Confidence in God's Word
As evangelicals, we believe that God's Word is inspired, inerrant and authoritative. Sometimes we refer to ourselves as 'Bible-believing Christians'. So the Bible is clearly of great importance to evangelicals.
Yet, having a high regard for God's Word is not always the same as having confidence in God's Word. Sometimes, even though we believe the Bible, we act as though we think it needs our help. And hence the plethora of methods and programmes which abound within the confines of evangelical Christianity. We become beholden to the latest fad, because it promises to work. We become pragmatists, placing our confidence in what works (or seems to work, or perhaps is marketed as if it works) rather than in how God has promised to work.
The problem here is that our trust is misplaced. Instead of trusting in God to work in His way, we can easily end up trusting in men and their man-made ways of doing God's work.
So is there a remedy to the predicament? Yes. Trust in God's Word to do its work.
Martin Luther trusted in God's Word to do its work:
'Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached and wrote God's Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything... I did nothing; I let the Word do its work.'
Like Luther, sometimes we need to do 'nothing' and just let the Word do it's work. We need to get ourselves and our programmes and methods out of the way of God's Word and trust it to do its work.
God has promised that His Word will not return to Him void (Isaiah 55:11) and that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word (Romans 10:17). He has promised that people will be saved through His Word, and that He will accomplish His purpose through His Word. So in that case, we should allow the Word to do its work. We should read the Word, preach the Word, sing the Word, learn the Word. We should have much more confidence in God's Word than in our methods.