by Pastor Lem Niere
“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” James 1:22.
Do you ever get bored with church or with your spiritual life? My was I surprised when I heard a kid in church say, “I’m bored.” One thing we need to remember is that God cannot withstand boredom in His presence!
There is one primary reason why people get spiritually bored. It’s very simple: knowledge without application eventually becomes boring and unfulfilling—every time. If all you do is sit and listen, listen, and listen to the Word without ever taking steps to apply it to your life, you’ll soon reach a place where you’ve heard, heard, and heard so much of the Word that you are sick of hearing it! Instead of anticipating what you might receive from the Lord, you’ll think, Oh, no, another sermon!
The problem isn’t the Word! God’s Word was meant to be acted out. So if you just sit and listen to more and more sermons, gathering more and more information but never acting on what you’ve heard, you’ll eventually become so oversaturated that you won’t want to hear any more!
We become bored because we’re not doing the Word that we’ve heard preached. If you will simply do what you have already been told to do, you won’t have time to be bored! Applying the Word you already know will necessitate that you have a serious prayer life.
It will require great discipline; it will demand that you learn to crucify your flesh. In fact, walking in the kind of obedience that God expects will take every ounce of your focus. You’ll be so busy trying to obey what you’ve already heard preached that you’ll never have a moment to be bored!
This is why James 1:22 tells us “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” The word “hearers only” in Greek is akroates, which was used in classical Greek times to describe people who audited a class rather than taking it for credit. In other words, these people didn’t attend the class to receive credit for the course. They were simply there to hear the lecture, think about what was taught, and then later discuss it with friends. But they had no intention of actually applying what they heard!
In addition to being intellectually stimulating, these lectures could be quite entertaining. So, these “hearers only” would roam from meeting to meeting because they loved special speakers and the excitement of hearing something they hadn’t heard before. Sometimes they followed their favorite speakers from city to city (or from church to church). Bored? Don’t let this happen to you. If you determine to obey every scriptural truth that’s ever been preached to you, you’ll never have time to become spiritually bored again!
