ONE THINGSample

Today, we are going to focus on what it means to INQUIRE in His temple. The MSG paraphrase uses the term “study at His feet”. This is a pretty good explanation of what a person who has a single focus, or is chasing the ONE THING, does.

We must study.

I have often told our congregation that is it no good just accepting something because you heard it in a sermon. You need to discover the word of God for yourself. We have to be people who are willing to learn.

There are 5 key ways in which people learn:

‌Visual (watching)

‌Auditory (listening)

‌Written (taking notes, writing tasks)

‌Kinaesthetic (practical application)

‌Multimodal (quite simply, a combination of all of the above)

And I believe that the best way for us to learn or grow in our faith is through multimodal learning. There is not just one thing that is going to help improve the quality of your faith, but rather a combination of the following:

Engaging with scripture (visual)

‌Listening to teaching (auditory)

‌Worship & Prayer (written / spoken)

Faith in Action (kinaesthetic)

‌A well-rounded believer will live a life with a balance of all of these. And the more we study, the more we will gain revelation. We simply think that if we only just read the scripture, we will gain everything we need. But quite often, we can end up with a shallow faith if we do not understand what we read.

Richard Baxter says, 'It is not the work of the Spirit to tell you the meaning of Scripture and give you the knowledge of divinity, without your own study and labour, but to bless that study, and give you knowledge thereby … To reject study on the pretence of the sufficiency of the Spirit, is to reject the Scripture itself.'

We need to ask ourselves 3 key questions:

1. What are we learning?
2. Where are we learning?
3. Who is teaching us?

There are a wealth of resources available for believers to expand and grow in their faith, from online bible school to short courses, from commentaries to teaching series.

At the end of the day, it comes down to us. Do we really want to grow? If we do, we will will put in the work.