We know it all, don’t we? We’ve heard all this before! If you attend church for any length of time, you soon come to the point where everything is no longer “new,” and you might be tempted to think you’ve got it all figured out. If we’re not careful, this can lead us to the religious pride and smugness of the Pharisees (they thought they were experts!), and it can even lead us away from the faith altogether. (The early church had this problem with the Gnostics, who claimed to be Christians but who drifted from the faith in search of “higher knowledge”). Our challenge is not to simply know what the bible teaches, or even to give assent to it, but to embrace it by faith and put it into practice. The life of faith is something that none of us have yet mastered!
This is one of the many reasons we are encouraging you to listen to God’s Word attentively and then join us during the Sermon Discussion and Review as we encourage one another to put God’s Word into practice.
“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the Word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.” James 1:22-25 ESV