How Are You Planning To Read The Bible? (2)

 

 

Before the Iron Curtain fell, people risked their lives smuggling Bibles to the people living behind its dark veil of repression. There are still nations that prohibit the free and open distribution of Bibles, and there are still people risking their lives so that others may have the Word of God. What would we think, how would we feel, if the Bible were to be suddenly outlawed in the United States?

 

Yet, which is worse, to be prohibited from reading the Bible, or to have Bibles readily accessible that we don’t read? If Bibles were prohibited, we just might wonder what is in them, we just might desire to read the Bible; as it is, most of us sense no compelling need to actually know the Bible – and I’m writing about professing Christians, I’m writing about folks who attend church with some frequency. Even though we have Bibles, we mostly know the Bible (or think we do) not through reading and meditating on it ourselves, or in relationship with others, but we know it second-hand – through what others write and speak, we tend to know the Bible vicariously through others without the Bible being an active and necessary and critical part of our own lives on a daily basis.

 

Put another way, are we examples of Psalm 1:1 – 2?

 

“How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers! But his delight is in the law of Yahweh, and in His law he mediates day and night.”

 

Do we delight in the Word of God and do we meditate in it day and night?

 

It is said that it takes about 10,000 hours for a person to become really good at a job, a vocation; based on a 40-hour week, that is 5 years, 5 years to really understand what you are doing and why you are doing it, 5 years to develop understanding and perspective. It takes time for things we do and learn to “come together” so that the sum is greater than the parts – and that is when we really begin to grow and learn exponentially, that is when we can really begin to help others, that is when our learning accelerates because we can “see” things that we couldn’t see before. That is when things become alive and exciting in ways we didn’t think possible.

 

Are we investing our time and attention in reading the Bible? Are we doing this in such a way that over the course of years it has become, or will become, woven into the fabric of who we are? The only way to know the Bible is to read the Bible…but the challenges to do so are many.

 

For one thing, we are addicted to outside stimuli – we need to hear noise and we need to see things moving, we have short attention spans of just a few seconds. How many times do we look at our phones, even when we are with others…others who should have our attention? We say we are “multitasking,” when multitasking is, by and large, an activity that produces poor results – we think we are smart when we are really becoming more stupid.

 

We waste time by watching video that is often (usually?) trash, and I mean trash. Professing Christians submit themselves to watching sex and violence and other content which destroys the image of God within mankind – within them – and foolishly think they can do this with impunity. Others are addicted to so-called “news” channels which they allow to form their souls – often with vitriol and hatred and sarcasm and with false promises of political and economic and social salvation. Dear friends, I don’t care if a news channel is 100% true, which it is not, it still isn’t the Word of God, it is not Jesus Christ – we are citizens of heaven, not of earth, why are we selling our birthright for a bowl of stew?

 

Then we have the myth that if we have short attention spans it is because we have a diagnosis that indicates that a short attention span is beyond our control. In fact, it seems that there is now a diagnosis for every problem we have, every difficultly in learning or growing or understanding. The social scientists are now our priests and we dare not question our priests – especially when they provide us with excuses and absolution.

 

Yet, for years studies have shown the detrimental effects of electronic addiction on the brains of young people – but we must ignore them, for if we don’t we’ll have to make changes, and if we don’t ignore them it will affect our marketing and economy, and if we don’t ignore these studies then parents will have to be parents and educators will have to be educators and the church will have to be the church…and adults will have to be role models.

 

Do we see the contradictory stupidity in all of this? On the one hand we have studies showing the harm of electronic addiction, on the other hand the harm is diagnosed as an innate disability. We are in a downward spiral that has no apparent bottom.

 

Then we have the “tyranny of the urgent,” which I think is related to our attention spans. Everything is urgent so we don’t have time or attention for anything, our goal is to “check the box” so we can move on to the next box to check. We “need” to respond to every text, every phone call, every email, without delay – we have no peace because we choose to have no peace.

 

Dear friends, if our lives are to be lives of worshipping the True and Living God, and we are slaves to the immediate, to the world – system in which we live, to electronic mania (which years ago a friend styled “electronic cocaine”), then we are not living lives of worshipping God, we are not presenting ourselves to God as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1 – 2).

It also strikes me that there is little, if no, expectation on the part of pastors that elders, deacons, and congregations know and learn the Bible, and know what it is to meet and commune with Christ in the Word. There is likewise, no expectation on the part of congregations that its elders and deacons know the Bible…really know the Bible…after all…isn’t that what the “professionals” are for?

 

However, we can be encouraged, for our heavenly Father and Lord Jesus deeply desire to reveal themselves to us through the Word of God and the Holy Spirit is here to help us. We’ll ponder this in our next reflection.

 

How Are You Planning To Read the Bible in 2023? (1)

  

May I please ask, “How are you planning to read the Bible this coming year?”

 

I suppose I should also ask: “How has your Bible reading been this year? Have you enjoyed it? What have you seen? What has the Bible meant to you? How has Jesus revealed Himself to you through His Word? How have you been challenged? What have you valued about the Bible this past year?”

 

What other questions might we ask?

 

I am not big on New Year’s resolutions, but I am big on planning. Of course, planning is like a gameplan in football, it is subject to change, for isn’t that life? Yet, some things ought not to be subject to change, such as faithfulness to our spouse, love for our neighbor, devotion to God, telling the truth, and consistent meditation and learning and assimilation of Scripture – the Bible, God’s Holy Word…and by God’s grace learning to obey what we read.

 

I’ve been reading the Bible for almost 57 years, as I write these words it is almost too much to believe. Sometimes I have misread the Bible, often I have tried to make the Bible say what I want it to say, many times I have disobeyed the Bible, the worst times have been when I thought I was an exception to what I was reading…that was, and always will be, stupid and dangerous and close to demonic…if not demonic.

 

We ought not to think that knowing the Bible, knowing the “data” of the Bible, knowing the Bible as information, is the same as knowing Jesus Christ or the same as spiritual maturity; after all, it was the religious leaders who persecuted Jesus Christ and pressured Pilate to crucify Him. Let’s recall what Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me” (John 5:39). We can most certainly know the Bible and not know Jesus, we can know the Bible and not know God.

 

And yet, the resurrected Jesus Christ reveals Himself through the Bible (Luke 24:27, 44 – 45), and it is through the promises of God, the Word of God, that we become “partakers of the Divine Nature” (2 Peter 1:2 – 4).

 

After all these years of pondering and meditating in the Scriptures, I see more of Jesus Christ than ever before, and I see more mystery than ever before. You might say that there are more things I know and also more things I don’t know…and frankly some of the things I know are pretty painful, for the Holy Spirit opens my eyes to see myself, whether the self of the past or the self of the present, in some pretty selfish and heartbreaking ways. I do not think He could do this were it not for the fact that He assures me of God’s love and care for me (Romans 8:31 – 39), the glory and mercy and assurance of Christ’s forgiveness in my life (Romans 4:1 – 5:11), and of the reality of Christ in me and me in Christ (Colossians 1:25 – 28; 2:9 – 10; 1 John 3:1 – 3).

 

Reading books about the Bible is not the same as reading the Bible. Reading devotional books, such as Our Daily Bread, The Upper Room, My Utmost for His Highest, is not the same as reading the Bible. Devotional books have their place, I have read My Utmost for His Highest many times, as well as other devotional books, but they are not the Bible.

 

And while we may have different gameplans for reading the Bible during the year (I’ll touch on Bible-reading plans), one thing should be common to them all – we should read the Bible as it was written, first as individual books and then as a whole. This means that we should not read a passage in Exodus and then a passage in Matthew today, and a passage in Nehemiah and a passage in Titus tomorrow, and then the third day read a passage in Revelation and a passage in Malachi, etc. That is, we should not read the Bible piecemeal because if we do we will not develop an integrated picture of either the Biblical books nor of the Bible as a whole – and let’s recall, that the Bible portrays Jesus Christ, it communicates the Gospel from Genesis to Revelation…do we really want to miss and misinterpret what God is saying to us?

 

Imagine what it would be like to have sixty-six movie DVDs in your home; one day you watch five minutes of DVD 1 and five minutes of DVD 53. The next day you watch five minutes of DVD 48 and five minutes of DVD 27. The third day you watch five minutes of DVD 14 and five minutes of DVD 19, etc. At the end of the year what will you be able to tell someone about the sixty-six movies? Will you be able to share the storyline of each movie? Will you be able to share memorable quotes? High points? Low points? Lessons to be learned? How well do you think you will really know the movies?

 

I am making a big deal of this because, when we do read the Bible, we tend to read it piecemeal. We do this because of our nanosecond culture, which has invaded our Bible teaching and study, and which has also reduced our attention spans to less than that of a goldfish – which I am told is 20 seconds. I’ll come back to this.

 

In the meantime, what are your answers to the questions with which we began this reflection?

 

To be continued…

Pondering First Peter (4)

 

“To those who reside as aliens…according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with His blood: May grace and peace be yours in the fullest measure.” (1 Peter 1:1 – 2; NASB).

 

What do you see about God in this passage? What do you see about God’s work in your life?

 

As we touched on previously, those who belong to Jesus Christ are aliens, we belong to the City of God, not the City of Man. It is because the world-system is opposed to the Kingdom of God that John warns us “not to love the world nor the things of the world” (1 John 2:15 – 17). Now we don’t much care to read this warning because most of us have been raised to be consumers, to desire things, pursue things, accumulate things. We have also been raised to value position and influence, to esteem what others think about us, to value the praise of mankind more than the praise of God. We are also taught to value the experiences that this world can give us more than the experience of knowing God, of loving and serving others, and of learning the depths of His love and grace.

 

As a practical matter we often go “undercover,” blending into our social environments so that we look and act and speak like everyone else, rather than aliens whose citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20). How many times have I seen an unashamed follower of Jesus Christ come into a workplace, sharing his or her faith as a natural part of life, and before long other people who have been in that workplace for years begin saying, “O, I’m a Christian too.” Well now, while better late than never, I want to ask, “Where have you been all this time?” I don’t ask this question harshly, I ask it to get us to think about why most of us live incognito, why we don’t live as citizens of heaven? There is something fundamentally amiss when so many of us do not live lives of witness at work, at school, and in our communities. It is not so much that there is something amiss with us as individuals, it is that there is something amiss with us as a people, as congregations.

 

Here are some observations:

 

Perhaps if we shared our faith with one another within our congregations, and with other followers of Christ outside our congregations, as our way of life, then it would be more likely that we would share our faith, in words and deeds, with those who don’t know Jesus yet; it is more likely that we would be who we are in Christ at work, in our communities, in school, at recreation…indeed in all facets of life. But the reality is that we have little opportunity to share with one another within our congregations. We meet for an hour or two for a “service” once a week, we may or may not attend a “class” on Sunday (which seldom has opportunity for personal contribution and is often driven by dumbed-down curricula, and which typically has no expectation that its participants actually engage the Bible as a way of life). We may even participate in a small group, or home group, during the week, but again, that is often driven artificially by poor curricula and offers little opportunity for organic relationship with one another.

 

How often do you share Biblical insights with other professing Christians? I am not asking you how often you talk about “church” with other Christians, though that may be a good question too, I am asking you how often you share with other believers insights you are gaining as you ponder the Scriptures and as Jesus Christ reveals Himself to you through His Word? How often do you talk about the Person of Jesus Christ with your brothers and sisters in Christ? How often do you pray with your brothers and sisters in Christ?

 

If this is not our Way of life, why isn’t it?

 

If we are not sharing Jesus Christ within the People of God, is it little wonder that we seldom share Jesus Christ outside the People of God? We don’t need yet another DVD series or a book about sharing Jesus, we need healthy congregations who are truly functioning as relational local bodies, bodies in which all of the members are participating and growing and loving and giving.

 

Another question I have for us is, “If a brother or sister within our congregation were to lose his or her job because of witnessing for Christ, whether by word or deed, would our congregation support and help that person, including economically?”

 

If the answer is “no,” then why are we wasting our time living in such hypocrisy? Why are we calling ourselves Christians if we are not prepared to lay down our lives, including our money, for one another? Certainly we can find something more profitable to do on Sundays, perhaps work in a food pantry, feed the hungry, assist in an animal shelter, or help with the environment.

 

I wonder how many times a Christian fails to witness at work, whether by word or deed or both, because he knows that if he loses his job, neither he nor his family will find support within his church “family”? Also, when I speak of “witness” I am including those times when we are confronted with the choice of telling the truth or not, of engaging in deceptive practices or not, of treating others fairly or not; I am not referring exclusively to verbally sharing the Gospel – let me assure you, the world and its workplace and its political and educational systems are corrupt to the point where we have ample opportunity to witness by our words and actions as those who are citizens of heaven – we don’t need to hand out literature, we are to be the literature that others read.

 

We can have confidence is sharing Jesus Christ with others because we are in a secure relationship with Him, a relationship that God initiated, that God is preserving, and that God is perfecting. We have been chosen by God the Father, by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, our sins have been forgiven us through the blood of Jesus Christ, and by God’s grace we are being taught to obey our Lord Jesus.

 

Jesus Christ gave His all for us, ought not we to give our all for Him?

Psalm 23

 

Below are two emails I sent to a friend who preached on Psalm 23 this past Sunday. He sent me the text of his message and there was a quote in it that I wanted to explore with him.

 

Good morning…,

 

Of course I don't know the context of the quote you used, so acknowledging that:

 

“He’s the only Shepherd who knows what it’s like to be a sheep.  He became a Lamb and lived among us and then died as the perfect Lamb of God to take away all the sins of the other sheep.  He said in John 10, “… I lay down my life for the sheep.””

 

But what about you?

 

What about the elders of 1 Peter 5:1 - 2?

 

What might we say of Colossians 1:24? And Phil. 3:10 "the koinonia of His sufferings"?

 

And 2 Timothy 2:10, "For this reason I suffer all things for the sake of those who are chosen, so that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus and with it eternal glory."

 

Not to mention 2 Cor. 1:6; 5:12.

 

Are we not to be laying down our lives for the sheep?

 

Is not your congregation to be a collective Good Shepherd for your county and beyond?

 

If Jesus is sending us even as the Father sent Him...then Psalm 23 is our calling as lambs and as shepherds.

 

I recall that last Christmas you pointed out in one of your Sunday messages that Christ lives in us. So I am asking, What does Psalm 23 look like incarnationally?

 

Good morning beloved of our Lord,

 

When I awoke this morning I was thinking again of Psalm 23, and a comment that another friend sent me yesterday made me realize that we can also "see" this Psalm as being prayed by the Corporate Christ...the Body of Christ.

 

The anointing of the Head speaks of Jesus Christ, the Head of our Body. Consider the Table that we are called to. The Valley of the Shadow of Death - ah Gethsemane and the Cross...and indeed we, His Body, continue to walk through these valleys.

 

Glorious love in Christ

 

Bob