The last six weeks have been great for me as far as my Bible study is concerned. As you may or may not know from a previous post, I use the Inductive Bible Study Method when studying scripture. Over the last six weeks I've been studying through the book of Galatians, and if your familiar with Galatians you'll know that there is six chapters in it. Every week I started a new chapter and spent the whole week studying that chapter, man it was awesome.What was also very interesting as well as humbling, was how much my own life as well as many other Christians lives resembled the churches of Galatia. We have heard the gospel, yet we allow stupid things to creep in and after a while we see these stupid things as part of the gospel. This was the case with the churches of Galatia. Paul took these churches to task for this and he also spends much of the book reminding them of what Christ has done for them and how that only through faith in Jesus can our sin and our lives be justified before God.
Like the church it's not until someone lovingly corrects us that we repent of our sin and begin seeing the gospel for what it really is and for what it really says.
What about you? Have you ever ever found yourselves adding something to the gospel that was never there? I know I have, although stupid, I'll give you an example. I thought for a long time that because the Bible calls our bodies the temple of God in 1 Corinthians 6:18-20 , I figured that smoking was a huge sin. While smoking is stupid, unattractive and very unhealthy, it's not a sin. It wasn't until I actually read it in context and saw it for what it was truly saying that I realize my error. Those verses in 1 Corinthians in context are talking about sexual immorality.
Many of the reasons, as was mine, that people have a wrong perspective of the Bible is because they were incorrectly taught what the Bible says and were never taught how to correctly study the Bible for themselves. I'm sure my parents were well intentioned in telling me that smoking was a sin, but they should have just said it was stupid and left it at that.
Let me encourage you to take time and study the Bible, don't rush through it but absorb all that it has to say in it's right context.
2 comments:
Imagine my surprise when I figured out smoking wasn't a sin. I like studying the Bible and talking about it in light of God's love. It's so much more fun this way.
Your right, it is more fun. Being that we had a pretty similar upbringings, I'm sure we could come up with a great list of things we were taught, that are never found in scripture. I used the smoking example cause it was easy.
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