first seminary post

For seminary I am asked to participate in weekly online discussions responding to a particular question and the answers offered by my online classmates. Here is my very first response (actually responding to a several responses) to the question: "What do you believe is the greatest obstacle to effective Bible Study?"

disclaimer: I talk about western Christianity because it was a distinction raised on the first post.

here is my eventual response:
"I want to continue with [my classmate's] comment on "thinking that it is important." While this is imperatively true--we must see the Bible as important--I believe that "western Christianity" can also be challenged for living too much for/in thought. As pastors/teachers we try to persuade minds and may at times even succeed, but there must be more than mind alteration for heart-thumping, page-turning Bible study. It is important to remember that even the inspiring and immortalized preaching of Paul put people to sleep sometimes (Acts 20:9). There is a need for the people to be awakened afresh by the Holy Spirit and inflamed with love for God. People will never move beyond seeing the Bible as a self-help book or at best divine philosophies unless they become lovers of God and from that love seek to do what he commands. This does not discount the usefulness of Biblical teaching. This love can be cultivated and watered. Teachers who cherish all the true details of God's word and breath them out onto their hearers, just as the word of God actually is--His very breath. So this goes beyond the "lack of interest" that as Mark first discussed. Someone could say the same thing about why their wife does not enjoy the Super Bowl. It is an issue of being Spiritually asleep, and I think this frustrates the "western Church" because we would like to treat it purely as an academic issue. We are not desperate enough to cry unto God like Rachel to Jacob (echoed later by John Knox), "Give me children, or else I die" (Gen. 30:1), yet we expect the birth of scripture-loving spiritual children."

There it is. Do I believe all that. Yes. I affirm it to my classmates and to any questioner, but what is the practice of that in my life. Do I live with that weeping unction? Give me children! I believe that is the heart of God. How do I share that heart? And I am talking about more than a polemic seminary answer. How many of us know the answers? True things about God and man and heaven and hell and forevermore. God want my heart not just my two cents.

So here is my question: what does a man/woman of true and godly conviction look like?