Oh, Yeah, the Bible!
I just received a 15% Coupon from Barnes & Noble in my e-mail. I can’t wait to go down and purchase something. Together with my Membership Card I’ll get 25% off! I love to buy a new book on discount as much as I love to find gasoline for under $3.90 a gallon. I came home the other day and there was a box from Amazon sitting on my front step and I almost tingled in anticipation as I opened it (“and what to my wondering eyes should appear?!”) taking out all those lovely, new books I was taking to Vancouver for my study week. I love books! I even love the way they smell. I still have a Day Timer rather than a Blackberry because writing on paper with an ink pen is aesthetically pleasing to me.
Most of my books help me understand how to follow Jesus in this world. They either help me understand following better, or help me understand Jesus better, or help me understand the world better. They are tools that I use to help me. They also bring me great pleasure; I love to read.
But an addict can never be too careful about his addictions. It is easy for me to forget that these are tools, that they are secondary; that they are aids to my understanding. When I have a coupon to Barnes & Nobles in my pocket, it is easy for me to forget that there is one book that should command my attention all the time, one book that relativizes all the others. John Wesley is famous for saying, “I am a man of but one book.”
Oh yeah, the Bible!
This is the book that is called the Word of Life. This is the book that is “living and active”. This is the one book that is called the Bread of Life: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” This book is so closely tied to Jesus that both of them are called the Word of God.
Amity Bible has a new press now that can print 12 million bibles a year - in Chinese! - but even 23 bibles a minute does not keep up with the demand. Amity has over 55,000 distribution sites in China, delivering bibles to some churches that baptize over a 1,000 new Christians a year. They don’t hunger for Danielle Steel, or Nora Roberts or James Patterson’s latest thriller. They want the Word of Life.
Oh yeah, the Bible!
God still speaks to us today. And you don’t need to be a mystic or a seminary graduate to hear Him. “Speak Lord, for your servant his listening.”(I Sam. 3:9). That’s all we have to do. Sit down, take up the Bible and read. When we listen, God speaks to us, through His Word. God still speaks to us today. Do you want to hear His voice? Take up a bible, go off by yourself, sit down, open it up and begin reading. “Oh, how I love your Word. I meditate on it all day long…your commands make me wiser than my enemies..I have more insight than all my teachers…I have kept my feet from every evil path so that I might obey your word.” – Ps. 119:97-101.
Does it matter where you start? No, but I suggest you start with one of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Read for fifteen or twenty minutes, mark your place and continue from that place the next day. Read all the way through one book like this. Have a pad of paper and a pen handy because you will want to write down things that seem to capture your attention. Read it out loud if possible. “My ears You have opened.”- Ps. 40:6 “Ears you have dug for me” is one translation! God wants us to hear His word, not just see it.
Does it matter what translation you read? No, but I would suggest a good study bible, like the NIV or the ESV. They are both careful translations that are nevertheless contemporary and fluid in their use of the English language. Many study aids are also linked to these two.
In time you may begin to collect a whole bunch of questions on your pad of paper and want to explore some study aids to help find answers to those questions. There are plenty of good ones resources. Start with Fee and Stuart’s “How To Read The Bible For All Its Worth” and “The New Bible Dictionary”(IVP). You can progress from these to commentaries and other, more technical resources.
Does this feel intimidating? Does it feel like this One who promised to give us rest constantly overloads us with more to do? Answer: Jesus is not the one who is overloading our lives with too many things to do! If we can find time for a two hour movie (more than once a week!), we can find time to read the Word of God.
Summer Reading they’re called, beach books; page-turners. Barnes & Noble confronts you when you walk in the door with tables full of books you will love to devour: mysteries, thrillers and romance novels that are written so well we can’t turn the light off and go to sleep at night. I heard people brag about how fast they read the final installment of Harry Potter last summer. My nephew held some kind of record, reading J.K. Rawlings 759 pages in less than 24 hours!
I’m sorry, but the Bible will never be that attractive to us. I wish it were. There have been times when I couldn’t put it down, and I have known new Christians who would read it for hours on end, but overall, Bible reading is a discipline, and like all other disciplines that keep us healthy, it has to be developed with perseverance, maintained with diligence and guarded with alertness against all those other books that tend to eclipse it. A little, coupon can be a very subversive thing, can’t it?!
Do you remember what God told Joshua?
“Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.” – Joshua 1:8
Do you remember what Paul told the Colossians?
“Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly” – Col. 3:16
Oh yeah, the Bible!
