Thursday, July 12, 2012

Knowing About God is Not Enough!


The following from a John MacArthur sermon was a sobering reminder of the insufficiency and folly of those who seek to accrue more and more "knowledge" about God alone, without "mixing it with faith" (cf. Heb. 4:2, KJV):
A famous actor was once the guest of honor at a social gathering where he received many requests to recite favorite excerpts from various literary works. An old preacher who happened to be there asked the actor to recite the Twenty-Third Psalm. The actor agreed on the condition that the preacher would also recite it. The actor's recitation was beautifully intoned with great dramatic emphasis, for which he received lengthy applause. The preacher's voice was rough and broken from many years of preaching, and his diction was anything but polished. But when he finished there was not a dry eye in the room.  When someone asked the actor what made the difference, he replied, "I know the psalm, but he knows the Shepherd." Salvation does not come from knowing about the truth of Jesus Christ but from intimately knowing Christ Himself.
As Leonard Ravenhill used to say, there is a great difference between knowing the Word of God, and knowing the God of the Word.

Indeed, there is a pervasively deceptive danger of faithless, lifeless knowledge that has crept not merely into many of our churches, but many of our pulpits.

May God rescue us from the deceptive lie that a mere & shallow head knowledge of the gospel is to be equated with a robust and living faith in our living Savior.

In Christ, God's Word incarnate,
Pastor Ryan

No comments:

Post a Comment