If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited. The very greatness of the subject matter will intoxicate us, and we shall come to think of ourselves as a cut above other Christians because of our interest in it and grasp of it; and we shall look down on those whose theological ideas seem to us crude and inadequate and dismiss them as very poor specimens....
To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end in itself, to approach Bible study with no higher a motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied self-deception. We need to guard our hearts against such an attitude, and pray to be kept from it.
May this ever be in the forefront of our thinking!
1. Preunderstanding fallacy: Believing you can interpret with complete objectivity, not recognizing that you have preunderstandings that influence your interpretation.
2. Incidental fallacy: Reading incidental historical texts as prescriptive rather than descriptive.
3. Obscurity fallacy: Building theology from obscure material.
4. Etymological root fallacy: Looking to the root etymology of a word to discover its meaning.
5. Illegitimate totality transfer: Bringing the full meaning of a word with all its nuances to the present usage.
6. Selective use of meaning: Selecting the meaning you like best.
7. Maverick fallacy: Believing that you don’t need anyone but the Holy Spirit to interpret the text.
A deep, practical conviction of the need of the Spirit, would make us men of prayer, would send us to our closets, and keep us there! Here perhaps is the cause why we have not more success in our ministry, and are not more frequently and more heartily gladdened by the conversion of souls to God; we seek to be men of the pulpit merely, and are not sufficiently men of the closet.
...[W]e do not pray as if we believed we were sent to save souls from eternal death, and that we could not be successful in a single instance without the grace of God! Who of us can read the diaries of such men as Doddridge, Brainerd, Payson, and Martyn, and very many others, and not stand reproved for our lamentable deficiency in the exercise of earnest prayer?
...A praying ministry must be an earnest one - and an earnest ministry a praying one!
...The eternal destinies of our hearers hang not only upon our sermons but upon our prayers; we carry out the purposes of our mission, not only in the pulpit - but in the closet; and may never expect to be successful ministers of the New Covenant - but by this two-fold importunity in first beseeching sinners to be reconciled to God, and then beseeching God to pour out his Spirit upon them - thus we honor his wisdom in the use of the means he has appointed, and then his power by confessing our dependence upon his grace.
Who then can pride himself over against someone else and claim to be better than he? Especially in view of the fact that he is always capable of doing exactly the same as the other does and, indeed, that he does secretly in his heart before God what the other does openly before men. And so we must never despise anyone who sins but must generously bear with him as a companion in a common misery. We must help one another just as two people caught in the same swamp assist each other. Thus we must "bear one another’s burdens and fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). But if we despise the other, we shall both perish in the same swamp.
It is easy to live a divided, compartmentalized kind of life in which God fits neatly into Sundays and Wednesday nights, as well as in our quiet times, but then to view everything else from our jobs to our back yards to our meals with completely secular lenses. But Scripture, and I think especially the psalms, call us to reject such a notion.
Israel’s God, Yahweh, was not limited to a certain sphere of the world; he was the Creator of all things – their covenant God was the Lord of the universe! And so we must see, and confess, and delight in the truth that everything – everything – belongs to the Triune God of our salvation. It was created by him and for him.
Let us remind ourselves today that we are not simply going about business as usual; we are passing through the theater of the glory of God.
Though the knowledge of God is intimate and personal it does not come to us directly; it is always mediated, usually through another human being. Whether this be a mother teaching her child the Lord's Prayer, a bishop expounding a passage from the gospels, a missionary explaining the words of the Apostles' Creed, or someone telling a friend how her life has been changed by Christ, the truth that Christians confess is transmitted through other persons, through the Christian community, the church.
It is not enough, Origen explained, to say, "Christ was crucified": one must say with Saint Paul, "I am crucified with Christ." Likewise it is not enough to say, "Christ is raised." One who knows Christ says, "We shall also live with him" (Rom. 6:10).
All Christian witness is in the first person...
First Baptist Church of Paducah, Kentucky, will be hosting a Men's Conference March 5-6 with special guest, Dr. Randy Stinson. Stinson is Dean of the School of Church Ministries at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Executive Director for the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.