I am one of those people who feed the birds and the squirrels. If I see a bird out there in the winter I might throw some bread out.....but I spread some peanut butter on it because the white bread alone might fill their stomach but provided few if any of the nutrients that they need. In other words....bread alone may do more harm than good.
               We all are familiar with when Jesus mysteriously told Peter three times to feed His lambs and feed His sheep. We sheep....we lambs....are to be fed primarily by the preached Word of God. It is meant to be a....means of grace. It is an absolute necessity....or else we can spiritually die.
                Just by the nature of the way I spend my time....and it's been pretty much the same for over forty years now....I have become very familiar with the average preached sermon in America today....and folks it is white bread.....with an occasional spread of peanut butter on it.
                Look for yourself....visit the websites of some of the bigger churches in your area....and more likely than not you will not even find a link to the sermons....and if you do....those sermons are by and large either Bible studies....where the pastor preaches what we should be learning for ourselves....or they are therapeutic....alleviating pain and encouraging.  
                This lack of preaching does not show up in sunken facial features or bones showing through the skin....but quite the opposite actually as without the needed mortification in the sermons....we might very well spend all of our free time at Planet Fitness....building as I called it over thirty years ago....the Church of the Fit and Buff.
                The church today treats the epidermis....that protective layer of skin that has no blood vessels to provide nutrients....and ignores what is below....but it is what is below that provides the nutrients. So our sermons today address only that which appears bothersome on the surface. I'll give one example of a plethora of areas of which we constantly need self-examination....that example is this....we look at this world and we identify the evils....fair enough....but we need also to identify the evils that we have added to the situation. Yes....Trump is a cluster of evils....but we built the culture that gave us Trump. What evils lurk within us? We are blind because our spiritual eyes lack the nutrients that the preached Word provides!
                 Church attendance and personal ministries and even being generous and helping others....and even evangelizing....can be nothing but a clear skin....even a beautiful skin....protecting a diseased body....with a spiritual heart may not even be beating.
                 I'm not advising people to leave their church because they probably would not be able to find a pastor who can preach as men of the past....but I am....and always have in these posts....strongly recommended....even pleaded for....literally begged in some cases....Christians to supplement their brick and mortar churches with CDs or Internet sermons from....as I have always labelled it....preachers from the past....men like Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones and Ryle and Bunyan and Whitefield and Edwards and so many more....and Preachers today who preach like preachers from the past...men like MacArthur and Sproul and Piper and Paul Washer and Michael Horton....and so many more.....spread thinly across America.
                 These posts are littered with sermon links that you can easily go to. Please consider listening....which may include watching....one or two of these each week. If you do....you will see what the fuss had always been about concerning the weak preaching age that we live in.