Preaching To People Who Hurt: An Interview With Anne Graham Lotz
If you don't know God like that — if you know God through hearsay, second hand information, what you're pastor says, your Sunday school teacher says, what you read in a book, what somebody thought He might be like, what you're parents said He might be like — then when you suffer you don't really know Him and so you doubt Him. There's an underlying doubt. You're not sure He's good. You're not sure He really loves you. You're not sure that you can trust Him with this situation.
I think the church, if it's falling down in one place more than any other . . . We've brought in a lot of programs and a lot of what I call "the stuff" and we've left the fundamental basics that are absolutely necessary for a healthy Christian life, like Bible reading.
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A woman that had come to our Lexington Just Give Me Jesus and she had just made a mess of her life. She'd been in an abusive relationship and then a divorce and something else and then remarried — just made a mess. And she's come to Christ finally and just felt so ashamed and so guilty and so unworthy and is going to church and married now to a terrific guy. Anyway she just felt like if she'd come to our revival that she would somehow — actually she said if she could just get near me she would feel like God would consider her worthy. I won't go into all of her story but when she left she said that she realized with an incredible force that her worthiness was found at the cross, her worthiness was in her personal relationship with God. She said at the end of her letter, "Why didn't my pastor ever tell me to read my Bible for myself?"
That's what we try to do in one day: to teach them to read the Bible for themselves, teach them to pray in a way that communicates to the Lord as well as putting your focus on Jesus. I feel the church is, as John Stott described it, "a mile wide and an inch deep" and we just lack what we need.
One of the messages of September 11 to the church is that we need to get serious about God and we need to get serious about our relationship with Him and about the gospel, and about a lost world, and about really living out our faith. And my concern is that the church hasn't gotten the message. If September 11 wasn't enough to get their attention, then what would it take? So that makes me afraid that September 11 is a prelude to something else that's coming. I think when we put all this stuff in the church it served a purpose in the beginning — to enhance and further equip and explain our Bible study and our prayer and our evangelism and all that. Now it's become distracting so people substitute that for the daily spiritual disciplines of Bible reading, application, obedience, prayer, witnessing. You don't have to go to a seminar, you don't have to go learn somebody's formula — you just go next door and tell your neighbor about Jesus. We've made it into "I haven't taken that course yet so I can't do it."