Note: One can only imagine that since the bible is the one tool God uses to speak to us consistently as a means of giving to us our marching orders, it should not surprise us then the enemy of our soul would do anything he can to keep us from both reading and hearing it. One way Satan keeps people from reading the Word is to make it unavailable. Though this is true in certain countries such as China, it is not true here in America. We have such an abundance of the bible in various sizes, colors, and translations.
So then, the next step of the enemy to keep people from reading the bible is to attack from within – i.e. make the bible seem boring. Here Satan attacks on the inside of us and contaminates our hearts. Although we all have a bible and most likely a bible in one or more translations, Satan corrupts our hearts with a lie that kills our desire to want to read and study it.
Michael Patton has listed seven reasons why we often times think of the bible as boring. He also gives a remedy for each one. Reading through his list will put you ahead of the devil’s plan and provide you with the needed understanding to overcome inner boredom. Enjoy.
Seven Possible Reasons We Find the Bible Boring
Michael Patton
Speaking from a protestant perspective, the Holy Bible is the final authority for faith and practice. Moreover, it is God’s ultimate communication to us. However, there are a number of Christians who struggle with reading the Bible. In fact, you might be one of them and find it difficult to engage with on an in-depth and consistent level. Now, I confess, I have always enjoyed reading the Bible . But even in my zeal, I have found dry times. As I contemplate various reasons for the ennui based on observations of others and many conversations as well as my own life experiences, I think that one or more of these reasons could account for it.
1. Lack of Understanding: for some, reading the Bible is like the reading comprehension portions on standardized tests, the kind that includes a bunch of technical terms, themes and conclusions that are hard to decipher. Who wants to read something they don’t understand? I think the contributing factor to this difficulty is not understanding what the Bible is, how it was put together, the different genres, the progression of God’s revelation, the major themes and the correlation of how all the books fit together. When people are told to just read the Bible and don’t have an understanding of what they are reading, its like picking up a puzzle piece and trying to make sense of the whole picture. This is an essential component of the discipleship process yet, I fear that might be missing in a great many churches. Good Bible study methods are needed for understanding.
Now I am of the opinion that the Bible is meant to be understood and can be understood by all (although not all will accept the message). The Bible is a divine book, in that it is inspired by God, but it is also written by human authors who were using normal means of communication. Therefore, reading each book according to its literary genre and particular place in God’s overall program is important.
Remedy: If this describes you, get a hold of some instructive material that will aid understanding how the Bible is put together. Some basic resources that I have found useful for this task is,
• How to Study the Bible for Yourself, by Tim Lahaye
• Living by the Book, by Howard Hendricks
• What the Bible is All About, by Henrietta Mears
2. Lack of Relevance: if the reason we find the Bible boring is that it just doesn’t seem to applicable to our lives, we will get bored. Especially, when reading Numbers! This will happen if we are approaching the Bible to find solutions to our problems and will only be interested if what can solve the problems we face. However, while the Bible was written for us, it was not written to us. The Bible is God’s revelation and provides a description of his plan for history. Understanding his plan should give a great deal of meaning to understand his heart and how we fit into that plan.
Remedy: if this is you, start approaching the Bible to learn about God and his overall program for history. Always ask with each reading how what you are reading is relevant to his program rather than our personal program.
3. Too Impatient: We live in a micro-wave culture. We want understanding and we want it now. While I do contend that understanding what the Bible is communicating is possible, studying takes time. Understanding how each part fits together takes time. It involves a consistent and diligent effort. The use of study tools, like commentaries, can seem like it slows the process down but are valuable for the understanding process. In the end, it is about understanding and I am of the opinion that the more we understand, the greater our interest will be to learn more.
Remedy: if this is you, resolve in your mind that learning involves discipline and diligence. It doesn’t happen overnight.
4. Too Conditioned for Excitement: As long as we are looking for something new, a fresh word from God, the next move of God or wanting to go to the next level we might be conditioned for excitement. But if our Christian walk is conditioned upon needing excitement, reading the Bible can feel like watching paint dry at times.
Now, I contend that there is excitement in learning what God is communicating through his word, but as mentioned in #3, that will take time. The end product of understanding can cause exhilaration although the process can not seem that way at times. God has not changed what he has communicated but our understanding does and will increase with each reading.
Remedy: resolve in your mind that learning will not always be exciting. But learning about God on his terms should be and provide the motivation to continually seek what he is communicating.
5. Incompatibility with Personal Agendas: similar to #2, if you are looking for the Bible to resolve a self-interested agenda and it does not, then reading what is not relevant to personal agendas can get old real fast.
Remedy: if this is you, ask yourself the question of whom do you serve – self or God. It is a hard thing at times to loosen the grip of self-serving motives but surrendering to the lordship of Jesus Christ does require us to do just that.
6. Lack of Spiritual Motivation: I have been here plenty of times, just not interested in spiritual things even though maintaining a commitment to Christ. Paul indicates in Galatians 5:16-17, that the flesh and spirit oppose each other. The flesh is that principle within our humanity inherited from the fall that does not want to subject itself to God’s ways. (Romans 8:7). When its winning, we lose interest.
But consider that God breathed out his word through the pens of 40 authors in order to reveal himself. Consider the Bible as a love letter where God expresses his heart to us. When we are apathetic, his word has a way of wooing us but won’t if don’t engage with it.
Remedy: if this is you, read anyway and with intentionality for the word to speak to you. Now that doesn’t mean ignoring contexts or reasonable rules of reading, but open up to what is being communicated. This does require discipline that says, even though I don’t feel like it, I’m going to read anyway.
7. Discouragement or Anger with God: this is worse than spiritual motivation. Whereas #6 refers to apathy, this is where we are just down right disgruntled with God. When you are like this, who cares what God is communicating. You may even feel like he opposes you and has no interest in you.
But here is where I’d say reading the Bible becomes the most crucial. Jeremiah says that the heart is desperately wicked, who can understand it (Jeremiah 17:17). Relying on a troubled heart will only pull us down and must combated with the immutable, timeless truths of scripture. Otherwise, the troubled heart will continue to pull you further and further away from God’s truth, which may even result in you rejecting it all together.
Remedy: honestly, this is the toughest one. The only thing I can think of is to cry out to God, reach for Christ and keep reading his word even though there may be buckets of tears with each reading. Finding a loving, leaderful and wise shoulder or two to cry is important too. Consult your pastor or even get some sound Biblical counseling. You have nothing to lose but everything to gain, even though it may not feel that way.
Overall, the encouragement here with each one of these categories is to think about what makes the Bible boring for you and how to possibly work past it to absorb the wonderful truths of who God is, his plan for history and the greatest gift of eternal life for those who would place their trust in the work and person of Jesus Christ.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Worshiping The Queen of Heaven
Five cardinals have invited every cardinal and bishop in the world to join them in petitioning Pope Benedict XVI to solemnly proclaim the Mother of Jesus as the "Spiritual Mother of humanity” as an ecumenical service of clarification to other religious traditions and to proclaim the full Christian truth about Mary.
An English copy of the letter which the five cardinals sent to all the world's cardinals and bishops in various languages on January 1, as well as a Latin “votum” or petition and its English translation has been released by His Eminence, Luis Cardinal Aponte MartÃnez, Fatima Symposium cardinal co-patron, with permission for publication.
This initiative also intends to start an in-depth worldwide dialogue on Mary’s role in salvation for our time and builds upon the endorsement of over 500 Catholic cardinals and bishops for the petition for the definition of this potential fifth Marian dogma over the course of the past 15 years. Renowned contemporary Catholic leaders have also voiced their support, such as Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Mother Angelica, foundress of the worldwide Eternal Word Television Network, along with approximately 7 million petitions from Catholics worldwide.
Should this effort prove successful, a proclamation would constitute a historical event for the Church as only the fifth Marian dogma defined in its 2,000-year history.
These five cardinals and their petition, in the form of a Latin votum, included the names and petitions of a number of cardinals and bishops who met at the renowned Marian Shrine in Fatima, Portugal, in May 2005 for a theological symposium on the role of the Virgin Mary as the "Unique Cooperator in the Redemption" (an expression of Pope John Paul II). The symposium ended with a commonly accepted and signed votum to Pope Benedict, which respectfully asks him to prayerfully consider declaring the existing Church doctrine on Mary as the spiritual mother of all peoples as a solemn definition or "dogma," which represents the highest level of recognition of a particular Christian doctrine as a Catholic truth. This definition of Mary as spiritual mother would include her three maternal roles as the human “Co-redemptrix” (which literally means “a woman with the Redeemer” but never on a level of equality with her divine son), “Mediatrix” or distributor of the graces of the redemption, and “Advocate” or principal intercessor to her Jesus Christ – From www.catholic.net
This idea of worshiping a goddess (currently Mary the mother of Jesus) is as old as the Old Testament. Let me show you a couple of passages from the Book of Jeremiah written around the 6th Century B.C.
Jeremiah 7:18: The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes of bread for the Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to other gods to provoke me to anger.
Jer. 44: 15 Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, along with all the women who were present—a large assembly—and all the people living in Lower and Upper Egypt, said to Jeremiah, 16 "We will not listen to the message you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD! 17 We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our fathers, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm. 18 But ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine."
The practice of worshipping a goddess of heaven was addressed by Jeremiah. He exhorted the people to cease doing it. They refused to do that. God says, “Then go right ahead and fulfill your vows to the Queen of Heaven. I will be watching over your for harm and not for good” (v. 27).
The Roman Catholic Church is not an evangelical entity. It does not hold to the central teachings of the bible such as, the sufficiency of Scripture, the exclusivism of salvation through Christ, and the exclusive worship of the one true God. This makes the Roman Catholic Church a cult. Now I know this may be offensive to some who have family and loved one within the system, my mom was also a catholic, but not a very good practicing one. My advice to you is to pray that in some miraculous way, God will remove them and bring them to a saving knowledge of Jesus first and foremost. It is not important for people to have a relationship with a particular kind of church, but with the living Son of God.
In this account in Jeremiah, two things stand out clearly and are also signs of our times.
First, people tend to worship whoever and whatever based on results.
Notice again what the people in Jeremiah’s day were saying: “We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our fathers, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm. 18 But ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine” (Jer. 44:17-18).
The Jews in their twisted thinking were giving credit for their prosperity to the Queen of Heaven and not to the Lord. Jeremiah explained to the people that it was precisely because they were worshiping an idol that God removed their prosperity and gave to them hardship (vv. 20-23).
You see – now watch this because this crucial to understand. God often times allows hardships to plague us as a way to “test” our loyalty and faithfulness to Him.
In Joshua time, God did not drive out all the inhabitants in the Promise Land. He kept some there so that the left over people would be a “test” to Israel to see if they would follow through on their obedience to God.
20 Therefore the LORD was very angry with Israel and said, "Because this nation has violated the covenant that I laid down for their forefathers and has not listened to me, 21 I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations Joshua left when he died. 22 I will use them to test Israel and see whether they will keep the way of the LORD and walk in it as their forefathers did” (Jud. 2:20-22 NIV).
Elsewhere in Psalm 26:2, we read: “Examine me, O LORD, and try me; Test my mind and my heart.” One of the reasons why God allows us to go through tough times is to see if we will throw Him under the bus and go after other gods. So Satan comes along and causes us to turn our backs on God and turn to some idol and as a result we experience a measure of success and comfort. So what is our conclusion? What we are doing is good because it brings better results.
This is so wrong and we become so duped. We have got to get away from the mentality that whenever we follow the Lord our lives are suppose to be nothing but blessings and absolute prosperity. I wonder what Job would say to that? We tend to depend too much on pragmatism as a test for truth. That is, if something works and becomes a blessing, then it must be true and okay to do. This is why so many Christians tend to walk by experience and not by faith.
Here is the bottom line: We must worship God and only Him because it is the right thing to do regardless of if we receive the desired results. God has promised to bless us, but He also may postpone the blessings as a way to test our hearts. He may want to expose the motive behind our commitment to Him. Are we committed to following Him for the right reasons or are we doing so for reasons that are less than pure and noble?
Someone prays to the Virgin Mary and has his or her's prayers answered. That’s a test. So now, the person becomes a committed worshiper and follower of Mary because of an experience he received. God is not going to hold us accountable for our experiences, but He will hold us accountable on whom we place our faith and trust in. Just because walking with God can sometimes be hard and difficult and you experience problem after problem – do not jettison your loyalty to God. Stay true to Him. Your heart is being tested.
Now let me share another sign that was true in Jeremiah’s time as well as in our own.
2. The families were pathetically spiritually weak.
Listen to what the women told Jeremiah regarding their husbands: “Besides,” the women added, “do you suppose that we were burning incense and pouring out liquid offerings to the Queen of Heaven, and making cakes marked with her image, without our husbands knowing it and helping us? Of course not!” (Jer. 44:19 NLT).
Isn’t that the most pathetic thing you heard? The women were saying, “Don’t come only to us with this issue. We’re just obeying our husbands. They are the ones resourcing us and making the worship of the Queen of Heaven possible.”
Is this something we see today? Oh yeah! Weak husbands are everywhere! Weak husbands either are weak through their non-involvement and passive spirit, or they are weak through their over-involvement and aggressive spirit.
Both idolatry and weak families weaken the nation. Notice the times God references “all Judah” (Jer. 44:24, 26, 27) and then contrasts the nation with “all the remnant of Judah” (v. 28) who will witness the victory of the Lord.
The Roman Catholic Church is at least upfront in their stance on worshiping the Queen of Heaven. But what about we Christians who ought to know better? You may not be a Roman Catholic, but that does not exempt you from idolatry. In fact, when John wrote his first letter, the very last thing he wanted his readers to remember was this: “Little Children, guard yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).
What are the best ways to heed this warning? First, don’t build your worship of God around positive results. Remember what I said earlier? If you do this, you are building your worship of God around your “experience.” This is never a good thing to do. You have to walk in truth and stand steadfast in the truth no matter what your experiences may suggest otherwise. If you rely on your experiences to determine who and what you worship, you will become a “double-minded person unstable in all your ways” (James 1:8).
Second, your church is your home – pastor it well – especially those of you who are husbands and fathers. When your wife is right, support her, when she is not, correct her and point her in the right direction. Be the leader. Weak fathers and husbands lead to weak families, which leads to weak churches, which leads to weak societies, which leads to weak states, which leads to a weak nation.
Within Judah at the time of Jeremiah, as well as within America is a remnant of true believers. No one who is an idol worshiper is part of God’s remnant. How about you? “Guard yourselves from idols.”
An English copy of the letter which the five cardinals sent to all the world's cardinals and bishops in various languages on January 1, as well as a Latin “votum” or petition and its English translation has been released by His Eminence, Luis Cardinal Aponte MartÃnez, Fatima Symposium cardinal co-patron, with permission for publication.
This initiative also intends to start an in-depth worldwide dialogue on Mary’s role in salvation for our time and builds upon the endorsement of over 500 Catholic cardinals and bishops for the petition for the definition of this potential fifth Marian dogma over the course of the past 15 years. Renowned contemporary Catholic leaders have also voiced their support, such as Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Mother Angelica, foundress of the worldwide Eternal Word Television Network, along with approximately 7 million petitions from Catholics worldwide.
Should this effort prove successful, a proclamation would constitute a historical event for the Church as only the fifth Marian dogma defined in its 2,000-year history.
These five cardinals and their petition, in the form of a Latin votum, included the names and petitions of a number of cardinals and bishops who met at the renowned Marian Shrine in Fatima, Portugal, in May 2005 for a theological symposium on the role of the Virgin Mary as the "Unique Cooperator in the Redemption" (an expression of Pope John Paul II). The symposium ended with a commonly accepted and signed votum to Pope Benedict, which respectfully asks him to prayerfully consider declaring the existing Church doctrine on Mary as the spiritual mother of all peoples as a solemn definition or "dogma," which represents the highest level of recognition of a particular Christian doctrine as a Catholic truth. This definition of Mary as spiritual mother would include her three maternal roles as the human “Co-redemptrix” (which literally means “a woman with the Redeemer” but never on a level of equality with her divine son), “Mediatrix” or distributor of the graces of the redemption, and “Advocate” or principal intercessor to her Jesus Christ – From www.catholic.net
This idea of worshiping a goddess (currently Mary the mother of Jesus) is as old as the Old Testament. Let me show you a couple of passages from the Book of Jeremiah written around the 6th Century B.C.
Jeremiah 7:18: The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes of bread for the Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to other gods to provoke me to anger.
Jer. 44: 15 Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, along with all the women who were present—a large assembly—and all the people living in Lower and Upper Egypt, said to Jeremiah, 16 "We will not listen to the message you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD! 17 We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our fathers, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm. 18 But ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine."
The practice of worshipping a goddess of heaven was addressed by Jeremiah. He exhorted the people to cease doing it. They refused to do that. God says, “Then go right ahead and fulfill your vows to the Queen of Heaven. I will be watching over your for harm and not for good” (v. 27).
The Roman Catholic Church is not an evangelical entity. It does not hold to the central teachings of the bible such as, the sufficiency of Scripture, the exclusivism of salvation through Christ, and the exclusive worship of the one true God. This makes the Roman Catholic Church a cult. Now I know this may be offensive to some who have family and loved one within the system, my mom was also a catholic, but not a very good practicing one. My advice to you is to pray that in some miraculous way, God will remove them and bring them to a saving knowledge of Jesus first and foremost. It is not important for people to have a relationship with a particular kind of church, but with the living Son of God.
In this account in Jeremiah, two things stand out clearly and are also signs of our times.
First, people tend to worship whoever and whatever based on results.
Notice again what the people in Jeremiah’s day were saying: “We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our fathers, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm. 18 But ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine” (Jer. 44:17-18).
The Jews in their twisted thinking were giving credit for their prosperity to the Queen of Heaven and not to the Lord. Jeremiah explained to the people that it was precisely because they were worshiping an idol that God removed their prosperity and gave to them hardship (vv. 20-23).
You see – now watch this because this crucial to understand. God often times allows hardships to plague us as a way to “test” our loyalty and faithfulness to Him.
In Joshua time, God did not drive out all the inhabitants in the Promise Land. He kept some there so that the left over people would be a “test” to Israel to see if they would follow through on their obedience to God.
20 Therefore the LORD was very angry with Israel and said, "Because this nation has violated the covenant that I laid down for their forefathers and has not listened to me, 21 I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations Joshua left when he died. 22 I will use them to test Israel and see whether they will keep the way of the LORD and walk in it as their forefathers did” (Jud. 2:20-22 NIV).
Elsewhere in Psalm 26:2, we read: “Examine me, O LORD, and try me; Test my mind and my heart.” One of the reasons why God allows us to go through tough times is to see if we will throw Him under the bus and go after other gods. So Satan comes along and causes us to turn our backs on God and turn to some idol and as a result we experience a measure of success and comfort. So what is our conclusion? What we are doing is good because it brings better results.
This is so wrong and we become so duped. We have got to get away from the mentality that whenever we follow the Lord our lives are suppose to be nothing but blessings and absolute prosperity. I wonder what Job would say to that? We tend to depend too much on pragmatism as a test for truth. That is, if something works and becomes a blessing, then it must be true and okay to do. This is why so many Christians tend to walk by experience and not by faith.
Here is the bottom line: We must worship God and only Him because it is the right thing to do regardless of if we receive the desired results. God has promised to bless us, but He also may postpone the blessings as a way to test our hearts. He may want to expose the motive behind our commitment to Him. Are we committed to following Him for the right reasons or are we doing so for reasons that are less than pure and noble?
Someone prays to the Virgin Mary and has his or her's prayers answered. That’s a test. So now, the person becomes a committed worshiper and follower of Mary because of an experience he received. God is not going to hold us accountable for our experiences, but He will hold us accountable on whom we place our faith and trust in. Just because walking with God can sometimes be hard and difficult and you experience problem after problem – do not jettison your loyalty to God. Stay true to Him. Your heart is being tested.
Now let me share another sign that was true in Jeremiah’s time as well as in our own.
2. The families were pathetically spiritually weak.
Listen to what the women told Jeremiah regarding their husbands: “Besides,” the women added, “do you suppose that we were burning incense and pouring out liquid offerings to the Queen of Heaven, and making cakes marked with her image, without our husbands knowing it and helping us? Of course not!” (Jer. 44:19 NLT).
Isn’t that the most pathetic thing you heard? The women were saying, “Don’t come only to us with this issue. We’re just obeying our husbands. They are the ones resourcing us and making the worship of the Queen of Heaven possible.”
Is this something we see today? Oh yeah! Weak husbands are everywhere! Weak husbands either are weak through their non-involvement and passive spirit, or they are weak through their over-involvement and aggressive spirit.
Both idolatry and weak families weaken the nation. Notice the times God references “all Judah” (Jer. 44:24, 26, 27) and then contrasts the nation with “all the remnant of Judah” (v. 28) who will witness the victory of the Lord.
The Roman Catholic Church is at least upfront in their stance on worshiping the Queen of Heaven. But what about we Christians who ought to know better? You may not be a Roman Catholic, but that does not exempt you from idolatry. In fact, when John wrote his first letter, the very last thing he wanted his readers to remember was this: “Little Children, guard yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).
What are the best ways to heed this warning? First, don’t build your worship of God around positive results. Remember what I said earlier? If you do this, you are building your worship of God around your “experience.” This is never a good thing to do. You have to walk in truth and stand steadfast in the truth no matter what your experiences may suggest otherwise. If you rely on your experiences to determine who and what you worship, you will become a “double-minded person unstable in all your ways” (James 1:8).
Second, your church is your home – pastor it well – especially those of you who are husbands and fathers. When your wife is right, support her, when she is not, correct her and point her in the right direction. Be the leader. Weak fathers and husbands lead to weak families, which leads to weak churches, which leads to weak societies, which leads to weak states, which leads to a weak nation.
Within Judah at the time of Jeremiah, as well as within America is a remnant of true believers. No one who is an idol worshiper is part of God’s remnant. How about you? “Guard yourselves from idols.”
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