The absence of Scripture in today's church

During my pastorate we had two Scripture readings during the worship service. One was the sermon text which I would normally read as I began my message. The other was another Scripture that seemed appropriate for the day. It might be a responsive reading that contained a number of Scriptures from the back of our hymnal, it might have been a responsive reading that I put together for that day or it may have simply been a passage from the Bible. Regardless, we always had two readings from the Scriptures. On Communion Sundays we had a third reading as I would begin our Lord's Supper with the passage from 1 Corinthians 11 in which the apostle Paul discusses the Lord's Supper.

Unfortunately, I find little Scripture reading in many of today's worship services. The sermon text might be read, but that is often all you hear read from the Bible. I'm not sure I understand why it is this way.

We spend a lot of energy defending the Bible as the infallible Word of God. We talk about how it does not return void but accomplishes its purposes. Many conservative Christians complain about Bible reading being removed from schools, but we don't read it in our worship services.

Billy Graham was well-known for his frequent references to the Bible when he preached. "The Bible says..." he would thunder to his audiences. He was not ashamed of the Scriptures because he knew they pointed to Christ and therefore had the power to change people's lives. He sowed the Word and trusted God to bring in a harvest, and hundreds of thousands of people turned to Christ because of his faithfulness to the Word of God.

Could our barren alters be the result of our largely ignoring the Word of God in our worship services? In the book of Mark we read that the disciples went out to preach and God confirmed his word with signs and miracles. We do not read anywhere that God confirmed the opinions of individuals or the latest polls with signs and miracles. Perhaps the reason we do not see more people saved and transformed is because we have ignored the Scriptures in an effort to be relevant.

Not only do we need to be reading the Scriptures in our worship services, we need to take our people deeper in understanding what the Scriptures teach. As a pastor I began preaching through books of the Bible during the summer months and into the fall. I would begin the Sunday after Father's Day and continue until the book was completed. I never had to wonder what I would preach the next Sunday because I would just start up where I left off. It forced me, and those hearing the messages, to confront passages I might have preferred to ignore. These expository messages helped me and our congregation to grow in our faith and understanding.

Let's bring Scripture reading back into our worship services. Let our congregations be exposed to as much of the Word of God as possible that it might richly impact their lives.