Day 24 - Praxis

Read John 8:31-36

A lot of churches have stated in their values that they want their community to “know the Bible.”  So, this affects everything they do, especially how they teach the Bible. The assumption is that knowledge equals practice or that “orthodoxy” equals “praxis.”  The prince of Grenada, an heir to the Spanish crown, was sentenced to life in solitary confinement in Madrid's ancient prison called "The Place of the Skull." The fearful, dirty, and dreary nature of the place earned it the name. Everyone knew that once you were in, you would never come out alive. The prince was given one book to read the entire time... the Bible. With only one book to read, he read it over hundreds and hundreds of times. The book became his constant          companion.  After thirty-three years of imprisonment, he died. When people came in to clean out his cell, they found some notes he had written using nails to mark the soft stone of the prison walls. The notations were of this sort: Psalm 118:8 is the middle verse of the Bible; Ezra 7:21 contains all the letters of the alphabet except the letter j; the ninth verse of the eighth chapter of Esther is the longest verse in the Bible, no word or name of more than six syllables can be found in the Bible.   When Scot Udell originally noted these facts in an article in Psychology Today, he commented on the oddity of an individual who spent thirty-three years of his life studying what some have described as the greatest book of all time yet could only glean    trivia. From all we know, the prince never made any religious or spiritual commitment to Christ, but he   became an expert at Bible trivia.  (Wayne Rice, Youth Specialties, ‘94)

There's a difference between knowing facts about God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible, and allowing God to change you from the inside out. Many people can grow up knowing a lot about the Bible but never let it affect or change their life. A biblical community needs to know how to live out the Word of God    because it is not enough just to know the Bible.  John Eldridge describes his journey this way: “I began to   believe the truth, and it set me free. The doctrine I knew – kind of, but having a doctrine pass before the mind is not what the Bible means by knowing the truth. It’s only when it reaches down deep into the heart the truth begins to set us free, just as a key must penetrate a lock to turn it, or as rain fall must saturate the earth down to the roots in order for your garden to grow.” (Eldredge, John, Waking The Dead, 126).  

Whenever we teach at Grace, whether in a small group or during a message, we need to ask the question, so what difference does this make for us today?  How will we do life differently now that God has revealed His truth in our lives because we can’t stay the same.  There is no room to rest on our laurels, we must change  from the inside out.