Will God grant us an avalanche of mercy? I will need it. I've learned from God that I haven't learned from God.
My beginning days of preaching were filled with authentic terror, What will I preach this week? Sermon security blankets are beautiful for the handicapped as myself. If J. W. McGarvey and R. L. Whiteside or the Adam Clarke commentaries believed it....I believed it. When not sure where we stood I would check with respectable authors to find out where we stood. I stood with the popular; not necessarily the accurate.
A strange thing happened a long the way. I began to believe the Bible over the good and famous authors. This caused immediate and threatening times for the church largely had believed what others had believed that others, still, had believed. When the loud majority believes something, this is known as Truth.
Therefore, Truth was not according to Jesus but according to those who held the mic best and longest in their debates. We were expert at following...and we always knew where we stood when we once checked to see where the respected were anchored.
What we have in every denomination is a stifling glut of copy-ism. Doctrines and unwritten codes have been passed down the pike for such a long time that many do not know how such things were ever concluded. The Word is still the Word but it has little chance in the American church because it competes with tradition, culture, and economy.
To the staunchest of believers, I would ask how much time you spend in prayer, in fasting, in study of the Bible, and in sacrifice. Dabbling in these disciplines will possibly detect whether we are true to the Christ or merely operating from a stiff-arming, smug-mannered copycat religion.
1 comment:
I learned early the "value" of sermon outline books by "safe" preachers. What an amazing release from all of that when I discovered Jesus instead of "us." I had so much more to talk about and the sermons actually started to change my life, and others.
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