Wednesday, July 2, 2014
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21 KJV).
Eat the meat but do not choke on the bones!
A discouraged Christian friend once emailed me to explain his dilemma. He had discovered a source that contained sound Bible doctrine and church tradition. He recognized the doctrinal error, yet he was so disturbed that he was questioning everything in the source (even the sound doctrine). My advice to him was simple, “Eat the meat but do not choke on the bones!” (The same advice conveyed in unique phraseology was also helpful to me when I was in the same predicament years earlier.)
Having visited our local “Christian” bookstore recently, I could not help but chuckle at much of the literature I saw there. There were shelves after shelves after shelves of volumes that had nothing to do with the God of the Holy Bible, nothing to do with the Holy Bible, nothing to do with the Christian life God has given us in Christ. If were were to purge today’s average “Christian” bookstore of everything non-Christian, doubtless the store would soon declare bankruptcy!
Since organized religion has corrupted pure Christianity, Christendom is a spiritual minefield—it is dotted with thousands of gimmicks, heresies, and other traps. If the Christian is to survive Satan’s military tactics and assaults, he or she must be grounded in God’s Word rightly divided. The Christian must always remember that the Holy Bible rightly divided is the “minesweeper,” detecting and destroying the mines that would otherwise destroy the Christian. As today’s Scripture says, we need to sort truth from error. Our standard as English-speaking Christians is the King James Bible rightly divided. That which fails the test is worthless, so we toss it out; that which passes the test is “good,” so we retain it!
Dear saints, we will never find a perfect local church, but that is not our desire anyway. We “make no bones about it”—we seek a pure church, for that is what the Holy Spirit desires us to have (2 Corinthians 6:14-18; 2 Corinthians 11:1-20). We seek neither “milk” nor bones, but “meat” (1 Corinthians 3:2)! 🙂
333 Words of Grace 
Enjoyed this post and I hear what you are saying; however, a “pure” church in my area cannot be found, so what does a person do? Right now I am not attending anywhere. I was counseled one time to go to a church that was “close enough” (whatever that meant) to what I believed (right division, by the way) – I found a church that believes in a pre-trib rapture thinking that was “close enough,” but unfortunately that was not “close enough” for me! I found that if the pastor does not rightly divide the scriptures, his sermons will come out skewed almost every time. Personally, its difficult for me to sit and listen to a sermon that is not “right” practically week after week.
Thank you for these devotions/studies! I do like reading them every day!
Marsha