There is an old story of a farmer who wanted to enter his mule in the Kentucky Derby. People assured him the mule could never win the race to which the farmer agreed. He said, "I just thought the association would do him a lot of good."
Proverbs 13: 20 reminds us that "He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm." I remind myself of that when I tackle a difficult book or listen to a lesson that is especially challenging.
I often download podcasts to listen to while I'm driving. One of my favorites comes from William Lane Craig. Craig holds two PhDs and is a research professor at Talbot. He is a Christian philosopher and apologist who has debated some of the best known atheists around the world. No less an authority that J. P. Moreland has said that Craig is among the top one percent of practicing philosophers in the Western world. I love to listen to his podcasts, but there is one problem. Some of what he says goes right over my head! To say he thinks on a different level than I do would be an understatement. Still...I think the association does me a lot of good.
Last year I read On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision. The subtitle explains the premise of the book. It was written more for the lay reader and not for the academics for whom he normally writes. It was an excellent book containing a lot of information I used in various sermons.
Yesterday I broke down and finally purchased Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, a much more academic book of his I had been wanting to read for some time. I was just concerned it would be so far over my head that it would be waste of time for me to even begin reading it. It may be, but we never advance if we are not willing to stretch ourselves intellectually.
Much has been said in recent years about the decline of the Christian mind. Years ago as a pastor I became concerned that the Sunday school material we were using had been so dumbed down that it was of little value. For 14 years I attended a different church almost every week due to my ministry responsibilities, and so many of the messages I heard contained very little substance. Much of the preaching one hears on TV is all fluff. Christians need to be challenged to think, we need to be stretched with biblical truth that will make us more bold in our faith and more confident in what we believe.
Many of our people do not have a Christian worldview because they've not been taught how to think as biblical Christians. They don't know what they believe or why they believe what they claim to believe. There was a time when the pastor was the local theologian, but this is not the case in many churches today. Pastors have been reduced to community activists, social workers, and counselors leaving little time to study the Scriptures in-depth.
Christian people need to hear theological truth from the pulpit to strengthen their faith. They need pastors who will dig deep in the Scriptures to mine out those truths and present them boldly and with authority. For that to happen, those of us in leadership positions must be willing to stretch ourselves intellectually.
I'm excited to continue that stretching in my own life with this new book, but I have a feeling it will be slow reading!
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