Thursday, October 29, 2015

Bible Buffet

"Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, "This is a hard saying; who can understand it?"
From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more."
John 6:60, 66 (NKJV)

There are many different types of restaurants.  Some specialize in a certain type of food, some are only for people who want to come in and sit down to eat, and some restaurants are manly for customers who want to order food and take it with them.  Some restaurants have complete meals that you can order while others offer a buffet where you can choose different foods to eat and take what you like and leave what you don't want.  Unfortunately some Christians also have this kind of view of the Bible and the truth they like to listen to; however, there is no such thing as a Bible buffet.

One day while Jesus was teaching in the city of Capernaum He said some things that seemed to offend some people.  They said, "This is a hard saying; who can understand it" or in other words, this is something that is hard to hear, who can listen to teaching like this?  What Jesus said was not well received and the result was that many of His disciples, the people who had been following Him and listening to Him, would no longer follow Him.  These people were guilty of the Bible buffet mentality.  There were some things they liked to hear and when they heard something they did not like they turned away.

God has given us His Word as a guideline for our lives.  But, we cannot just pick and choose the things in the Bible that we want to focus on and hear about while neglecting other parts.  We like to hear about benefits and blessings but not so much about how we need to walk in love, to serve others, to give, or to grow up spiritually, just to name a few things.  Sometimes we can be just like these disciples in John 6 and turn away from the things we don't want to hear.  We all need to be the type of Christians who know the whole Word of God and not just try to live on a Bible buffet.

No comments: