| Subject: God's people and their thirst for His Word (Bill Wilson) |
Author:
Connie
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Date Posted: 12:35:15 03/03/10 Wed
WASH--Mar 1--KIN--An essay by Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today, has stirred some thought among many evangelical Christians, as well it should. Galli, in a November article entitled “Yawning at the Word,” has raised the point that many church goers are impatient with the word of God. He cites examples where he and others have quoted scripture at length while teaching and preaching, only to be admonished to “cut down on the Scripture quotations...You’ll lose people.” Galli says that teachers and preachers need to keep in mind good communications skills, but “these examples reveal such a feature of current church culture that we might want to question ourselves.”
President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., agreed in an article entitled “Falling on Deaf Ears?” Mohler says, “The fixation on our own sense of need and interest looms as the most significant factor in this marginalization and silencing of the Word. Individually, each human being in the room is an amalgam of wants, needs, intuitions, interests, and distractions. Corporately, the congregation is a mass of expectations, desperate hopes, consuming fears, and impatient urges. All of this adds up, unless countered by the authentic reading and preaching of the Word of God, to a form of group therapy, entertainment, and wasted time - if not worse.”
Many agree that Lucifer’s fall from heaven was a result of the sin of pride. The various manifestations of pride have been a hindrance to man’s walk with God ever since the original sin. One of those manifestations that seems to be apparent in the present day church is that of self indulgence. It starts by wanting to have examples of how God is working in people’s lives--but it often comes at the expense of wanting to hear the word of God. It ends up in self indulgent practices of “Spirit guided reasoning” or “revelation based learning” where humans believe they are hearing from the Holy Spirit, are giving personal prophecies and new revelations, but are twisting the meaning and context of Scripture in their white divination.
In Isaiah 55:8, 9, the Lord says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” The only way that we as mere human beings can be in sync with God is to know His word. Jesus said in Matthew 5:6, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” Christians should thirst for the word of God and from that there shall be “a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” If we thirst for God and are filled, then it is Christ who springs from us, not our self indulgence. Let us thirst for God’s word!
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