The Key Ingredient Forgotten By Many Christians

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Today it feels like there’s something missing in the lives of many Christians, we go to church, and occasionally read our Bibles but it feels if that it isn’t enough. As Christians we are good at listening, pondering, and absorbing information, revelation and insights but what do we do with all of that knowledge? Do we write it down, store it away in our minds for a rainy day, or do we replace it with whatever is heard the following week?

These are the questions we must begin to ask ourselves if we want to fully reflect Christ into this world, these are the questions we must ask if we are serious about growing and developing the Kingdom here on earth. However, being able to grow personally and corporately hinges on the fact that we must begin to practice what we preach and to apply what we have learned. It is as if many churches and Christians have become drunk on knowledge but are starving for wisdom and application.

Knowledge is the accumulation of information, while wisdom is knowing what to do with that knowledge and how to apply it in real world situations and in your own life. I believe this is where many Christians get tripped up, we are good at hearing a sermon or reading a passage but we lack the ability (or discernment) to apply those truths in our own lives (or for more than a week). It is easy to sit and listen but it is much harder to act out what was heard.

Look at it this way would you invest time and money to go to a trade school (carpenter, electrician, mechanic) and never do anything except the book work. Imagine getting a master’s degree in carpentry but you’ve never picked up a hammer during the entire experience. It sounds ridiculous but this is how many of us approach church and the Bible. Each year we sit through at least 52 sermons plus all of our personal reading <strong>but rarely does a real lasting change, refinement, course correction, or new type of action materialize in our lives.</strong> What is happening here?

Christians Must Do the Do

The Christian life is based on more than just attendance and homework, it is based on action, belief and trust. You can have knowledge about Jesus and not be saved (member of the New Covenant), you can have an understanding of Paul’s writings and not be a contributing Christian and you can have insights about God and still be without a relationship with Him.

What is the tipping point between knowledge about Christ and relationship with Him? James the half-brother of Jesus and leader of the church in Jerusalem (Acts 15) wrote about how to bridge this gap.

James 1:22-25 “22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; 24 for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. ²⁵But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.” (NKJV)

You see it is not enough to read the scriptures, we must learn how to apply them to our lives and how to live them out. Paul in Romans 10:9-10 talks about believing in your heart AND confessing with your mouths, to receive salvation both must happen not just one or the other. My own salvation experience reflects this. I believed in my heart in April of 2000 but I didn’t make a verbal confession until July 2000. Jesus revealed Himself to me and gave me a choice, from that day I believed in Him but I didn’t speak it out until just over three months later. For those three and a half months I had knowledge of who Jesus really was but my actions to back that up were delayed.

We can take this truth in James 1 and apply it to more than just salvation, we can apply it to the entirety of the scriptures and especially the words Jesus spoke of in the Gospels. Jesus went and did, Jesus didn’t sit at home in Capernaum and revel in the knowledge of who He was. No, He went out and demonstrated the reality of His life and calling. Jesus didn’t just mentally frame the words of the magi, Simeon, Anna or His cousin John and look over them when He was frazzled with a His carpentry work. Jesus brought life to the words, promises, proclamations and call on His life.