Saturday, March 5th, 2016.
You are learning grace doctrine. Great!
You are zealous about growing in grace and in Christ. Wonderful!
You are asking, “Can we have more teaching on personal application?”
Houston, we have a problem.
Grace doctrine should be applied to your personal life, but it is not the job of the preacher to tell you what to do in all the personal details of your life. It’s yours!
Perhaps you are so accustomed to pastors telling you exactly what to do from the pulpit, that when you hear doctrinal grace preaching you think, “where is part where he tells me exactly what to do?”
You are not under the law, and what may be right application for one person in one situation might be irrelevant or wrong for another.
The Lord gives you the liberty to make these decisions in your life! You are not under the power of any.
But decisions are not made in a vacuum. Liberty requires responsibility to make informed decisions.
The job of preaching and teaching is to create informed saints, equipped workmen, responsible brothers and sisters who use the doctrine in the personal details of their life.
If you are not getting informed about Bible doctrines you cannot make the choices needed for personal application. Instead, your decisions will be misinformed, or you will require someone to just “tell me what to do.”
If you need help with personal application, you should consult someone who knows you personally and knows right doctrine.
I don’t know many people well enough to give them unsolicited personal advice, and never through the pulpit.
This is why we need more grace churches who minister to one other by example, conversation, and application. This is ministry that goes on before and after the recorded lessons. This may be what you are missing.
For His glory,
Justin “between the meetings” Johnson