Is your product always effective?

I often wonder about the door-to-door salesman who tries to demonstrate his product, and then it doesn’t work right. I always remember the lady who lived in the country, and a vacuum cleaner salesman came by with a high-pressure sales pitch. He said, “Hey, lady, I’ve got the greatest product you’ve ever seen. This vacuum cleaner will eat up anything. In fact, if I don’t control it, it will suck up your carpet.” Before she could say anything, he said, “Lady, I want to give you a demonstration.” He immediately went to the fireplace and threw some of the ashes in the middle of the carpet. He also had a bag of stuff which he dumped on the carpet. Then he said, “I want you to watch it suck every bit of that up.” Well, she was just standing there aghast. Finally, he said to her, “Lady, if it doesn’t suck up every bit of this, I’ll eat it all with a spoon.” She looked him right in the eyes and said, “Well sir, start eating, because we ain’t got no electricity.”

Now it’s pretty tough to be caught in a situation where your product doesn’t work. But that never happens with the Bible—it is always effective—it always does exactly what it says it will do. That’s a tremendous reality about the Scripture

In John 17:17b Jesus prayed to the Father and said, “Thy word is truth.” That’s a great statement, but do you realize what it is to have the truth? Quite often when I confront people about Jesus Christ they say, “But I don’t know what the truth is.” Even Pilate came to the place in his life when he looked at Jesus and said, “What is truth?” (John 18:38a). Many people have that same thought; nevertheless, we’re in a world that searches for truth.

It is said that nearly three thousand new pages of material are printed every sixty seconds in our society today. That is really cranking the information out. But did you know that books don’t really work anymore? They’re too big. So now we have microfilm, microfiche, and other tiny things they put information on. In fact, I saw a tiny chip that had the entire 66 books of the Bible on it. People are working on those kinds of things because we’ve got to reduce storage factors so we can keep all this information. (I’m not sure we ought to bother with most of it.) Some people have even said that microfilm is too big. So now they’re developing laser storage. They store information, somehow, on a tiny crystal, and every facet of the crystal has information on it. Then they shoot a laser beam on the crystal at just the right point, and it flashes the words they want on a screen. But that’s also too bulky, so now they’ve developed what is known as molecular storage. They say that they will be able to store the entire Library of Congress on an object the size of a sugar cube. Now that’s a lot of information (and a lot of misinformation), because our society is chasing truth.

The Bible even says that men are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). Do you know what that’s like? I remember that when I was in junior high school, I had a terrible time with algebra. I’d go home and work on one of those silly problems for hours. Then I’d go back to school the next day without the answer, and that was so frustrating to me. But you’ve had that problem too: you’ve worked on something and never solved it or found the answer. And that’s the way it is with people in the world. They read, they study, they think, they reason, they listen, they talk, they interact, and they never get the real truth. They never settle on anything, and the frustration is overwhelming. I remember talking to a man who just kind of left society altogether; he just bailed out and got on drugs. He had graduated from Boston University but he was living in the woods, sleeping in a pup tent. I asked him, “Whatever made you do this?” He said, “Well, I searched for the answer so long, I finally decided to blow my mind on drugs. At least now I don’t even have to ask the questions.” Now that’s the despair of never knowing the truth.

Some would rather use “joy” or “blessing,” but “happiness” says it. The truth is there and it brings us joy, or happiness. In Psalm 19:8a it says, “The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.” It’s just talking about the principles of the Scripture. When you begin to study the Bible and learn the great truths it contains, you will get excited. I study the Bible a lot because I’m constantly teaching and preaching the Word, but I also study it on my own because I love it so much, and the exhilaration that comes to me in the discovery of great truths in the Word of God has never diminished. The greatest thrill I’ve known in my life is the tremendous exhilaration that comes to my heart when I have cracked open the shell of an incredible truth in the Word of God. In fact, Proverbs 8:34 says, “Blessed [happy] is the man who heareth me.” In Luke 11:28 Jesus says, “Blessed [happy] are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” Do you want to be a happy person? Then obey God’s Word.

It’s amazing to me how so many people know what the Bible teaches, but they don’t obey it—so they forfeit happiness. Some people say, “Well, the book of Revelation is so hard to understand. I study the other stuff, but I don’t want to get involved in Revelation.” But look at what Revelation 1:3 says: “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy”. The word “blessed” means “happy.” Do you want to be happy? Read Revelation. Yes, to be happy, read the Word of God and respond to it. I love 1 John 1:4; it says, “And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.” Isn’t that great? Then there’s a wonderful statement made by our Lord in that magnificent fifteenth chapter of John where He presents Himself as the Vine. In verse 11 He says, “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” What a tremendous thought—joy from the Scripture