America -- Where is the Passion?

Last night's discussion got me thinking about the state of the church here in the United States. I think about how precious the Word of God must have been to men in the Pre-Reformation era if they were willing to face martyrdom in order to get it in the hands of the people. I cannot begin to imagine how hard it must have been for Gregory in Croatia to be excommunicated from the church because he believed that the Bible had to be in the hands of the people. Similarly, I am struck by the passion shown by those in the 2/3 world as they now comprise the majority of missionaries. They certainly do not have the money that we do, yet they have a passion for missions that puts us to shame. I can only think that this passion comes from not only reading the Bibles they do have, but also really believing the commands in what they do read.

Meanwhile, as I look around my house I see more Bibles than I have time to regularly read. We have paraphrases, literal translations, and dynamic equivalents. We have study Bibles to guide our theology and our living. I suspect that just about everyone who belongs to a self-named “evangelical” church owns at least one Bible. The problem is that it is like pulling teeth to get most of us to read our Bibles regularly.

Conversely, there are people in parts of the world who are willing to die for owning just a tiny part of Scripture. Yet those people are reading what they have and cherishing it as if they really do believe that the Bible is God communicating to them. I find it quite humbling to see countries like India with little money but such a passion for missions that they would even send missionaries to the United States. As a country we appear to be so spoiled that we do not appreciate the freedom we have to read and discuss what God saw fit to preserve for us over these many millennia.

For me, the application for this is in my ministry and in my personal life. Am I really searching for wisdom as “hidden treasure” as Proverbs 2:4 calls it? I take the time to read the Word, but do I really search for the hidden treasure? I think I could do much better with this. I also realize that studying for seminary does not really feed me like devotional reading, which removes another excuse. For my ministry I see the need to preach the value of the Word with even more fervor. Getting upset about how people in this country neglect the Word will do nothing unless I use what little influence I have to encourage people to spend more time. We need to recapture the passion shown by men who believed to their graves that getting the Word into people's hands was the most important thing. I want to be a part of that awakening.