Lost Your Appetite?

According to one web site I checked, every 3.6 seconds someone somewhere in the world dies of starvation, with 3/4 of these victims being children under the age of 5. That is sad! I could not imagine as a parent not having the food to feed my children and, as a result, watch them slowly starve to death. Reaching out to the world's poor and suffering is something God calls us to do ... so I hope you are involved in someway, giving toward this great world need (see Proverbs 14:31 and Proverbs 19:17).

But it is not my purpose this morning to talk about world starvation ... rather I want to highlight another form of starvation that is ravaging the Kingdom of God. Consider for a moment the following two quotes:

"Americans revere the Bible but, by and large, they don't read it." (Pollster George Gallup)

"We own more Bibles than we will ever use, but we are slowly starving to death because we have lost our appetite for Scripture." (Krish Kandiah, director of Churches in Mission for the Evangelical Alliance UK)

How about you? Revere the Bible but don't read it? Got more than one copy but have lost your appetite for it? This is a sad situation, my friend. You may not know this, but in parts of Asia there are groups of believers who meet in secret house churches (secret due to the very real threat of persecution). Often these believers will sit for as long as 12 hours, studying the Bible together! Yet we are hard pressed to find 5 minutes to open God's Word and read a couple of verses!

If you have lost your appetite for God's Word, I encourage you to pray and ask God to restore it! Then make it a priority to get into the Scripture! You cannot grow in your faith ... you will not become more like Jesus Christ apart from a deepening "relationship" with the Bible! (see John 17:17)

Thanks for stopping by . . .

pj