As I’ve shared on The Two Cities before I have been incredibly impacted by passages like Psalm 1, “Blessed is the man [who’s]… delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night… In all that he does he prospers.” This passage has incredibly impacted how I do ministry and how I live my life. If I want to be a fruitful Christian I ought to mediate on God’s word day and night. This seems so straightforward and I probably sound like a broken record, but many today do not see a connection between studying the Bible and loving your neighbor. There is definitely a huge dichotomy in many churches today of being a “service church” or a “Bible study church.” Why is this the case? Did Jesus or the Apostles every make a dichotomy between word and service? I think the fear is that a church can become too focused on the Bible that they never participate in loving their neighbor, but it doesn’t have to be an “either or” decision.
A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to here Chuck Swindoll, who I had never heard preach before, and I was pleasantly surprised. Chuck’s message was simple, but impactful, “God is awesome.” As he began to unpack Isaiah 6 this idea became so clear to me, it is after Isaiah sees who God is that he is convicted of his sin and motivated to service. When we see a clearer picture of God we are motivated to live externally.
There’s a big push in youth ministry not to bore our kids with too much teaching and that we need to entertain them- as if anyone ever became bored by the Bible and got saved from playing foosball, but I digress. Ron Sider in his book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World?” illustrates my point perfectly. He says that Evangelicals who are more doctrinally rigorous are “nine times more likely than all the others to avoid ‘adult-only’ material on the Internet.” Additionally he says that Forty-nine percent of all born-again Christians with a biblical worldview volunteer more than born-again Christians without a biblical worldview. In a study done by Barna, they note that Evangelicals (with a biblical worldview) are the “most likely Christian segment to be categorized as having both the Christ-like actions and attitudes,” in contrast to born-again Christians without a Biblical worldview.
Orthopraxy flows out of Orthodoxy. When right doctrine is preached and embraced it naturally leads to an outflow of service. We can’t have a people who are serious about evangelism and service if they do not know the Gospel. We cannot fulfill the great commission if we cannot define it. Perhaps we don’t “practice what we preach” because we are not truly preaching. If we want to be equipped for every good work we must be serious about the Bible.
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