Mine the Riches
0
I agree with everything you said. It’s absolutely right. How did we get like that? When God stopped us from having so many corporate gatherings, should we have just been at a place of maturity that we should have very quickly moved into that kind of responsibility on a more personal level? Did we miss it? Sounds like we missed something for a while. We need to be admonished about this very thing. It’s not that now we are at a point where we need to move into it, that we’re at a place of maturity where we need to do this. If we have missed something, then how did that happen?
I don’t really feel like it has been some major oversight. We’ve prospered over the last twenty months. I can think of tons of mega-breakthroughs in people’s lives on a supernatural level over the last twenty months. I’m not unhappy at all with the last twenty months. But when things come up, you just go forward with them. What brings them up or how we got here I don’t know if it’s even answerable. I think there’s been a basic shyness that has pervaded our existence over the last bunch of years.
The shyness being, if we sit in a group of people in a living room and read a passage of Scripture, somehow we feel like it’s more spiritual to sit there and look at each other than it is for someone to take the time to begin to expound on it. With humility certainly but is it really more spiritual to look at each other in silence than it is to say, “Hey, let’s talk about this thing, let’s dissect it. Let’s dig in a little bit deeper.” And again, I don’t mean in some sort of academic way. To mine the riches is different than to simply slice and dice and cut it into little bitty pieces and pretend that we’re scholars. I’m not talking about that, but I’m saying to mine the riches of the thing.
That’s what I want to do Wednesday night with some of these passages of Scriptures that you’ve come prepared with, is to actually discuss the process of mining these things out so that we can help God’s people and feed them and not let them live on physical bread alone. What is the process exactly of mining out things that can be useful to God? What perspective do we need to have as we read and try to comprehend God’s counsel for our own lives...what tools are there? What way of thinking or perspective is there that will also help us mine those things for sharing amongst God’s people? Not promoting ourselves in any way nor creating some sterile academic environment where everybody sits, and we put a little podium at the end of the room. I am not talking about anything as absurd as that. But I am saying that there is a perspective and a mindset that allows us to be useful to God’s people beyond just ourselves. There is a way to look at life and the Scriptures themselves.
