Imagine you’re walking into a Sunday service at any church in your town.
After the welcome and announcements, you’re invited up to the stage where you offer a question. “Who here has ever read the Bible? Not the whole thing but just any bit of it?" Most hands in the room go up.
"Ok," you continue, "keep your hand raised if you read the Bible regularly. At least a few times a week." Some hands may drop off but a decent majority remain.
"Alright, what about this....how many of you feel like your reading of Scripture changes you and brings you into an encounter with Jesus?" Slowly but surely, hands start to drop with a small minority remaining.
You nod your head, it’s exactly as expected.
What’s wrong with reading the Bible
Well, nothing.
Reading is great but becomes a problem when it’s the sole purpose we pick up the pages of Scripture.
At its' core, reading is a person sitting before words on a page, darting from letter to letter. We hop on the linguistic ride, following the path made by verbs, adjectives, and prepositional phrases. Treating the Bible like a roller coaster, we read hoping to get a quick thrill, a cheap shot of inspiration.
This is great at an amusement park but damaging when applied to Scripture.
Reading is meant to be the beginning of an encounter, a means to an end.
Unfortunately when we make reading the goal of our time in the Bible, it easily slips into an impersonal act. It becomes the end goal instead of the beginning.
Move from reading to listening
I think we need less reading and more listening.
We need to let the action of reading bring us to the interaction of listening.
When we listen we're involved in an interpersonal encounter. Two created beings locked in on one another. Open to the others wants, needs, hopes, acts, opinions, and personality. Listening is an act of entering into the reality of another. It's a posture of openness and love.
When we come to the Bible, this is what's required of us.
We don’t need just an open ear to read, we need open ears. Ears to listen for Jesus speaking to us through his word. Ears which bring us into healing, forgiveness, and the inner life of our Triune God.
So read the Bible but don’t stop there.
The next time you read the Bible, let your reading go from your eyes to your ears. Ears which are open to the Holy Spirit and the words that bring us from death to life as we listen to Jesus speak to us anew.
One Book I’m Reading: Working the Angles
So much of pastoral ministry dissolves into “management.” But that’s not what the work of the pastorate primarily is. In this book Eugene Peterson calls pastors back to their primary work of Praying, Immersing themselves in Scripture, and offering Spiritual Direction.
Here’s two quotes.
Prayer means that we deal first with God and then with the world. Or, that we experience the world first not as a problem to be solved but as a reality in which God is acting.
There is a large, leisurely center to existence where God must be deeply pondered, lovingly believed. This demand is not for prayer-on-the-run or for prayer-on-request. It means entering realms of spirit where wonder and adoration have space to develop, where play and delight have time to flourish.
One Thing I Love: This Interview👇
Listen to the whole thing. The. Whole. Thing. You won’t regret it.