Just One Thing: Reading the Bible

Blessed is the one … whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.Psalm 1: 1-3 Not everything in your Bible is always easy to understand.  Not everything in your Bible is even comfortable to read.  However, you do not need umpteen theology degrees, nor do you need to be an unrepentant bible nerd to grasp what is necessary in the Bible to be formed into a resilient disciple - someone who delights in the word of the Lord and soaks it up day and night. The Bible gives us wisdom for any situation across a lifetime by telling us the story of what it is to be human and who God is.  The aim of this story is to shape us into people who, as they read, mature spiritually. To mature spiritually is to begin to know what it feels like in any given situation to be more in line with the will of God instead of less.  We are invited to step into that story, to make it our own, to be shaped by its beauty and to live by its wisdom. Yet, one of the challenges in accepting this invitation is the fact that to fully step into these texts we must train ourselves to see their wisdom and beauty. We have to spend time in the word of God. Even when we don’t understand. Even when we don’t find it comfortable. The good news is our effort needn’t be a sprint.  We aren’t trying to download hundreds of pages into our heads in a single sitting. We should be working at developing a lifetime passion, developing consistency, bit by bit, little by little, day by day. No one gets the Bible in one reading. It is designed to be read again and again in community.  We should be feasting on God’s word, eating this honey so that no other book tastes as sweet.  Other stories may entertain us for a moment. But to be fed, to receive life for the deepest parts of us, we come back again and again to the Bible.  We come to encounter God’s wisdom. We come to be formed by the Spirit. We come to receive revelation of God’s goodness and beauty, particularly through the person of Jesus.