Is there anything about reading the Bible that has ever made you feel anything other than bad?
That was the query I put to the group I was leading once it became loudly apparent that most of the group’s members had walked away from Bible reading with the same slumped shoulders and drooping head that have characterized many of my post-Bible reading ventures.
They, like I, love Jesus.
They, like I, have listened to scores of sermons where the zeal of the preacher about THE WORD (always pronounced in ALL CAPS) enticed them to read it.
They, like I, read it with a burst of expectation, only to find our reading zeal sputter like a gas-thirsty Ford whose fuel-indicator light has been ignored for too many miles.
Tastes like...Bologna Left Out Over Night?
Then they, like I, felt somehow tricked, or else deficient:
“Why does it taste less like honey and more like bologna left out on the counter over night; less like bread from heaven, and more like stale Saltines?”
“Why does it make so little sense?”
“Why, if Jesus is so sweet, does he sometimes seem so mean?”
“How on earth am I supposed to do all the things it requires of me?”
“Why does it not “work” for me the way “they” said it was supposed to?”
“Why does it seem such a chore to get through my reading plan?”
“When will I experience the “Love Letter from Christ” tingles that Bonhoeffer experienced and every evangelical preacher since has used for cajoling Bible truants to read the Bible?
Give up or Grind it out...
This family of questions has pinned bus-loads of eager Christians to a mat of Bible-reading defeat.
Your questions may be distant cousins of these, but I’ll bet you have wondered something like them! At some point, when your experience doesn’t jibe with what you’ve been told to look forward to, you will often either:
Give up, and many folks do. Give up hoping. Give up trying.
or
Grind it out dutifully with nary an ounce of anticipation of anything happening. Get it over with so you can get on to real life with its tangible pleasures and burdening responsibilities.
And of course giving up and anticipation-less grinding are nearly the same thing. In neither instance is the Bible living up to its hype and in both, we are essentially Scripture high-school drop-outs who have concluded that real life must be elsewhere.
But here’s the thing.
The Scriptures reveal a wonderful Savior and present to us “words that work.” The Bible ought to do things in us, to us and for us and the world. As surely as a puff of Aslan’s warm breath thawed out Fauns, Centaurs and Giants who’d been turned into museum pieces in the White Witch’s frigid Ice Castle, the Words of God ought to re-animate us, wake us up from deep freezes of heart, and make us what we ought to be.
So I offer here a few suggestions and permissions which might be useful for a remedial, and perhaps, quasi-disappointed Bible reader who’s interested in a more full-orbed relationship with God through the Scriptures:
1. Think Small - If you rightly have the sense that the Scriptures are meant to be carriers of the life of God, revealers of Christ himself, good. Keep that sense. But throw away the idea that you need to read the whole Bible this year.
If you’re the Scripture-savoring gal or Bible-binging boy who easily, cheerfully, regularly, and profitably reads the Bible each year, please ignore much of what I am saying. And I do believe you are out there.
But for the other 99 and 44/100 of you out there, think small.
Take a small selection (a paragraph or connected passage) of Scripture and read that same small selection multiple times in a week. It would be helpful if you manage to read it daily. But it might be more attainable, and therefore, exponentially more helpful, to suggest that you endeavor to read it several (3-5) times throughout the week prayerfully asking Christ to speak as you read.
2. Begin with passages of Scripture you like - I know there is hardwired spiritual DNA in some of us that expects that we should only do things for the Lord that we do not like. But we’re not trying to cultivate our neuroses, superstitions, or what my wife has astutely identified as “jinx theology.” We’re trying to figure out how to “eat” the Gospel, or good news. Eating Good News shouldn’t primarily taste bad, should it?
And of course not many of us conduct the rest of their lives this way. I doubt, for instance, many of us aspire to feast regularly on foods we despise. I’ll not touch or even draw near kale unless I’m wearing a hazmat suit. No, most do their best to prepare, purchase, and consume those culinary treats that make for the cheer-ful-est bellies!
Why shouldn't you regard Bible reading in a similar way?
(And if all this makes you feel a strange sort of guilt, all this talk about reading according to your taste buds, consider how your present approach is working.)
This advice is not for the Simone Biles of Scripture reading, but rather for those who are dad-bodded in their spiritual sensibilities and a touch too flabby from lack of practice. For folks, like most of us, who did “hit the snooze button in the morning” too often, instead of “choosing to be awesome!”
So primarily "eat" parts of the Bible that you like. The things that move you toward God. Find passages that "speak" to you. Passages that make you say, “ah-ha.” Words that cause your heart to thaw out. Scriptural overlooks and hiking paths that cause you to notice or to expect God's involvement in your life, in the life of the world or in the life of your work or church. Passages that, when you read them, you say, “Hey, I like this book. I want to get closer to God, I want to move toward Him, I want to follow Him.” Or “I find myself strangely and inexplicably wanting to want what I see here on these pages.”
Spend time with the passages that cause the rotting places in your insides to be re-vitalized. It’s ok. You have permission. God won’t be mad. Start with the places you like.
3) The Bible is not primarily a direct communication to us but a divine revelation for us - The Scriptures follows a loose sort of story line. And it is ultimately meant to introduce us to Jesus.
God made lions, lizards, ladies, and long-bearded men. The gents and their brides revolted. The whole place was vandalized to the core. God figured he would have to fix the place and its inhabitants back up, to even better than before. Creation. Fall. Redemption. Restoration. Everything of course changing when God himself steps onto the stage (as Jesus) to reprise the role of the first Dude (Adam), only playing it with such stunning perfection that it changes the whole rest of history, moving backward (in forgiveness) and forward (in restoration and renewal).
It’s mighty helpful to realize this, because many of us have the tendency, perhaps, to identify primarily with the main characters in the play. We will read of Abraham being told to leave his family and presume we too are being called to do likewise. We will not be consistent, happily, and assume we should try to pawn off our wife as our sister, but we will think, “If I am in earnest in my faith, I too will “leave all” to follow God.
Or since Moses had a run in with a talking bush-a-blaze before his “calling” that surely we should also expect such a similarly dramatic run in with God sometime during or after college so we too can know what we’re supposed to do!
But what if these Biblical leaders (eg. Abraham/Moses) are shown to have exceptional things happen to them, because they were selected on exceptional occasions, because they, though quite ordinary, had been hand picked by God to advance the drama of reconciling the universe to Himself?
What if we were told these things so we (and those original audiences) would know to pay attention to them as spokesmen for the Heavens? And what if God was wanting us periodically to consider the whole big story, as the actual authoritative story of the world, and be captivated by the Him who was writing and starring in it?
If these things are so, there is no necessary reason to presume we will completely identical experiences. And God may want us to identify more with Paul’s audience (the troubled churches being chastised) than with Paul himself, with the grumbling Israelites who were urged to listen to Moses, than with Moses himself, or with a nameless 30-something in the magically fed crowd of 5000 than with Jesus himself, at least sometimes, right?
Steeping in a Personality
St. Paul once told his young pastoral charge, Timothy, “reflect on these things and the Lord will give you insight into all of this.” Perhaps by thinking small, choosing what seems most appetizing, and calling to mind that in the Scriptures, our God means to introduce us to himself and his constant fussing mercy over all he has breathed into being, we’ll be given a deeper insight into a friendship with the Savior to whom these words wish to introduce us.
C.S. Lewis reminds us, most importantly of all:
“It may be indispensable that Our Lord’s teaching...should demand a response from the whole man, should make it so clear that there is no question of learning a subject but of steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself. So in St. Paul. Perhaps the sort of works I should wish him to have written would have been useless. The crabbedness, the appearance of inconsequence and even of sophistry, the turbulent mixture of petty detail, personal complaint, practical advice, and lyrical rapture, finally let through what matters more than ideas—a whole Christian life in operation—better say, Christ Himself operating in a man’s life.”
Let’s pray, read, and act toward “steeping ourselves” in Christ, even in small bits, “acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself” for the sake of the world whose ruin Jesus has sturdily and sacrificially propped himself up against.
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Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org or follow him on Twitter @GEricYoungblood.