Living Doctrine

06 July 2025

written by Senior Pastor John Macindoe

Some Sunday School students seem to have the answer to every question even before it’s asked. Tell them a Bible story and they tell you they already know it. Retell the story and they proceed to inform you of all the really important bits you left out. 

We might laugh but forget that these children grow up and often become people like us. It is so easy to fill our head up with Bible knowledge and think we have it all together. We can delight in the cleverness of our well thought out theological positions and yet barely know the Living God.

A.W Tozer writes, ‘There is scarcely anything so dull and meaningless as Bible doctrine taught for its own sake. Truth divorced from life is not truth in its Biblical sense, but something else and something less… No man is better for knowing that God in the beginning created the heaven and the earth. The devil knows that, and so did Ahab and Judas Iscariot. No man is better for knowing that God so loved the world of men that He gave His only begotten Son to die for their redemption. In hell there are millions who know that. Theological truth is useless until it is obeyed. The purpose behind all doctrine is to secure moral action’.

Hearing God’s Word, thinking about it, and debating theological truth all have their place but only for people who nurture a living faith. We must allow God’s truth to impact our hearts and spur us on to be those who do what God says.