(We temporarily return to regular PP programing. For newcomers, these are the kinds of statements that have kept PP going much longer than I ever imagined it would.)
Perry Noble preached on how to hear from God today. We’ve chronicled problems with Noble’s extra-biblical view of revelation many times on this blog, but today’s statement probably takes the cake.
All too often we seek answers in the Scriptures when we should be seeking Jesus…because HE will ultimately BE the answer to whatever we are facing.
Exactly how does one find answers from Jesus if not from Scripture? Perhaps we ask the portrait of Jesus we have on our wall? The imaginary Jesus we keep under our bed?
Jesus is the Word. To suggest that he has a message that is outside Scripture is–how else to say it?–blasphemy.
Noble’s construction lets believers ignore Scripture altogether and make desisions based on their gut or based on their imagination of who Jesus is. Wearing a WWJD bracelet is not the same thing as knowing and studying Scripture.
After denigrating Scripture, Noble finds another way to hear God’s voice (a point he appears to have added to his sermon at the last minute).
Circumstances are often God’s megaphone that HE is using to scream to us. It’s amazing to many how many times in the Scriptures that God spoke so clearly and revealed who He was during a storm!!!
What could Noble’s circumstances divinity possibly be telling him right now?
What was the same divinity screaming at me this summer?
How does God speak to us and reveal his will? I’ve written about how preachers should talk about God’s revelation, so this will extend that to consider how we think and talk about how God speaks to us as laypeople.
Has God stopped speaking to us?
Just because God closed the book on his written revelation, does not mean that the book is dead. The question assumes that God has thought of more things to say in the past two thousand years. It also assumes that what he as said is at least a little bit worn out now.
God’s Word is eternal and imperishable. That means that it is as powerful and present as the day it was written. Our words do pass away (if we’re speaking, they die on our lips), are forgotten, and sometimes contradicted. God’s words are not.
One of the ironic aspects of liberal complaints against the sola scriptura position is that they say that we think God no longer speaks. To the contrary, we think that God continues to speak so powerfully and completely that he need not say anything else.
For example, one especially awful passage in The Shack is its characterization of seminaries.
In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper. (p. 65)
I would argue that seminaries exist because they do think that God’s Word is alive and a suitable object of focused study. The author of The Shack is the one who might more accurately be said to believe that God’s Word is dead, which is why he saw a need to write a new version of God for us.
Is God’s Word the foundation for personal revelation and guidance?
God’s Word should be a foundation for our faith in God, but it is not a foundation for additional words. We can use it as a measuring stick against which to measure words spoken by man. It cannot be a measuring stick for measuring additional words from God for two reasons.
First, we cannot bifurcate God’s words into any hierarchical system. New or old. Written or spoken. Perfect and pretty good. If God says something, it is always perfect, so cannot be inferior to anything else he’s ever said. If we are to say that God speaks something outside of the Bible, it would be blasphemy if we didn’t treat it as being as authoritative and permanent as the Bible.
Second, God has told us that he has finished his revelation. Revelation 22:18 warns us not to add anything to the Bible. Jesus tells us in Luke 16:17 that his Word is perfect down to the dot on an i. God’s revelation to us is also complete. God, who reveled himself to us through his Word, describes himself in Revelation 21:6 in literary terms—he is the Alpha and Omega, the A to Z, the whole story.
God’s Word is complete, perfect and unalterable. He need not add anything to it.
Does God speak to us when we ask for wisdom and guidance?
God has given us his Word, which is sufficient for both wisdom (Proverbs 1:1-7) and guidance (Psalm 119:105). Wait, you say, Psalm 119 doesn’t tell me whether I should marry Betty or Sally, or whether I should take the job in Iowa or Texas. How can I know what God wants me to do?
Pray that the Holy Spirit would give you wisdom, which we assume you’ve been developing through studying God’s written Word.
If you ask God to “tell you” what you should do, how do you know when you’ve received your answer? How do you distinguish between the effects of God whispering to you, caffeine, last night’s pizza, or Satan? How can you be certain that your deceptive heart is properly recognizing the speaker?
You can’t be sure. As 2 Peter 1:19 tells us, God’s Word is certain. If you can’t be certain, it’s not God speaking.
(I’m not including in this discussion some other ways God speaks to us, which would include general revelation, our conscience, and preaching. To keep the discussion reasonably simple, I’m just thinking about gut feelings or meditative states that tend to be translated into “God told me…” moments.)
How do we speak of God’s guidance?
First, don’t preface statements by telling us that God told you something. He probably didn’t, but you also put him on the hook for all kinds of nonsense.
Second, take ownership for your own thinking and planning, and treat God’s Word as sufficient for developing and sanctifying your wisdom and decision making.
Instead of saying, “God told me to be a missionary to India,” say, “God told us to go into all the world, so, based on my love for India and its culture, I think that the best way for me to serve him is to be a missionary to India.”
Instead of saying, “God told me to be an electrician,” say, “God told us that we should work to support ourselves and our families, so, based on my personal aptitudes and interests, I think that the best way to serve God through work is to pursue a career as an electrician.”
You honor God by submitting your desires to his Word, yet you don’t risk dishonoring his name should you or your plans fail.
Anyway, that’s what I think. You’ll need to ask God to tell you what he thinks.
Perry Noble advised pastors on how to hear from God last week.
One of the KEYS to receive REVELATION is PREPARATION! It’s not that God isn’t wanting to download HUGE vision into us as leaders…but many times we just aren’t ready for it.
Now, I might have said that the key to receive revelation was to open the Bible and read it, but perhaps that’s because I’m just not ready for Noblesque visions. Noble, and many other leaders like him, promote themselves as special vessels for God’s direct messages, to which all their followers must submit without question.
Noble certainly believes God continues to speak beyond the Bible. On Sunday, he seemed to rebuke the Bible-only approach to God’s word.
It is a dangerous thing to say God is silent when the Bible says that His Word is living and active!
The crazy thing is that this gets it all backwards. Folk who believe that the Bible contains, and closes the book on, God’s revelation to us do so because we believe that that revealed Word is eternally living and active. When you think you need to have new revelation downloaded by God, it is a good indication that you don’t really believe that the Bible is sufficiently living and active in 2009.
Besides holding a low view of Scripture, Noble’s position is inherently weak and dangerous in its susceptibility to error, especially when it’s combined with a violent intolerance to being tested and criticized.
John Calvin warned that when we think we hear God in our gut, we can’t always be certain that we’re not hearing yesterday’s lunch or the Devil himself.
Since Satan transforms himself into an angel of light, what authority can the Spirit have with us if he be not ascertained by an infallible mark? …but these miserable men err as if bent on their own destruction, while they seek the Spirit from themselves rather than from Him. (Ch IX.1)
The only infallible mark of the Holy Spirit’s authorship is the written Word of God–the Bible. The Scriptures are the Spirit’s finest and complete works, to which he need not add even a single comma.
When a leader tells us that he has “heard” God speak to him in any way that comes from inside him or was downloaded to him, we should wonder whether he has a special spiritual caller ID. There’s a good chance that it’s not actually God.
There’s enough in the Bible for clear-eyed biblical leaders to lead with. Anything beyond that is red-alert territory.
Calvin again:
With no less confidence than folly, they fasten upon any dreaming notion which may have casually sprung in their minds. Surely a very different sobriety becomes the children of God. (Ch IX.3)
Perry Noble seconded Rick Warren’s “argument” against heresy hunters yesterday.
RT @RickWarren: Heresy-hunting lets u to ignore the mess in your own life. God is more concerned about your hypocrisy than other’s heresy.
Let’s examine that.
Where is the hypocrisy? Warren assumes that anyone who finds heresy is a hypocrite. Pointing out heresy is about identifying unbiblical teachings. In most cases, those heresy hunters can only make their argument by pointing to Scripture. What’s wrong with that? What’s hypocritical?
Are messes disqualifying? Warren’s standard is that you have to have a perfect life to start worrying about what pastors are teaching. It was my impression that pastors only talked to imperfect people, so I suppose Warren’s formulation gives every pastor a free pass on everything they teach.
Is God really not worried? Warren asserts that God thinks hypocrisy is worse than false teaching. James 3 tells us that God holds teachers to a higher standard. Paul and Peter contain far more numerous and serious warnings against false teachers than they do against hypocrites.
Aren’t we all hypocrites? Anyone who affirms a moral code, which includes all Christians, cannot keep that code in all instances. Does that mean we should all keep quiet about it? If that’s the rule, who’s going to be preaching in our churches this Sunday?
Who does most damage? A hypocrite affects only those people who know him or her intimately enough to see the discrepancy between words and deeds. A heretic affects the spiritual health of everyone who hears him.
When are we allowed to heresy hunt? The problem with heresy is that it doesn’t look like heresy. That was Peter’s point in 2 Peter 2. Heretics hide and never announce themselves. If we’re not allowed to actively look for them, how will we ever find them?
I know that Warren and his followers use the term heresy hunter as a pejorative, but it’s an activity that should be embraced by all believers. After a few months of “heresy hunting” on this blog, I’ve discovered a few things about the activity.
I heresy hunt my own pastor. Every time my pastor or someone else steps to the pulpit and opens the Bible, my heresy detectors are on. Is what I’m hearing consistent with Scripture? Are the verses from the reading being expounded consistent to their wider context? etc. With my pastor, the answers to those kinds of questions have consistently been in the affirmative. That’s why he’s still my pastor.
Heresy hunting is commended in Scripture. The Bereans heresy hunted against Paul. Paul! Here’s someone who really was preaching the directly inspired word of God, yet they wouldn’t believe it until they’d checked it against Scripture. I’m sure many of the Bereans had messes in their lives, yet they’re described as being more noble than other believers.
Heresy hunting isn’t just about the heretic. Think about the process of discovering heresy. To do so, you take a teaching and compare it to Scripture, usually multiple Scriptures. This is the basis of the nobility of the Bereans. Not only did they listen to Paul’s teaching, but they added to it and deepened it with their own study. The net effect is that they got a second helping of God’s word.
NewSpring pastor, Shane Duffey, doesn’t see the connection:
i’d love to compare the time “discerners” spend in the Word vs. on the web searching for people & reasons to hate… i’d bet the web wins
I’ll bet, and testify from my own experience, that the Bible wins going away.
I discovered this for myself in my posts a while back on Simeon. Perry Noble’s characterization of him as a crazy old man prompted me to examine the Scripture to see exactly who Simeon was and what role he played in the story of redemption. The discovery that he had to have been a priest was new to me, but an exciting insight into the unity of God’s redemptive plan and the perspecuity of Scripture. Regardless of what anyone thought about the original teaching or teacher, I was blessed and grew spiritually by engaging in the process of careful Bible study.
A biblical teacher will seek to develop a congregation full of heresy hunters.
I can’t imagine that he thinks very much of it, based on earlier tweets suggesting God should apologize for Leviticus. Now he’s suggesting that the prophets were depressed and emotionally unstable.
Finishing Ezekiel-wondering how the OT might have been different if the prophets had access to Lexapro
Yeah, yeah, the emoticon at the end says he’s just joking, but why? How do you, if you are a Christian pastor, mock the intentions and intelligence of the Holy Spirit? There’s nothing funny here.
Does he think the prophets were too over the top? Was God just exaggerating his warnings when he used the prophets? If they took Lexapro, would Furtick have less to read because Ezekiel just wouldn’t be there? Is that it?
Furtick is supposed to be leading his church in a rapid Bible read through. It would be helpful if he could stop denigrating the Bible as he does so.
God taught me the 5 Purposes of Church at 24, but few paid attention. Now,in my50s,I ask”What 24yrold should I be listening to?
Had God been hiding these purposes until 30 years ago? You mean to tell me the Church wandered around for 1,970 or so years without knowing its purpose, until 24 year old Rick Warren comes along and recieves some type of special knowledge from God?
Is Warren really hoping to find another man in his 20s who has received new divine revelation?
Which 24 year old should you listen to? Pretty much anyone who is clinging tightly to the Word of God. Of course, that wouldn’t be new revelation, but really, really old revelation…but at least it is real revelation.
Age shouldn’t disqualify someone from being heard, nor should it be the reason we listen to them. I am sure there are some 24 year olds out there carrying the true message of God…and I would love to hear them. I know for a fact that there are some men in their 60s who are faithfully delivering God’s word.
Why is the messenger all that important anyway? The message itself is what matters.
Thomas usually makes a pretty easy target for our condescending judgments. So often and firmly do we judge him that we usually can’t think of his name without appending the required doubting adjective.
Why? What was his crime? He wanted to see and touch Jesus’ crucifixion wounds. He had heard the news, but he wanted to see with his own eyes.
We shouldn’t be so quick to judge him. There’s a lot of that in us, as evidenced in Mark Driscoll’s recent introduction to his commendable three-year exposition of Mark. Driscoll visited the Holy Land over the summer with a film crew and will be showing his congregation some of the important locations connected to Jesus’ ministry.
What we decided to do is, since Luke went to all these places—Bethlehem, Capernaum, Nazareth—he went to all these places to investigate the man who is God, the Lord Jesus Christ, we got this crazy idea: wouldn’t it be cool to do what Luke did? To just go there, and see it, and investigate it, and check it out. So we did…
We wanted to get Jesus off the flannel graph and get him actually on the dust of the earth just like he was. We want to take you to the places where he was, so you can see it and see it as historical reality, to investigate “the things that have been accomplished among us.” And so that’s what we did…
And when we finally get to it in a few years in Luke 24, I’ll preach on the “Resurrection of Jesus” from Luke 24 from the empty tomb of Jesus.
The question is, why? Well, because just like Luke, we want to do investigation so that you can have certainty about who Jesus is and what he’s done. We want you to have that personal certainty about Jesus.
My question to Driscoll is, how does it increase our faith in Jesus to see the historical reality of Jesus’ life? If my faith will be increased by watching Driscoll’s movies, would it be increased even more if I could go to the Holy Land myself?
This is exactly the same rationale that sustained the Roman Catholic impulse to engage in pilgrimages and hunt for relics. If only I could see and touch the nail that held Jesus to the cross, I would see the crucifixion as “historical reality” and have a “personal certainty about Jesus.”
Driscoll’s well-intentioned goal of retracing Luke’s steps and treating us as his own Theophilus misses the whole point of what Luke did and actually undermines Scripture. Luke did it once so that we didn’t have to do it again. He says as much in his preface:
Since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, must excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:3-4)
When Driscoll presents his trip as helping us have “personal certainty about Jesus,” he–probably unwittingly–suggests that Luke’s own account is insufficient. When you think we need more evidence than Luke provided, you might start preaching sermons based on unverified claims you pick up from tour guides (like this).
Luke seemed to think that he’d given us as much information as we needed. We didn’t need to visit the places, because Luke had done so, or had talked to people who had. John acknowledges at the end of his own account that there was much, much more that Jesus did that didn’t need to be written down (John 21:25).
Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30-31)
The Bible alone is perfectly sufficient for our faith and “personal certainty.” If we need trips to the Holy Land to boost our faith, we have learned nothing from Thomas or from Jesus’ response to him. The point of the Thomas account is not to emphasize his doubt, but to shine a light on our own doubt. In fact, Jesus was very gentle with Thomas.
Here’s how the Thomas affair unfolded: In Luke 24:36-39, Jesus appears to his disciples, who don’t believe that it is really him. He assures them by letting them see and touch his death scars.
Why do doubts arise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see.
Now, Thomas wasn’t with the rest of the disciples when that happened, and when they reported the event to him in John 20:24, he merely asks for the same evidence that the other disciples were given. He wants to see and touch the wounds too.
When Thomas does see Jesus, he’s not rebuked for his doubt; instead, Jesus removes his doubt by showing him the physical evidence. Thomas, however, is told that he’s the last who will be shown that evidence. From John 20:27-29:
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
What’s the point of John’s lesson? It’s the very next paragraph, cited above, where he tells us that what he has written is given to us that we may believe.
In other words, Thomas, you have the privilege of believing because of what you see with your physical eyes, but after you will come generations of believers who will have to trust their spiritual eyes. How do we see? How do we remove our doubts and say, with Thomas, “My Lord and my God”?
Through what the Gospel writers recorded. They’re not even very subtle about it. I’ve cited part of Luke’s preface where he says, I know what I’m talking about, so trust me. John says the same thing as he signs off his book in John 21:24:
This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true.
That’s all we need. When we hype visits and videos of the artifacts and places where Jesus walked and talked, we ignore the guarantees of the Gospel writers. We undermine their authority.
I learned an important lesson from Noble’s recent sex sermon: never miss an opportunity to knock Christians. (This came seconds after he personally gave nonbelievers an exemption from following God’s rules for sexual propriety. It’s good to know who’s looking out for you, I suppose.)
At the end of the day I just want those of us who know Jesus to live like we know Jesus, because our testimony about Jesus matters to a world that don’t know him.
Listen, I am so sick and tired of the term “Christian.” And some of you are like, “It’s in the Bible.”
Three times. Three times.
People that were closely associated with Jesus were known as disciples or followers of Jesus.
The term Christian in America today has become so neutered and watered down, it’s not even funny. I want for us to be known as people who really do love and follow Jesus.
Some questions.
Why follow Jesus if it means I have to obey God’s law? God’s law applies to everyone, saved and unsaved. Perry’s “generosity” in exempting the unsaved from God’s law turns the relationship between grace and law on its head. If we don’t know, or if it doesn’t matter, that we’re breaking God’s law, what’s the benefit of grace? Using Noble’s formulation, what’s the point of grace if it means that only once it has been given to me do I suffer the consequences of breaking God’s law? Wouldn’t I be better off and happier without either God’s law or God’s grace? As far as evangelistic strategies go, this one’s an epic failure.
Shouldn’t our Christian walk be prompted by what God thinks about us, not what non-believers think about us? Note that Noble asserts that the reason we follow Jesus is so that we’ll impress nonbelievers, not that we’ll please our Savior.
How many times does God need to identify us as Christians before Perry Noble accepts it? If the Bible had said it four times, would that make the word OK? Five? Twenty-seven? Perhaps this is just another of those antiquated Bible words, like shepherd, that we need to scrub from Scripture. The Commandments are only presented twice. Can we ignore those too? I mean, how important can they be?
Should Perry’s emotional state be more determinative than Scripture? God, through Luke and Peter, thought it a fit word to describe his people, but it makes this particular 21st century pastor sick and tired, so we need to drop it.
What does it matter what the world thinks of us? The world will always hate God, so it can be expected to hate his children. It’s ironic that the word is sometimes discounted by appealing to extrabiblical texts that suggest it was used as a term of derision against the early believers. If that’s the case, and if we want to model the early church, wouldn’t the contemporary worldly derision generated by the term encourage us to embrace it all the more?
Why should other Christians affect my willingness to be known by God’s name? Piper put it this way a few days ago:
Being ashamed of the Bible because there are looney Christians is like being ashamed of Milton because of Hallmark cards.
If Christians make you sick, what’s your disease?
As I’ve argued before, this repeated hostility towards Christianity is profoundly worrying. Perry Noble says he’s not a Christian, and we keep trying really hard to disagree with him. At what point do we give in?
In this post, we find Steven Furtick, once again, tirelessly running through any snippet of scripture possible in order to justify his actions:
(ACTS 2:42) They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Did you catch it? They devoted themselves. Who devoted themselves? The new believers! Nobody devoted them to the teaching. They had to do it for themselves. The apostles taught with authority, clarity, and consistency. But the burden of discipleship rested primarily on the new believers, not the leaders of the church.
Gee, had Pastors for the last several centuries realized this, they could have saved much time trying to make disciples. Just dunk a load of people in an above-ground pool, and let them fend for themselves.
Of course, that becomes problematic when you read Matthew 28:19:
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
If Steven is right, this verse must be speaking to non-disciples, and Jesus is telling them to make themselves disciples.
Wait…Jesus was actually speaking to the Apostles?
This is the danger of taking one word out of one verse, and trying to build doctrine around it. The vast majority of the time, you are going to get it wrong.
Almost two weeks ago, I asked Perry Noble supporters to give us examples of Noble’s biblical wisdom. I asked someone to describe the emperor’s advertised grand clothes, not seeing any myself, and all of his supporters on this site (and there are many) decided he was best left in his jeans and tee shirt.
Perhaps Noble was a little peeved at being abandoned on these pages, but if you review his tweets from last weekend, it appears that he provided his own response, which was, to paraphrase, It’s best that I don’t preach as well as some others.
The worse thing God could give some of us is more information b/c it would not draw us 2 Him but cause us to run from Him in disobedience!
It must be nice to think you can give advice to God, though perhaps he’s just emulating his pal Steven Furtick, who thinks God spent too much time talking about Moses and wasted all his time on Leviticus. Or Andy Stanley who says we should excise the word shepherd from Jesus’ teaching. As he says, “That word needs to go away.”
Here’s an incredibly important principle. You cannot communicate complicated information to large groups of people. As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information.
We talked about church marketing earlier in the week, and here we see how a sales mentality can corrupt faithful preaching. Note two lessons that Tony Morgan says are a characteristic of proper church marketing:
We focus less on what we say and more on how we act.
We reduce the number of competing messages we are trying to communicate.
The spoken word is deprecated and replaced by action, guided by a local pastor who thinks there’s benefit in intentionally hiding the whole counsel of God from his congregation. As Noble reminds us, an emphasis on continual action also suggests that we can stop learning.
Many times with me it isn’t always learning something new…but rather being reminded of what I should already know!
Stay shallow, friends. Stay shallow.
(An alternate interpretation of Noble’s first tweet would be that God only gives new revelation to people who are willing and able to properly respond to it, which often includes Noble himself. Such an interpretation suggests that the Bible is insufficient, and sets up pastors as special receptors of extra-biblical wisdom. It also limits God in whom he’s allowed to speak to.)
In the last few days, we’ve been wondering why leaders like Warren, Noble and Furtick have such a dim view of Bible study. In the case of Furtick, at least, I think I’ve found an answer.
He doesn’t like the Bible.
For a bit of background, Furtick has been leading some in his church in 90-day Bible read through. From his and others’ tweets, they seem to be somewhere around Deuteronomy at the moment. Furtick’s tweeted observations from his own reading are both revealing and horrifying. Let’s start with the worst:
Holly just told me the entertaining Bible stories are God’s way of apologizing for Leviticus.
Getting past the idiocy of judging the Bible based on its entertainment value, he thinks that God should apologize for parts of the Bible?
A pastor’s primary responsibility is to faithfully preach God’s Word. If Pastor Furtick thinks he knows best which bits should be in the Bible and which bits shouldn’t, he should go work for Rob Bell. He should not be working for God.
Even some bits that he deems worthy of including in the Bible seem to bore him. Note this:
Is it bad that I’m glad that Moses is dead? Is it b/c I have a man crush on Joshua?
Yes, Pastor Steven, it is bad. It’s even worse that you have to ask in public.
We have noted on this blog how the Bible seems to be a very low priority in Furtick’s sermon planning. This may explain why. Furtick’s personal interests guide how he reads and values the Bible, not God’s.
It’s not that Furtick finds everything boring or a waste of time. Some things really get his juices flowing.
Just had a financial strategic consulting mtg loaded w/ terms like absorption rate & OCF growth. Excruciating? Not at all. LOVE that stuff.
His arrogant attitude towards God’s Word is also apparently rubbing off on his church staff. This came from his Creative Pastor:
Deuteronomy…more like repeateronomy. Forgive me God.
It’s appalling, but at least he had the sense to apologize to God, not demand an apology from him like his boss did.
I look forward to seeing how Furtick apologists defend this, but one defense that can’t be used is that we shouldn’t read so much into dumb tweets. Furtick thinks quite highly of his own Twitter content, and imagines that the world is waiting for his 140-character wisdom.
I never imagined how much inspiration I’d be able to spread to people through a simple daily encouraging thought. I try to get these out almost every morning. When people retweet, it multiplies this impact exponentially. That’s very rewarding and humbling to me. Right after I wake up, I get to begin my day by planting a seed of hope into the life of thousands-both at Elevation, and around the world.
What makes this worse is that Furtick is aware that he’s leading spiritual infants with his tweets. As Downing pointed out yesterday, if we are to believe Furtick’s numbers, most of his church are new believers who don’t know how to study or read the Bible.
Why would you want to read Leviticus if your pastor thinks it’s a mistake? Why would you want to study Moses and the law if Joshua’s the main stud? Why bother with Deuteronomy if it’s unnecessarily repetitive? Why worship God when your pastor thinks he’s embarrassed?
How can a minister of God’s Word not only think that the Bible is boring and useless, but communicate that idea to his flock?
If you think that what God said is dull, between you and God, the dullard is not God.
UPDATE: The Leviticus quote has been updated to indicate that he was repeating his wife’s comment. See the discussion for why I think he is fully accountable for the comment himself though.
Steven Furtick says that we can study the Bible so much that it can be harmful. For example, he warns people not to go to churches where they learn about things like the doctrines of grace and “stuff your face until you’re so obese spiritually that you can’t even move.”
Eating God’s Word is an interesting metaphor, given that Jeremiah also used it in Jeremiah 15:16, but in a very different way.
When your words came, I ate them;
they were my joy and my heart’s delight,
for I bear your name,
O LORD God Almighty.
Perry Noble has also told us that we need to go on a spiritual diet:
Christians DO NOT need another Bible study.
David told us when we were supposed to eat in Psalm 1:2.
His delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
Two questions for Furtick and Noble:
How much eating is too much?
When, besides night or day, are we to stop eating?
This blog is mine alone and does not necessarily–or very often–represent the thinking or sentiments of anyone who disagrees with me, my wife, my employer, my friends, my family, my pastor, my brother, my church and, almost certainly, God. After I hit the Publish button, it doesn’t always even reflect my own thinking. It does seem to often reflect the thinking of Tommy F, Twit Conway and some guy in Minnesota, however.
