What Do you Believe and why?

You ever ask yourself that question? Why do I believe what I believe about the Bible? Why am I apart of the religious denomination I’m in? How solid is the foundation I’m building my relationship with God on? When you REALLY think about it, that's a VERY important question to ask for a lot of reasons. What you believe about God effects everything from how you view God in Sovereignty, how you interact with God, how you view God and His Holy Word, and most importantly the things you say to others about God!

These are ALL VERY important issues that EVERY Christian should inspect in their own lives OFTEN! So many of us in The Body take what Pastor says or what Bishop says about a topic and hold that as the ultimate truth! We accept what we hear from the pulpit as the final authority, rather than holding it up and comparing to the scriptures. How backwards is that?!? EVERYTHING anyone ever tells us should be subject to the Word of God.

Now I know that a lot of times, it becomes really easy to misinterpret scripture when reading on your own. That’s why wisdom encourages the use of Bible study tools like a concordance and some Bible commentaries. Use discernment in deciding which version of the Bible to read and which commentary to purchase. I personally add to that mixture the use of sermonic podcasts. I listen to a lot of R.C. Sproul, Way of the Master Radio, John Piper, Paul Washer, and John MacArthur. From my own studies, I’ve decided to listen to them because they most closely match what I believe to be proper expositional teaching vs the freestyle type of preaching done in many churches today. That's not to say that I agree with EVERYTHING they teach. For instance, R.C. Sproul is a theologian I hold a lot of respect for, but when it comes to infant baptisms our opinions are different. Not that I know any better than him, but I don't seem to find any place in scripture that teaches that children are to be baptized.

It's important to remember when reading scripture, that we don't read God's Word to find a passage that may support what we think, but that we read in order to gain a better understanding of God. When we excuse ourselves and allow ourselves to read scripture and eisegete things into the text that wasn't originally meant, we are in danger of creating idols for ourselves by fashioning a God that fits the description of what we want our God to be like. This is why I support expositional teaching over thematic teaching. When reading a passage of scripture, it's easy to distort meaning when we hop about the entire Bible attempting to make sense of a verse (at least is shouldn’t be done without the use of certain tools), instead, a person would read a verse in context with the other verses leading up to and after that particular verse to get a proper context of scripture.

To quote Flame “A scripture could never mean what it never meant before to its original readers and author”. In other words, the verses and scriptures we read should mean the exact same thing to us, as it did to the original audience and author. Bearing in mind grammatical and historical diffferences of our day and the time in which the text was written.

So many times we use God’s Holy words OUT of context and laugh and joke about it, without realizing that God is a HOLY God, and as such, His Word should not be taken lightly. We should strive to understand God’s Word in its FULLNESS to help us gain a deeper and richer understanding of our Heavenly Father!

I won’t forget a conversation I had with a good friend. We ventured into a theological topic and just as soon as I started getting into it, responded with “See, I believe that the devil will use all this theological stuff to trip believers up sometimes”. It hurt me to my heart to hear him say this, but it gave me a lot of insight on how high up the view of God’s Word he had. I agree that too much of anything can be a BAD thing a lot of times… but NEVER too much of God’s word. It’s deeper than any ocean, and even wider than the same. Most certainly it's important enough for us to delve deeper and attempt to learn ALL we can! The Bible describes itself as containing milk for the simple and meat for the deep. One could argue that spiritual growth and a relationship with God can flourish by dining on the basics of the Bible, but I honestly believe that any lover of God would want to graduate from the surface and simple things concerning the Bible and move to have a deeper relationship with a Saviour that saved their soul. Being mindful of ourselves in the process however because we all know that "knowledge puffs up". So we should ensure that our motives for wanting to grow spiritually and in knowledge of scripture should solely be based out of a desire to know God better.

There are portions of scripture that CAN be understood without digging too deep, but from my own personal studies, with friends and alone, I’ve discovered that a majority of scripture requires that we give it our utmost attention and priority to properly unpack and understand. It’s because of a sloppy approach to hermeneutics that we have a lot of the divisions we have today in the Body today! I’m not referring to the small disagreements believers can sometimes get into (spiritual gifts, anointing, etc). Rather the more important and VITAL things like the Sovereignty of God, the Deity of Christ, and the Trinity as examples. Without proper view of such things, one cannot even HOPE to even believe in the same God revealed in Scripture.
A lot of times, we choose to be stubborn and hold on to what we WANT to believe, even if it contradicts scripture. We’d rather BE right than GET it right (IRAAC, "I'm right at all costs"). It’s hard to fathom that sometimes mom or dad MAY have had it wrong. What a hard pill to swallow when you have to UNLEARN a lot of the things you’ve been taught because you find that your beliefs are found nowhere in Scripture, but rather in the twisting of the meaning of scripture or simply holding on to traditions!

I would just like to encourage you, reader, if you’re serious about the truth, and God’s Word, then please take it seriously enough to know that God doesn’t need an editor, or a proof reader (“see, what God MEANT to say here was….”). Submit YOUR will, to the authority of Scripture and conform yourself to it’s truth. Study to show thyself approved...

Amen.