I’ve been saying for years that you can find anything online. Any bit of information that you’ve been wondering about. Any opinion on just about any subject. Any fact to prove your point in an argument.
And it’s pretty much true. There are so many resources on the internet that it’s rightly the first place to research just about anything. But not everything is on the internet.
Just now I was reading through a paper that I wrote while in seminary. As I read it, I remembered how much fun I had while doing research for the paper. I had to really dig deep to find the most relevant sources. I had to find the most respected voices on the subject and just the right quotes from their works to use in my paper. I had to find people who agreed with my point of view and others who disagreed with me. And when I got to the end of the paper, I noticed that not one of the sources I cited was on the internet.
Now, I had no doubt used the internet to find some of the sources for my research paper. There’s no question about that. But my point is that there’s a wealth of information that can’t be found online that we’d be foolish to forget about.
I think our desire to do all our research online today isn’t because all the information is there, but rather because we’re often too lazy to dig deeper. It’s not hard to go to a library and find more authoritative sources, but often we’re just too lazy to do it.
And I think this is much like the reason we often become complacent in our faith. We know we should read the Bible for ourselves, dig deep to understand its meaning for us today, and practice what we read, but we’d rather just do what’s easy. We’d rather just turn on a radio preacher, or just go to church, or just read a verse in a devotional.
But God blesses us when we seek not to do what’s easy, but what’s good and wholesome. When we intentionally turn to His Word to learn from Him and grow in our faith. Because we might be able to grow a little just by going to church and hearing the Word there, but we will grow leaps and bounds when we give attention to what God would speak to us each day through the Bible.