Make the effort

Knowing Jesus and living like Jesus requires more effort on our part than just attending a weekly church service and or a weekly group session. And weekly volunteering doesn’t do it. As Jesus explains in the scripture below, that Pat Morley uses in his book, reading and learning the Bible help us to know the power of God.  

In the next section of the book Morley explains that ‘You can be transformed. God will change your life one verse at a time’. It’s all a result of reading the Bible. Find someone to help you if you need some help or guidance.

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Excerpt from the book ‘Man Alive’ by Patrick Morley

Section titled ‘What’s going on? - pages 10 - 12

Jesus gave us a picture of both the problem and the solution (to a question asked in the previous section. The question is: ‘What do men who lead powerful, transformed lives do differently than their lukewarm counterparts?) in His well-known parable of the four soils. A sower went out and scattered the seed of God’s Word on four kinds of soil: the hard path, the rocky soil, the thorny ground and the good soil.

Most men today would recognize themselves in the first three soils where the seeds don’t grow. Yet they honestly want to be like the good soil where the fourth seed fell – to be men “who truly hear and understand God’s word and produce a harvest of thirty, sixty or even a hundred times as much as had been planted” (Matthew 13:23).

What is keeping men’s lives hard, rocky and choked with thorns when so many urgently want more and when God created us for more – much more?

And, positively, what do men who lead powerful, “a hundred times” lives do differently than their mediocre counterparts? Jesus gave us an insight when He was speaking to a group of confused religious men. He said,

‘Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures, and

you don’t know the power of God.’ (Matthew 22:29)

Do you see it? Jesus made a direct connection between knowing the Bible and leading a powerful life. Lukewarm men are in error because they ‘don’t know the scriptures’ and therefore ‘don’t know the power of God’. Their capabilities don’t equal their intensions. Without the right training, their soil remains bare, stony and full of weeds. And as you’ll soon see, by ‘know the Scriptures’, Jesus was talking about a lot more than mere head knowledge.

On the other hand, transformed men ‘truly hear and understand God’s word and produce a harvest’. Digging into the Word of God is easily the number one factor that differentiates men who have tapped into God’s power.