"Please open your Bibles to..."

That's a common refrain at the beginning of my messages. So I thought I might want to answer one question raised by a guest on their First Impressions response card.

I’ve attended twice and I may be old-fashioned (only 35), but was only asked to open the Bible to a verse once. If I need “self-help” I can read Tony Robbins on my own time. I go to church to get instruction, wisdom, guidance, etc… from a Bible-based sermon. Was the lack of Scripture reading the exception or the norm?

In case the writer is reading this, and for anyone else new to Five Oaks, we never preach "self-help" based sermons, even on weeks where we have people turn to the Bible only once. I do prefer messages where we dig into one passage and everyone is asked to open to the passage, and that's what I tend to do. So if that's what a person is looking for, they will find that here most of the time. But we preach from biblical truth every week whether or not we are doing a full exposition of one passage or using several passages in a more topical exposition fashion.

I would add that...

• ...for centuries, including all the years covered in the Bible, their was at most only one text in the whole assembly (synagogue or church) and the teaching was still biblical.
• ...the book of Proverbs sounds very Tony Robbinish (or maybe Tony Robbin sounds very Proverbish) and the only time I haven't done a full exposition of a passage lately was when we based the entire message on a couple of verses in Proverbs.

Hope that helps.