“A visitor to the contemporary church materializing from an earlier century would probably be struck by how enormously privileged we are. We each own a Bible; if they owned a Bible it was in small print Elizabethan English. We carry entire theological libraries on our eReaders, have access to vast resources via the worldwide web; they perhaps owned one or two Christian books. And yet, if the truth be told, what might surprise the most is that their familiarity with God’s word, their knowledge of key passages in the New Testament, the degree to which they had thought long and hard about what Scripture means and how it applies, would leave us feeling ashamed. They would be surprised how hard we find meditation on the word of God, how little we actually know of it and how poorly we have nourished ourselves from it. They might marvel at the extent to which evangelical Christianity has been infected by our age of narcissism and how subjective so many Christians have become. They might notice that many modern Christians are often too interested in the development of self but little interested in the development of the their understanding of the triune God—that we are, to use Luther’s expansive Latin phrasing, incurvatus in se, turned in upon ourselves.
Scripture can deliver us from this, and heal the spiritual curvature of the spine from which we suffer and enable us to walk tall in the world for God’s glory.”
Want to know more about how Scripture can “heal the spiritual curvature of the spine?” Check out Sinclair Ferguson’s Devoted to God. (The quotation above is from pages xi–xii.)