Somehow (I still wonder how He did it), God pulled me out of this prideful place, and made me see that I was pushing my preferences and not God’s Word. I actually didn’t change my mind about much of what I thought, I just changed the way that I spoke and thought about it. Now, when people ask my advice, I am sure to point them to the Word. Instead of immediately jumping to how I apply God’s word, I give them the Bible, and encourage them to seek the Lord about what He says.
As a young Christian, I was always right. Its amazing how right I was about everything. I had Bible verses, and you can’t argue with the Bible. I also routinely read my Bible, and, well, let’s be honest, no one around me read their Bible. But don’t worry! Everything I did and said was verbally affirmed to be in humility. So that covered me. Like the saying goes, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But a weird thing has happened. The older I’ve gotten, the less “right” I see myself. Actually, I’ve come to see that, while I wanted to be a doer of God’s word (James 1:22), I was actually trying to get others to be doers of my preference.
My Preference
It is scary how simple it is for the devil, not to change the Bible, but to twist it (2 Peter 3:16). This was what he tried to pull over on Jesus: He word-for-word quoted Scripture, but he twisted its meaning. He twisted it at the application. And if we are not careful, we can do something similar. When we read God’s word, there are some universal applications that are directly prescribed by God. “You shall not lie, You shall not steal, etc…” But in the vast majority of Scripture, there are commands to obey and wisdom to be applied in a variety of situations that require Christians to use discernment in their obedience. Here’s where I fell into trouble.