Most of us believe somethings about God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Christian life that are shaped not by the Bible but by our experience, by the sermons we have heard, the books we have read, the teachers under which we have sat, secondary sources. We all hold those beliefs fairly strongly to the point that we base our walk with God on them. That is dangerous.
At some point in our journey we have to shift the foundation of our beliefs from those secondary sources to our own investigation of the Bible. If we do not we are, according to Acts 17:11 at best not noble minded and at worse emmeshed in heresy.
That is easier to say or write than it is to do. To do it well we have to submit what we believe to what the Scripture says. To do that we have to first admit what we believe is true. If we do not we will force the Scripture to say what we already believe and will not consider passages that may contradict what we believe to be true.
I know many believers who will not do this. They continue to hold and defend positions that they learned from their traditions continually shaping the Scripture to support what they already believe or else, and this I have seen as well, actually deciding that passages of scripture either no longer apply to us or, in the most egregious example, decide that the passages that do not align with their position should not be in the Bible. For a believer neither of those choices are a real option.
It is not easy to really closely examine our core beliefs, but we have to do so.
That is easier to say or write than it is to do. To do it well we have to submit what we believe to what the Scripture says. To do that we have to first admit what we believe is true. If we do not we will force the Scripture to say what we already believe and will not consider passages that may contradict what we believe to be true.
I know many believers who will not do this. They continue to hold and defend positions that they learned from their traditions continually shaping the Scripture to support what they already believe or else, and this I have seen as well, actually deciding that passages of scripture either no longer apply to us or, in the most egregious example, decide that the passages that do not align with their position should not be in the Bible. For a believer neither of those choices are a real option.
It is not easy to really closely examine our core beliefs, but we have to do so.
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