Chicken or beef, sir?

Picture this:

You're at your wonderful, large comfortable middle class church with numerous programs. You've got programmes coming out of the wazoo. And all of them look good. Maybe a worship workshop? How about a power prayer seminar? Or maybe a retreat for some spiritual invigoration? Sounds good, right?

Decisions, decisions. Choice after choice

And yet..all so wrong

When you are faced with alternatives, and all those alternatives look good - how do you choose? I mean, it's not as though I've a choice between church or drugs, right? They are all 'spiritual' and 'godly' choices

Oh,oh..my normal readers (about 1 or 2 in the world..:-) )know that when I start using quotation marks, I'm about to get snarky, and they would be right

Listen very carefully:

If you choose what your heart is telling you to..chances are...it's the wrong choice.

Remember what it says in Jeremiah: "The Heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. Who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9 ESV )

Your choice should be the one thing that you find boring, painful, a chore you wrestle with and the very thing you fear

For most people in church, it's serious Bible study. The one with no jokes, no trendy topics and dazzling music or video. Just you, a Bible and God. That's it.

I have seen the most spiritual looking and sounding people suddenly go weak at the mention of reading the Bible seriously. I have seen the same people in worship, raise their hands in glorious ecstasy to the King of Kings, promise that they will go to the ends of the earth for their Lord and fall to their knees in supplication..

..but they will not pick up his Word to know him better. His very precious divine word that has come through millenia, literal blood, sweat and tears and now is neatly bound in leather and sits in front of us in an airconditioned study room at church. We will not touch it.

Why? I've been asking over the weeks. Why is that?

Paul knew the answer, and it is a sobering one indeed:

" For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.."

( 2 Timothy 4:3 ESV )

Think about that for this week

SDG