(Preached 4-26-15, Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church, Morganton, NC)
For years before his death in 2013, Pat Summerall broadcast NFL games and other sporting events on television. Many of you would recognize his voice to this day. Some of you also know that Summerall’s life had been devastated by many years by alcohol. At one point, later in life, he checked into the Betty Ford clinic, but he said what really turned his life around was that while he was in there, he picked up a copy of the word of God, the Bible. He read it every day. And he said the more he read, the more wanted, and soon his thirst for alcohol was replaced by a thirst for the word of God. When he got out of the clinic, he was baptized as a follower of Jesus Christ, and his life was never the same. The word of God had changed his life.
This kind of hunger for the word is what is described in our passage for this morning, I Peter 2:1-3, where the Bible says:
“Therefore, putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.”
We are continuing this morning the study, “The Disciplines of Disciples.” We saw last week that God commands us as followers of Jesus Christ to “discipline (ourselves) for the purpose of godliness.” Just as it takes discipline to practice for a good band performance, and discipline to exercise, it takes some discipline to live a successful Christian life. It is not going to just “happen”; you have to learn to exercise some disciplines.
This morning we are going to look at the first, and arguably the most important of those “Disciplines for Disciples” — the discipline of the word. Our focus is going to be on :2, where God commands us through Peter, “Long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.”
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