A Stable Faith

I was listening to John MacArthur preach the other day. He was preaching on spiritual stability and the elements of a spiritually stable Christian. In part 5 of his series, he preaching on "Godly Thinking". Here is something he said that hit home:

"Bill Hull, in a book entitled Right Thinking written in 1985, writes, “What scares me is the anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking philosophy that has spilled over into the church.  This philosophy tends to romanticize the faith, making the local church into an experience center.  Their concept of church is that they are spiritual consumers and that the church’s job is to meet their felt needs,” end quote.  And what is happening in the church is that people are going to church not to think, not to reason about the truth, not like the noble Bereans to search the Scriptures to see what is true, but they’re going there to get a weekly spiritual fix, a weekly spiritual high, so they can feel that God is still with them.  They are spiritually unstable because they live on feeling rather than on thinking. 

The Christian must not be a victim of his feelings.  He must not get caught in a pragmatic trap of does-it-work/is-it-successful.  John Stott has written in his helpful little book, Your Mind Matters, this:  “Indeed, sin has more dangerous effects on our faculty of feeling than on our faculty of thinking because our opinions are more easily checked and regulated by revealed truth than are experiences,” end quote.  Very wise statement."

A stable faith can be attained as our minds are renewed in the truth (Romans 12:1-2) of God's Word. It's not that "feelings" are unimportant, but they are so fickle and unstable that we must not let them drive the care of our lives.

Just something to think about...