The Whole Word
“And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him;” Hebrews 5:9 /// “…but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.” 1 John 2:17. /// “For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end.”Hebrews 3:14 /// “But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.” Mt. 24:13 /// “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” (BOLD ADDED)
I come from a family of health-care practitioners, and one thing I am certain of when it comes to studying to become one is that picking out pieces here and there from medical textbooks and disregarding everything else would be dangerous and possibly fatal. Imagine a surgeon performing open heart surgery and only having studied where the heart is. Or a brain surgeon only learning the parts of a brain before trying to remove a brain tumor. Absurd and unheard of, isn’t it? This is exactly what some of us do when it comes to the Bible. Many of us never get past, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16.)” If all God wanted us to do was to memorize this verse, profess our belief in Christ, return to our worldly, sin-ridden ways, and fly first class to heaven when our lives are over, He wouldn’t have given us His whole Word.
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that out, does it? No pun intended. Tragically, many of us have convinced ourselves we can pick the likeable, palatable, comfortable, and comforting parts of the Bible, and ignore or toss away the rest. Others of us have convinced ourselves we don’t need the Bible at all, or that we can rely on preachers to spoon-feed us God’s Word so we don’t have to bother with it ourselves. How can we even tell if it’s truly God’s Word or the false teaching the Bible warns about if we’re not continually in His Word ourselves? We may not only miss eternity in heaven with this neglect of God’s Word, but may also miss the amazing relationship with God we can have on earth.
Countless Bible verses make clear that TRUE faith in Christ must be ONGOING, that it involves godly sorrow and genuine repentance, that repentance produces fruit of changed hearts and lives committed to the Lord’s ways, and that obedience to God and His Word are the fruit of genuine belief. Hard to hear, isn’t it? But I would rather be told the truth about God’s Word now and learn to live by it than to have heaven’s door shut in my face (Matthew 7:21-23), wouldn’t you?