.' This is poetry, not theology, where the
psalmist expressed poetically that his sinful ways did not
begin recently. ... Thus, when you read a psalm, be careful
that you do not try to derive from it concepts that were never
intended by the musical poet who was inspiried to write it.''
Contrast this with the words of Jesus recorded in Luke
24:44: ``Then he said to them, `These are my words that I
spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything
written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the
Psalms must be fulfilled.'''
2. John 20:30-31 (ESV)