More effort

The whole world understands that a doctor or an engineer can’t be trained in a haphazard manner. It involves continuous study for 15 or 20 years. But very few people realize that the study of the Word of God requires even more effort. If earthly things require much study, what of the heavenly? By not giving that much importance to the Word of God, the vitality of the church has fallen and become only a religious tradition.

This situation cannot be remedied with a week of evangelistic meetings or with a short Bible lesson every Sunday in Sunday school. It can’t be remedied with emotional praise services or with miracles or with divine healings. It can’t be remedied with dramas, missionary trips, and other activities for the youth in the church. The people get excited about such things, but the next day they return to their same lives of spiritual ignorance because they haven’t made the Word of God to be their principal meditation.

Modern Christians have given ten or twenty years of their lives to the study of this world’s wisdom in the schools, and only a few hours to the study of the Bible, which is the Word of Truth that God communicated to the world through his prophets and apostles, Jesus Christ being the principal expositor.

The only remedy for this lukewarm state of the church is to put our children to study the Bible as if it were the thing of most value in the universe. ✞

-  Art Dappen (1946-2006), author of The Education of Kings.  This article was excerpted from his newsletter, PlaticAMOS.