About the Bible and Fighting the Good Fight
The Bible is a book written from the hands of faith to encourage faith in others. We learn through these scriptures that the spirit of God is a Jesus shaped spirit, and that those scriptures are given for our consumption and digestion as bread for our life’s journey.
Recorded in the gospels, there is a story about the feeding of the five thousand. It is a wonderful image of how Christ was shaping the early church through the pattern of the breaking of bread. In that story we hear that Christ took the bread, broke it, blessed it, and gave it to the crowds for their nourishment. Often his disciples helped to distribute the bread and then he taught. Sounds a lot like a worship service at Heaton today. By gathering around the Lord’s table every Sunday we continue to break bread and feed on the teachings of Christ in the expectant hope that God will satisfy our spiritual hunger.
God’s word then is food for our hungry souls, to be given thanks for and to be appreciated, not to be exploited for the purpose of some theological food fight. We need to disabuse ourselves of any bad table manners within Christ’s church that use the bread of life in any violent or vicious manner to dehumanize or demoralize any of God’s children. The most appropriate response to the gift of God’s word is to give thanks for what we have received, because it enables us to fight the good fight of faith.
