I’ve just left Cowboy’s room where we held our accountability and Bible study for Monday of this week. I’ve realized just how incredibly important it is having people keep you accountable. And that’s not just in a defined setting, but all the time. Today, I went to a mini-seminar here at Belmont (we call them convocation, but I’ll get into that later) with Michael W. Smith. He stressed time and again about the importance of having people keeping you accountable in the business that I’m getting ready to go into. Several things God has shown me today point to that need, and only the foolish would call it coincidence.
I did some reading for New Testament, which was reading all of Mark. Well, I only read half, but that’s not the point. In Mark 5, there’s the story of Jesus healing the man demon possessed by “Legion.” The lesson I learned tonight came from verse 17, “and the crowd began pleading with Jesus to go away and leave them alone.” Why would they do that? He had just healed a man who had been demon possessed with no foreseeable hope! They were more concerned about the harm Jesus caused than the healing. But that’s the way the world is. When Christ works, those who are not followers aren’t left happy. They are offended. Jesus is offensive to the world because He doesn’t offer all encompassing beliefs to please everyone. There is no reason to sugar-coat the truth just to keep from offending people. That’s what I got just from that passage…
Then tonight when I met with the guys, Nathan expanded on it some more. Keep in mind that he had chosen this verse ahead of time. He read 1 Corinthians 18-21:
‘I know very well how foolish the message of the cross sounds to those who are on the road to destruction. But we who are being saved recognize this message as the very power of God. As the Scriptures say,
“I will destroy human wisdom
and discard their most brilliant ideas.”
So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made them all look foolish and has shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense. Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never find him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save all who believe.’
That is why those who begged Christ to leave their region did so. And that verse is what comforts me when atheists, agnostics, and various other non-believers attempt to get me riled up and fight in a debate. I cannot debate, I know this. All I have is my testimony. But even if I knew all that God has revealed to those who came before me, explaining it to “those on the road to destruction” would seem like total nonsense. And when I explain what I do know to be true, they argue against it. It defies science, and it can’t be proven. I know all this, yet my faith it not dissuaded. They cannot know because they Holy Spirit hasn’t revelealed it to them.
I am tired now. It’s too late to go to bed and expect to be wide-awake for an early class. I apologize for a lack of humor tonight. Perhaps I’ll expand on this later.
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