"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work."
So yesterday my small group leader Michael and I took Michael the homeless man (too many Michaels... I need to start using nicknames. From now on, small group leader Michael will be Paul and Michael the homeless man will be Peter. I know that's not much of an improvement for some people, but it'll have to do for now) and his wife Melinda (we thought she said her name was Kayla, but apparently not because she corrected us yesterday) to church with us at Watkinsville First Baptist. We only stayed for the college Bible study, but what we were there for was great! At least, I thought so.
See, Peter and Melinda (this is going to be weird... haha), along with their fierce advocacy of the book of James (faith without deeds is dead), are very much caught up in the book of Revelation and the signs of the end times that are popping up all around us. They are convinced that all the natural disasters occurring—the tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and north Georgia, the earthquake/tsunami in Japan, Hurricane Katrina, etc.—are signs that the time of the Tribulation (the seven years before Judgment Day) is no more than a month away, and that the Tribulation will begin when Obama the Antichrist issues a law that all currency world-wide is to be done away with and replaced with a mark, like a barcode, on each person's right hand (the mark of the beast). (While the part about the mark acting as the new currency is completely possible, I doubt that Obama will be the one to enact that law, especially not in the next month. But we'll just have to wait and see. If it does happen, consider this your warning: DON'T GET THE MARK.) Anyway, because Peter and Melinda are so focused on other things about the Bible, they didn't get as much out of the study of Mark 11 as they could have. But that's not the point of this post. End side note.
After leaving church, Paul and I took Peter and Melinda to Five Guys for lunch downtown again. And while we were there, we had a few... disagreements. Well, not really disagreements/arguments so much as someone calling someone else out for something. The night we first met Peter and Melinda, Peter expressed a slightly faulty understanding of purity: while he understood that purity involves abstinence from premarital sex, he left out Jesus' statement that "anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:28). So while I was ordering my food after Paul had bought Peter and Melinda's lunch, Paul had a talk with them about purity. Although I wasn't there to listen in, Paul said that they seemed to open up to hear his views on purity, and they seemed to accept the correction as being God's truth, which is great because they're very close-minded about a lot of things (the certainty that the Apocalypse is a month away and the idea that smoking tobacco isn't wrong (which I'm not saying it is) because it isn't any more harmful than gasoline fumes, for example). So praise God for that!
But then Peter called me out for something. I fully deserved it, but it came across as a harsh accusation. Peter asked us what a certain passage said (he knew what it said, but he wanted us to see for ourselves), so Paul looked it up. As he was looking for the page, I complimented Peter, saying (not verbatim), "I'm really impressed by how easily you can rattle off Scripture references. I can quote verses, but I'm not great with knowing exactly where the verses come from." (Peter and Melinda are both surprisingly good at making references to specific chapters when they're talking about a certain topic.) Peter caught me off guard when he replied, "Of course not! It's because your mind is on this world. You get too caught up in your studying" (I laughed inside; I do my work, but if there's anything I don't get caught up in, it's studying) "instead of spending time in the Word. Me, on the other hand—I don't have anything to focus on except God's Word." (This was similar to something Peter said earlier while we were at church, that Paul and I, compared to Peter and Melinda, are materialistic people. While I do agree that we're slightly more materialistic than they are because we have more than they do, I wouldn't say that that makes them innocent of materialism. After all, the majority of Peter's lecture last Wednesday was on the fact that he needs "a place," which he can't get without money, which he can't get without a job. But again, that's beside the point. Maybe I'm still a little bitter about his accusation. God, forgive me.)
After I got past the sudden urge to defend myself and retaliate, I realized that he was right... to an extent. Studying school material is a chore for me; although I enjoy learning and making music, practicing/studying is, as for most people, a tedious task. But that doesn't mean that my grades are unimportant to me. As far as my inattentive, restless mind (undiagnosed ADD, maybe?) will let me, I try to get the best grades possible. And because classes, schoolwork, organized activities (band, Freshley/Wesley, Team United), and my own poor time management take up so much time, the first thing that gets crowded out of my schedule is my time alone with God, my quiet time studying the Bible. And that needs to change. A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that during SPAM, my time spent reading the Bible decreased rather than increased, and that, in my situation at that point, that was necessary. But now I've been convicted by God. I have a Bible for a reason, and it's so that I would read it. So even though Peter could have been more considerate in how he put it, I'm thankful that he said it because God used him to say, "Michael, I wrote you a letter. Why haven't you read it yet? Am I not the most important Person in your life? Then act like it!"
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