Getting Started

It happened again Sunday morning. There I sat in Sunday School at Hampshire View Baptist listening to Steve teach from Romans 12 and I felt this driving urge to write my feelings, my impressions, my thoughts, regarding what we were learning.

Hence, this is my effort to respond to that urge.

Acts 17:11 is quoted because it seems so apt, as best I can tell. Paul and Silas had come to Thessalonica where there was a synagogue. As was their custom, they went to synagogue, and they expounded the Word of God to God's People. Seems that a few of the Jews responded to the messages (three weeks of preaching), but of the "devout Greeks" a multitude responded, and of "the chief women" many responded. However, the remaining group (mostly men, I take it, from the text) rebelled at the message, and employed non-believers and non-church people to break in to their host's home and take him before the civil authorities (yet another case of attempting to use the government in the place of God, but that's for another time), and Paul and Silas' friends scooted them out of there to Berea.

There was a synagogue in Berea, and they went about their normal custom, as they had in Thessalonica. However, the response was different. Paul writes (see Title header) that the Bereans were "more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so." "These things" of course, refer to what Paul taught and talked about from the Scriptures.

Note the Bereans' "readiness of mind." They were ready to learn, ready to examine scripture, ready (apparently) to let scripture override their own personal wishes and wants and status. Note also their response, that they searched the Scriptures. This is a two-fold response.

First, they did not rely on the man that expounded on the Scriptures as the final word. They used his words rather as a starting point for their own personal understanding of their connection and relationship with God. Seems they already knew what Paul later tried to teach the Corinthians (I Cor 2:4-5 "And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.")

Second, they went to Scripture to check Scripture, so not only did they reject a man as a final authority on truth, they went to the correct final authority on truth to check what the man said.

So, we arrive here. Monday; Sunday's over, and it's time to take the Bereans' example and put it to work. I hope I can/will keep this up, regularly. I will do my best, and ask for your forgiveness if fail. It is worth a start, I believe, so it’s started.

Al