On ESPN, there is a segment called “Did You Know?” It is a segment full of stats that you can either find interesting or you may think, “Why do they keep track of that?” Right now, we are going to have one of those segments.
Did you know… there are 1,189 chapters in the Bible? Did you know… the Bible is about 800,000 words long and if the average person reads 250-300 words per minute; it would take about 3,200 minutes or 54 hours to read the whole Bible. So… reading 15 hours per day = 4 days. Did you know… that if I heard a sermon from 1 chapter of the Bible per week, I would hear a sermon from each chapter of the Bible in 23 years?
Why am I giving you all these useless stats?
This past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to go to CIY with about a dozen Jr. High students. The speaker at the conference, Robert Watson, made an easy connection with our students and me. He said, “If you want to grow, apply what you know.”
I got to thinking about how much of the Bible I do know. Then I got to thinking about all the different messages I have heard and all the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I’m only 26, and feel like I have a pretty good understanding of what God tells us in His Word. Now obviously, we’re not likely to hear a sermon on Genesis 10, because we could care less that Cush was the father of a great warrior named Nimrod. So, we aren’t going to hear a sermon from every single chapter in the Bible.
With that being said, most sermons talk about the love of God. Sermons on the love of God are the most popular because that is probably one of the most important, if not the most important message in the Bible.
I say all of this because if we go back to, “If you want to grow, apply what you know.” Every one of us who has been in church maybe only two weeks could tell someone else about God’s love for us. We will get into these habits of just trying to better ourselves and understand every little thing about the Bible. What if we took a different direction of APPLYING what we have found in God’s scripture and going out and making disciples? The relationships all around us of people who don’t know God and reaching out to them is just as important as sitting here at church on a Sunday morning hearing a sermon.
Some of us have heard thousands of sermons, and I’m not saying that we need to stop having sermons on Sundays. I am saying to take what we know from all the sermons, all the lessons, all of the wisdom we have from reading scripture and take it out into the world.
“If you want to grow, APPLY what you know.”
God Bless,
Heath Clark
Youth & Family Minister
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