Worth Repeating - July 28, 2017

Amos 8: 11 “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.” (NIV)

To most Christians, the Bible is like a computer software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click, “I agree.”*

This prophesy in the book of Amos refers specifically to Israel at a time in their history when the words of the Lord were just words. Amos’ job was to predict their coming punishment for removing God and his ways from their daily lives. Life was good – prosperity and peace reigned throughout the land – and they were religious after a fashion. So, Amos’ announcement about the famine of hearing from the Lord probably didn’t alarm many of the people.

Would it alarm you if you were faced with a famine of hearing the words of the Lord? What if your Bibles were confiscated and burned? (I say “Bibles” because we live in such luxury that we own more than one copy of God’s Word.) We are living in times when the possibility seems less remote than in the past. How would it affect your life if you no longer owned a Bible? Would it not matter since you never read it anyway?

There are Christians in other parts of the world who suffer from a famine of God’s Word every day. For some, it is merely a matter of there being no Bible in their language. For others, they are too poor to own one. And many Christians are persecuted by their government and denied access to the Word. I pray for my brothers and sisters whose walk with God is not enriched by a daily dose of his written word.

Does the thought of broken water pipes suddenly make you thirsty? Does the thought that your Bible might be snatched from you make you crave a taste of the Bread of Life?

More alarming than the ACLU’s desire to ban the Bible from every square inch of public space in this nation, is that the Bible has been exiled from most Christian homes.*