When I graduated from high school an older pastor and his wife took me out to lunch. They bought me a cheeseburger and gave me a Bible. In the cover he wrote to me: “This book will keep you from sin, and sin will keep you from this book.”
We can only serve one god: Jesus or else not-Jesus. Let’s stop kidding ourselves that there is a middle ground. That there is some sort of neutral zone or time-out. There’s not. We are sowing to the spirit or sowing to the flesh. Period.
In John 5, Jesus rebukes the pharisees for their closet atheism:
And the Father Himself, who sent me, has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form. But you do not have His word abiding in you, because whom He sent, Him you do not believe. You search the scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.
Those verses describe the vast majority of western church goers. Gosh, I feel like they describe me most on days, too. We just don’t have the Word abiding in us. And we wonder why our pastors are having affairs, why all the men’s groups are losing the battle against pornography, and why all the women are hiding their bondage to covetousness.
We are simply not alive in the Word.
Jesus made a covenant with us. He promised us that the truth would set us free and that whom He set free would be free indeed. Free indeed — Not free for the next 24 hours, or 6 months or even 5 years. Free forever. Most of us still aren’t even free the sins that so easily entangle, let alone the little foxes.
You and I both know that the idea of the Bible keeping us from sin (see intro paragraph) is not a new idea. But even though we have “searched the scriptures” we are still struggling with the basic issues of coming to Jesus and believing in Him. The good news is that we’ll always have that struggle, it is part of working out our salvation. The bad news is that we’ll always have that struggle.
As weak and fallen humans, we have to fight our closet atheism. We can recite Bible verses without the Word of God living and being active in our hearts. It’s not burning within us. It’s not alive yet. It hasn’t consumed us and made us true disciples.
And that is why so many of us are still powerless against temptation and powerless to lead others to Jesus. We’re not living true Christianity.
So what’s this about abiding…?
What does it mean to abide? Simple: It’s just having a relationship with Jesus through the Word. Abiding is not as mysterious as we think it is. Pray-read the Bible as a dialog with God.
For me, the most difficult resistance to spending time in the Word and in prayer is the seeming foolishness and weakness of it. I so often feel like I could be spending my time in a more productive matter — especially as a man with a type “A” personality (capital “A” at that, too). I feel like I could be putting initiatives into motion or helping come up with strategies or casting vision or creating something. Anything but shutting my door and praying to an invisible God while reading a book that is centuries old and wasn’t even originally written in my language.
This seeming waste of my time is precisely what God wants from me. Living a life of true Christianity is, at its core, living a life of weakness. (Which is precisely what the Sermon on the Mount is all about.)
I have been on the journey of leadership training for a while and I am continually reminded by God that the Heavenly prerequisite for leadership is friendship with God; and friendship with God is cultivated in the secret place.
A good friend of mine says over and over and over that the Bible isn’t boring, we’re boring.
Being men and women of the Word isn’t always easy. It’s work and lots of times it is boring. But not because the Bible itself is boring or because God is making Himself un-knowable — the trouble is that we are boring and we have dull spirits.
Something else important to note is that knowing the Truth and abiding in the Word is not an event, but a journey. It’s a daily choice to simply say yes to God and no to sin. It’s following through with our commitment to pray-read the Bible and to ask God to make our Spirits alive.
And don’t forget that we can certainly do a few “tricks” to help speed up the journey and help ourselves out. Things like fasting and praying in the Spirit. Fasting helps tenderize us and make us more sensitive to the Lord. Praying in the Spirit helps unlock the scriptures to us and invites the Spirit of revelation.
Tina Russell said:
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Tina Russell
Posted on February 6, 2008 at 9:31 am
Samuel Skinner said:
You mean many of those who claim to be Christians are closet atheists? Thanks for the tip; now to see if we can get them to come all the way out…
Posted on February 6, 2008 at 11:19 am
Sharon said:
This really provoked me. Thank you. So much.
Posted on February 6, 2008 at 10:09 pm
natrimony said:
So what do you mean by “praying in the Spirit”?
Posted on February 8, 2008 at 11:01 pm
natrimony said:
I’m guessing that you don’t comment on the replies to your posts. Oh well.
Posted on February 15, 2008 at 1:15 pm
shawnblanc said:
@ Natrimony: I do try to reply to comments. Sorry about that.
As far as praying in the Spirit goes, I mean praying in tongues. This is how we stir ourselves up in our faith, keeping ourselves in the love of God (Jude 20). Tongues is a doorway into revelation and power. Also, it was the secret to the Apostle Paul’s secret life in God and his massive spirit of revelation.
Posted on February 15, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Armen said:
Shawn, I see you as a God-fearing brother, and I love these provoking posts which challenge us believers to give ourselves more to God.
However, I do have issue with your comment left above, which states that the key to Paul’s ministry, power, and knowledge was tongue-speaking.
After placing so much emphasis on the importance of getting in the Word in this post, I’m surprised you’d make such a statement of assumption, which has absolutely no scriptural grounds. Just be careful how you may be influencing others with your writing.
Posted on February 16, 2008 at 10:26 am
natrimony said:
O.K. Can the Scriptures really be opened to us without praying in tongues? I think that one would have to call this ‘a special ability to acquire biblical knowledge not assecible to the run of the mill Christian’. I don’t see where Paul tells us that the hermeneutical key to the Scriptures is ‘praying in tongues’. And, I’d have to attribute the fact that…well…Paul was an apostle to be the key to his revelatory understandings. Plus, I’m not sure that ‘praying in the Spirit’ is really synonymous with ‘praying in tongues’.
-N
thegreycoats@wordpress.com
Posted on February 16, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Dan Lillyblad said:
This is my first visit to your site, and I see that the above entries are dated Feb. and this is September 21st. Did the above dialogue continue, or was that the end of it? My own experience has been that I was saved in a nazarene church that didn’t speak in tongues or believe in the experience. Three years after my conversion to Christianity in 1976, the Lord led me into the experience of asking for the Holy Spirit, receiving Him by faith and speaking in tongues. I didn’t feel a lot of power, but I did begin to speak in tongues from that point on. In my own experience, the word of God came alive to me in ways it never had before. Also, incredible worship in the Spirit became available to me that I had never before experienced. It was as though my spirit wanted to express things to God, but couldn’t. After receiving the Holy Spirit and the ability to sing in the spirit, I found that my spirit man could worship God in ways that it just couldn’t do before receiving the spirit. It wasn’t a doctrinal issue, but a reality. There is a worship intimacy level available that just can’t be experienced without the holy spirit taking you there. Speaking and worshiping in tongues is part of that. It doesn’t make you better than the next person, but you can go farther with the Holy Spirit than without Him.
I believe that praying in tongues is praying in the Spirit. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14:15 “I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding, I will sing in the spirit, and I will sing with my understanding. The preceding verse says that when we pray “in the Spirit,: our understanding is unfruitful which means we don’t understand with our intellect what we are saying. So from this I conclude that “praying in the Spirit,” is praying in tongues. Acts 1:8 says you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…Everything following in the book of Acts was done under the power of the Holy Spirit accompanied by tongues and demonstration of the Spirits power. I would agree that the apostle Paul’s revelation and power in ministry came largely from speaking in tongues. In 1 cor. 14:18 Paul said I thank God that I speak in tongues more than you all. How could He say that unless it was a vital ongoing part of His walk? This isn’t a deal breaker for spiritual fellowhsip, but there is much scriptural support for the above statements by Shawn, but you can’t bear it now. In His Love, Dan
Posted on September 21, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Ronni said:
dude, I know you haven’t updated this in seemingly forever, but thank you for leaving it up. I needed this post today.
Bad. Thanks.
Posted on October 17, 2008 at 4:21 pm