Wednesday, February 3, 2010

A Famine...Of Hearing the Words of the Lord

​​​​​​​“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God,
“when I will send a famine on the land--
not a famine of bread,
nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord."
Amos 8:11

I finished reading through the book of Amos this morning and was struck by this verse. Though obviously first speaking to the nation of Israel, it also has application for us today.

Larry DeBruyn writes:
We find ourselves living in times like Amos who indicated of his day that there was, “a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11). And seeing the helpless churches dying in the drought, pseudo-prophets seize the opportunity to “speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:16b). In many former evangelical pulpits the Scriptures are no longer taught, and correspondingly, in those pews the Scriptures are no longer learnt. Survey after survey reveals the abysmal state of both biblical belief and behavior in the evangelical nation.

With methods (i.e., doing church) having replaced the message, pan-evangelicals no longer find Scripture to be solely sufficient for matters of faith and practice. So absent the life that comes from God’s Word (1 Peter 1:23), many local congregations lay dead or dying amidst the spiritual famine. And energized by the sight of corpses that were once churches, prophets for profit circle like buzzards over what were once vibrant local churches, bodies of Christ, congregations that, for reason of possessing no real life in them, can now only perpetuate “a form of godliness” while “denying the power thereof” (2 Timothy 3:5).

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