In the last Passion Points I recommended a post on irritability. As I was first reading the post, I was irritable. It had been a long day. My family wanted to go for a walk. I wanted to crash. I was irritable. As I read, I recognized the obvious immediate application, but resisted. I was being a hearer and not a doer.
Of course, James calls us to “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22). Hearing or reading is not enough. We must respond. We must apply. We must obey. We must do what the Word says.
As we spend personal time in the Word, we must seek to respond to what God is saying to us. As we hear a sermon, we must strive to apply the message to our lives. But what about when we read blogs?
The danger it seems to me is that we can surf through numerous posts at one sitting, taking in the Biblical teaching but never responding to any of it. That is what happened as I read the post on irritability. And I have caught myself surfing blogs looking for posts to feature in Passion Points but never grappling with the manifold teachings myself.
The nature of a blog is that posts tend to be short (or no one will read them). And the nature of the web is that people tend to surf. Rapidly taking in numerous posts simply doesn’t encourage response. There is simply too much information to really process. And so we read but never apply; we hear but never do.
And this may be a deeper problem than just reading blogs. I wonder if the way we read blogs affects the way we read Scripture and hear sermons. Are we learning from our blog reading not to respond, and then taking that learned failure to our Bible reading and sermon listening?
These are serious issues. We dare not ignore God when he speaks to us. So I encourage you to examine yourself. Do you surf blogs without ever grappling with and applying the Biblical teachings? If you are like me, what might we do? Two suggestions that I want to apply to my life:
- As we read numerous posts, let’s look for one post that we can wrestle with and seek to apply to our lives.
- If we come to a post in which God seems to be really speaking to us, let’s just stop surfing (even if you haven’t come to my blog yet!) and just camp on that post – pondering and responding as God would lead.
Let’s strive to not only be hearers but doers also!
A Holy Ambition is a collection of sermons by John Piper (and one article by David Mathis) on the topic of missions. After a sermon and the article introducing missions, the book is divided into three parts: a Biblical theology of gospel-centered missions, the mandate of world missions, and the costs and blessings of mission. It closes with a final sermon, plus two appendices: one arguing against prosperity preaching and the other declaring 14 driving convictions behind missions. 
Brian J. Mikul 