Bible Reading Part 1

It has been a while since I've posted anything, but that doesn't mean that God hasn't been teaching me. 

I feel my head and heart being overloaded with God's wisdom every day, and almost to the point that I can't have anything sink into my heart because my head isn't allowing enough time to meditate. 

Each night, I read a little devotional from a book called "More Precious Than Silver."  It's a nice and peaceful way to end my day and rest in peace for the night, I've noticed anyway.  Besides the point, last night's devotional is worth a blog post to talk about, as well as an explanation of something we don't always know how to do...read the Bible. 

"Come now, let us reason together."  Isaiah 1:18

When tragedy blindsides you and almost knocks you silly, you are understandably bewildered.  You feel confusion and panic.  You may feel afraid that more hardship will come on top of it all.  You may feel like cursing.  Or praying.  You may feel a thousand things.  But at some point, somewhere along the line, if you don't stop feeling and start thinking about how to attend to the circumstances you find yourself in, you'll freeze.  

Yes, intense suffering calls for deep emotions.  In the aftermath of a terrible tragedy, people weep.  We should weep.  God weeps.  But there is also a time to think.  Neither can replace the other.  

When you are able to raise your head above the heartache in which you are swimming, the Bible tells you to take the next step.  It is full of commands to 'think,' 'ponder,' 'weigh,' and 'judge.' Jesus often turned questions about the meaning of life, death, and suffering back onto the questioner.  'What is written in the Law?' he would ask.  People would blink, sniff back their feelings, flip the pages in their mind, think out loud, and come up with the relevant passages.  But this didn't end the discussion.  Next was the real work.  'How do you read it?' Jesus would ask.  That is, what do you think these Scriptures mean?  Jesus never allowed room for sloppy or sentimental thinking about the tough issues of life.  

What you think about God influences your friendship with him.  It affects how much glory you give him.  But your imagination about God isn't reliable.  If we simply trust our emotions about him, we recreate him in our own image.  We then become like the people Paul described: 'They are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge' (Rom. 10:2).  

Do you have a question about God?  A question about your circumstances?  Make the Bible your only safe source of knowledge about him.  Make this a commitment for the year.  

Help me to search for you, God, not in my imaginations but in your Word. 

After I read this, I started to doubt something about me...I love imagination.  I love to let God rule in my mind and give me pictures to fall more in love with him.  I love it when I close my eyes and God gives me visions that display His Word more to me.  But after reading this I started to doubt that a little.  After pondering, I hold no doubts anymore, because my imaginations were based on His Word, and that is essentially what God wants me to get a deeper grasp on anyway. 

I realized, however, that many times I would box God into my imagination and saw the sin in this.  God is not boxed into anything, but small portions of Himself are displayed to us.  Not everything at once.  As we read and understand Him more, we need to understand that God reveals a portion of Himself to us, not the whole being. 

God allows us to feel and experience in life, but we need to go beyond that and learn from His Word to understand what we are feeling.  Not why we are feeling it, but hear God's Word through it to encourage us and lift us up.  We don't need to know why, and God doesn't say He will reveal the reasons to us.  That u=is the beauty and the "curse" of just trusting.  We have a hard time just trusting God.  We forget His miracles and the good He has given us already, and fall back into doubt.  This is just the pattern of humanity, and it's the pattern we have seen throughout history for all the people that God loves. 

In a future blog-post, I will post something I have found helpful.  I bought a journal (not one I am currently using at the moment) that is a study journal.  At the beginning of it, it gives a very easy set of directions for studying the Bible.  I will post those directions down because I feel we all need a reminder of what we can really do to not just read the Bible, but take time and meditate on the Scriptures.  I know I need this.  I need to slow down and simplify what is going into my head so I can really give myself time to devour it in my heart. 

This is how I will stand on a strong foundation, and this is how I will be able to stand against my enemies.  If I am not equipped properly with the Word of God and understand how I can truly trust His awesome power, I will crumble and fall.  If I don't understand how to put myself out of the way of God's plan for my life, how can He prevail in me?  If I don't know how to give the strongholds in of my life to God than to Satan, how can I overcome? 

It is important friends.  Don't just read your Bible.  Devour it.  Savor it.  Live it.  It is alive.  Ask God to show you how alive His Word is today.