When God’s people borrow the world’s religious vocabulary, they soon borrow the world’s religious ideas; faithfulness therefore requires that we hold the pattern of sound words and call Bible things by Bible names. This is a lesson about words, and someone will object that words are…
All authority in religion belongs to Jesus Christ; therefore His word, and His word alone, settles every religious question, and to refuse to hear Him is to be cut off from the people of God. Every religious dispute, when traced to its root, is a dispute…
Holy Spirit baptism was a specific divine promise, administered by Christ, poured out on the apostles at Pentecost and on the household of Cornelius to open the door to Jew and Gentile — not a general experience to be sought, and not the baptism commanded of…
The New Testament speaks of five different baptisms, but only one is the commanded baptism in force for sinners today; rightly dividing the five guards us from both neglect and counterfeit. A single word can carry several meanings, and nowhere does that cause more mischief than…
Faith is easy to praise and easy to talk about. It sounds noble. It sounds safe. But James refuses to treat faith like a badge you wear or a word you say. He treats it like a force that moves a life. Jesus did the same. He told us to count the cost, to carry the cross, and to give up what we cling to. So James presses the question we would rather avoid: not “Do you believe?” but “What has your belief made you do?” Abraham laid Isaac on the altar. Rahab walked away from her old world. Real faith always lays something down. And if your faith costs you nothing, James says plainly, it is worth nothing.
We have not experienced that kind of famine. Today, we carry the Bible in our pockets. We can open a phone or a computer and read God’s word anytime. The Holy Spirit has given us the **completed revelation** in 66 books.
But imagine if every Bible—printed, digital, recorded—were suddenly gone. No access at all. At first, some might not notice. But eventually, we would ache for it.
We caught a glimpse of that hunger during the pandemic, when we could not gather. At first, it was manageable. But after weeks and months, many of us were starving and thirsty for fellowship, worship, and the word of God. We did whatever we had to do to come back together.
That is the kind of longing Amos describes.