When the people of Israel went through the wilderness, and they messed up and fell over, and did all kinds of crazy things - it's written for you to learn from.
When Abraham lied about his wife, then had a sexual relationship with her concubine, and made a huge mess - that's there for you to learn from.
God has recorded things about people, and their encounters with God. This is not just a book of stories - it's a book of people, and their relationship and engagement with God. It's about people engaging with Jesus in various points of history, and how He engaged with them. This is why the Bible's been given to you, one of the reasons.
1) That you can learn, from the experience of others, what God is like. You can read what God is like, when you read someone's story. You say: that's what God's like? I was thinking He was like something else.
2) You can look at your life differently, and see it from God's point of view. When your emotions get stirred up, your thinking gets messed up, and you are the centre of your world. But when you get into the word of God, God begins to shift the thinking, so you start to see: what is God doing in the midst of this.
When we're in pain, it's all about me; but when I get into the word, it begins to lift my thinking to: where is God in all this? What is God saying in all this? What is God's perspective on all of this? So God wants me to align with His way of thinking. That's what helps you. That's what gets you through these things.
3) To experience the presence and comfort of God. God wants you to experience His presence. “These things are written, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures”. God wants to use this word for you to experience comfort in the midst of pain and difficulties, by learning from the lives of others.
4) Here's the outcome – “that you might have hope”. When you have turned to God in the midst of pain, engaged the comfort of the scriptures, and positioned your thinking and acting right, the thing you end up with is - a positive view about the future.
Think of how many people walk around depressed - it's a major chronic problem, all over the world now. How many people walk around uptight - full of rage and anger? It just gets triggered off at the slightest little thing. They're messed up. They don't have a positive view of life.
Listen to even how many Christians walk around, and they complain, complain, complain... - lose, lose, lose... That's unbelief manifesting. God wants you to have hope.
Hope means: because it's grounded in God, I can have a positive view about the future.
“Now the hope fills you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope” - I have to believe though! There’s something I've got to do, in order to get to that place where my attitude is completely different. I have to engage the pain, and engage with God, and shift my thinking, and respond to Him. That's what gets me out of it.
A lot of people say: I want ministry, come and pray for me, come and pray for me. If you want to be a baby, and suck on a bottle for the rest of your life - do that. That's okay when you're a baby, but if you've been 20 years a Christian, and that's still your answer to your problems, you're in trouble.
God wants us to learn how to use scriptures to obtain comfort in times of distress - that's what the scriptures are there for. God is a comforter, the Holy Spirit is a comforter, Jesus is a comforter, the Father is a comforter, and the Bible can comfort us - but we've got to learn how to engage with that, and end up with fresh hope and looking forward to the future.