Don't Just Stand There

As the saying goes, do something! It’s fairly instinctive, isn’t it? We humans are actors: beings built for doings. What’s more, as believers, we are willing doers. Ephesians 2:10 reminds us that God has planned out a lifetime of things we can do to please him and bring him glory. And we know that his Word is living and active, and his Spirit in us will turn our ears to that Word and instruct us in the path we must go.

So I was just a little bit challenged this week when a friend in ministry posed a question: ‘Application’ is what you have in a sermon when you believe that you can be saved by what you do - discuss.

They had a point. If every sermon resulted in a church being told to do something, pretty soon those doings would become a necessary part of really being a member of that church. Give it a bit more time, and you wouldn’t be a real Christian if you didn’t have the runs on the board to back it up.

Fortunately, ‘application’ is more like what a trained winetaster will do - we savour the word, look at it in the light, smell its flavour, sip it, taste it, drink it down. Mere doing would be crude gorging on the riches of what God has given us.
And it could never work anyway. We’re a roomful of statues when it comes to our ability to dig our way out of the trouble our sin has brought upon us. Thanks be to God for giving us hearts of flesh in place of stone!