Many people in life are exposed to the gospel at a very young age in an elementary, easy to understand way. Possibly at an age where they are still unable to read, they form their first beliefs of who God is and how a person gets to Heaven. The majority of the time this might come with a little scripture but mostly someone just telling them the basics. Maybe they first hear it at age 4…then every Sunday for the next 3 years. Now they are seven and have been told well over a hundred times the same thing. They’ve heard it from their parents, their teachers, and their preacher. Maybe they are too young to understand a verse that supports the teaching they are receiving…so they are just “told” what it means. Oftentimes the person’s understanding that is explaining it comes from they themselves being “told” what it means…so on and so forth. As the child grows these beliefs are reinforced over and over through Sunday school teachers, youth pastors, and their preacher. The more they grow, the more scriptures are introduced to them to support their previous exposure to it. These scriptures are far from exhaustive and usually consists of a small handful that are cycled through the lessons over and over.
Eventually the child sits down to read the bible for themselves. They have so many preconceived notions from the “teachings” they were exposed too that it is next to impossible for them to not read those beliefs into every verse they see, no matter how few those may be. That is why a person can be so adamant their beliefs are correct, yet can only paraphrase a few verses in the bible. It is because their belief is based more on what they have been told their whole life rather than what the bible actually says. I have even had preachers tell me the only explanation they have for the verse they preached on is that is how they were taught it. Our confidence in our beliefs should not come from having confidence in the people that taught us, but rather in the scriptures themselves. It is mind boggling how many strong doctrinal statements are made today that have no scriptural reference.
People are rarely able to leave those first ideas of how a person gets to Heaven no matter how much scripture seems to contradict what they have been taught. They can’t fathom how all those people that taught me can be wrong…when the truth is many learned it just like you did…someone gave them a few scriptures and a whole lot of interpretation. It was burned into their brain and even though there are tens of thousands of scriptures in the bible…they are convinced that they only need a few to be the foundation of their belief and it is impossible that there might be scriptures out there the totally contradict what they believe those few verses mean. We are masters are making the bible say what we want it to say and turning a blind eye to those areas that seem to tear down the beliefs we have had from a young age. Most of God’s people don’t love His Word…they only love parts of it.
Are we willing to labor in God’s word to harmonize the scriptures? Are we humble enough to let the bible say what it says…not what we want it to say? Do we love the Lord enough to take our doctrine from the bible rather than take our doctrine to the bible?
May we labor in the scriptures so we can rightly divide and properly apply the word of God.
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