Reggie Weems’ Blog

Heritage has recently begun reading Scripture during our services; separate from the Pastor’s preaching text but much the same in thought and theme.  It affords another look at the truth being presented through the message.  It provides our members another divine inlet into their hearts and minds.  Such reading encourages the right kind of humility so necessary in Christianity but absent from a world that is vainly brash in its own conceit.  Every time we hear the Bible read it should humble us.  Scripture reveals the holiness of God and the lowliness of mankind.  This is one reason liberal churches and worldly-minded Christians don’t read the Bible. 
 

No one can be truly humble apart from hearing and obeying the Word of God.  Nor will our churches ever be the kind of congregations that genuinely represent Christ (Who humbled Himself) and gain God’s omnipotent blessing.  Plainly put, nothing is more essential to the success of biblical Christianity than humility before God’s Word.    
 

We need a theology that teaches us to prostrate ourselves in humility before the truth. Any other posture is incorrect.  Yet many American Christians lack humility in reading the Scripture.  We value our own opinions, interpretations or traditions above God’s Word.  We want God to bend His mindset to our thinking. “Liberal” theology is liberal because it does not view Scripture as ultimately authoritative.  Liberal churches, ministries and people continually argue with and against God’s clearly revealed Word.  Churches that hesitate to preach, teach and live according to sound theology may intend to epitomize humility, but genuine, scriptural, Christ-exalting, sin-hating, world-evangelizing Christianity humbles itself, without hesitation, before God’s Word.  With regard to the Bible, hesitation is pride.  Christian humility accepts and obeys whatever God has revealed in His Word. Trusting the Bible to sufficiently reveal God’s mind honors God.  Tentativeness in confessing His Word as true and final does not honor God.     
 

In 1950 Bertrand Russell wrote that “The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology,” (in “Philosophy and Politics,” in Unpopular Essays, [1950] p. 15).  For Russell, theology needs to be held onto tentatively, simply waiting for something new to prove it wrong and replace it.  But when it comes to the Bible, hesitancy is not humility.  No one should hold onto truth tentatively but tenaciously.  This is especially true about theology because what we believe will either save us or damn us. 
 

The humility we want in our churches is the humility that reads and obeys the Bible.  Modern Christians need to read the Bible and believe it, dogmatically!  Humbling ourselves before God’s eternal, unchanging, infallible Word is the essence of Christian humility.  When it comes to truth is not humble to be hesitant. 

  For Heritage this means expanding the time we read Scripture and the amount of Scripture we listen to during our worship experience.  It is in the hope that God’s truth will permeate our minds and hearts creating an immediate and tenacious response that evidences humility before our holy God. 
 

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 11:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.