Utmost 12/15 pt. 2
Always make it a practice to stir your own mind thoroughly to think through what you have easily believed. Your position is not really yours until you make it yours through suffering and study. The author or speaker from whom you learn the most is not the one who teaches you something you didn’t know before, but the one who helps you take a truth with which you have quietly struggled, give it expression, and speak it clearly and boldly.
Do you struggle through some of the difficult realities presented by the Bible?
Election? Predestination? Sin? Suffering? Jesus' death? Baptism? Communion? Grace? Women in ministry? Marriage? Divorce? Excommunication?
These are difficult and easy to pervert without the Holy Spirit, humility and study.
You can defer to your denominations' codified beliefs on these topics, but unless you think and study and read the Bible for yourself and ask the Holy Spirit to give light to your mind, you will not own these in a personal sense. You will not hold these convictions. You will parrot other's convictions.
This does not mean you have to be intellectually elite or a thinker on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory to be a real or deep Christian.
It does mean that whatever your capacity you will have to think through these if you want to hold them deeply.
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