We have been studying Hebrews together as a church and this past week looked at chapter 12. One of the passages in the chapter states, “let us throw off everything that entangles us”. I was thinking this morning about how comprehensive that statement is! The passage does not say, “let us throw off everything that entangles us badly”, but states everything with no qualitative statement. In other words everything. What if I took that seriously? What would I have to get rid of? When will I be ready to buy into those comprehensive words in my life?
This reminds me of a quote I read recently from Soren Kierkegaard who was a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher. He said, “The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”
The hard part for me is reading a quote like this, and knowing that I will continue to refuse to live according to the face value of Scripture. My prayer is that God will continue to give me the strength to let go of my ability to justify the parts of my life that fall short of the example of Jesus and the commands of Scripture.
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