A Matter of Approach


We all love that "mini-rush" of checking a box off of the to-do list. Think about the rush you get when you hit send on a long-overdue email. It's amazing. I am so weird I even love bringing a paper list to the grocery store and crossing off each item I get as it drops into my cart. We live in a "check-the-boxes" society in a lot of ways, we're always just grinding to get to the end of the next workday, then through the tasks of the evening, and finally to the weekend. But then the weekend is full of activities and chores! Checking the boxes on life can result is life sort of passing you by, and leaving you wondering, "Where has the time gone?" We've all had that feeling of, "It's Thursday already?" I've found that this can happen in my Bible reading, that it can simply "pass me by."

For about two months now, I have been following two Bible reading plans. The first one is a chronological bible plan, that over the course of a year takes the reader through the Bible by the year that the passage itself was written. For example, I started in the book of Job, and have now worked through Genesis and into Exodus. The other Bible reading plan I have been following takes the reader through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice throughout the calendar year. This has resulted in me reading sometimes seven chapters of the Bible per day. That has got to mean I'm doing a good job, right? A good Christian should be Bible-saturated, right?

But then I read this passage spoken by Jesus in John 5:
"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life." (John 5:39-40)

 Jesus is speaking these words to the Pharisees and scribes of his era. These are people who were absolutely Scripture-saturated! R. Kent Hughes in Preaching the Word says, "they felt that in the Scriptures they had life..." and that (Jesus) aimed this message at the scribes who labored with concentration and obsession over the Scriptures. Some even believed that memorization of Scripture counted towards salvation. These were people who were obsessed and centered on the Scriptures, and yet they could not see Jesus in them and refused to come to him to have life!

 The scribes and Pharisees put the entire stock of their lives into knowing Scripture. And Jesus tells them that without him, they are simply checking boxes, because he is life. (What a claim by the way, no wonder they hated him.) How easy is it for me then to find my "life" in the boxes I am checking as I read my Bible! Meanwhile, like the scribes, I am missing the whole point of reading God's word: to see and know glory of God and the love of Christ!

John Piper, in an "Ask Pastor John" article on DesiringGod.org says of Bible reading, "We go to the Bible to be amazed at God and amazed at Christ and amazed at the cross and amazed at grace and amazed at the gospel. And when we are stunned and amazed and humbled, we walk out of our study or our chair or wherever we are having devotions, and there’s a spirit and a flavor about us that makes us a better person at the kitchen table and when we go to work."

 If my Bible reading becomes more about me checking the box of another chapter read and another day of the plan completed, I am missing the whole point! I don't leave amazed. I'm certainly not stunned, and I'm probably not humbled. I don't leave filled with joy and left in awesome wonder of our great God! I leave with a bolstered sense of self-accomplishment and I'm trusting in what I'm doing rather than in Jesus alone.

When I check the boxes of Bible reading, I am looking right through God's Word to see the reflection of own successes and in the process missing the whole point: Christ.

How then do we come to Jesus for life as we read Scripture?

1. We come to Jesus with spiritual hunger.
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst." (John 6:35)
2. We come to Jesus with spiritual thirst.
On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink." (John 7:37)
3. We come to Jesus for light. 
"I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness." (John 12:46)
4. We seek Jesus as our life. 
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6)
5. We come to Jesus to abide in his love.
"As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love." (John 15:9)

We come to Jesus and to Scripture to be fed, to have our thirst quenched, to have light and life and love. These are our most urgent needs in life! We need the bread of life and the living water of Christ. We need his light and his life and we need to abide in his love. We come to Jesus because he is these things for us, and we read the Bible to experience these things fresh and new every day. Experiencing Christ through Bible reading in these ways is pure joy and it completely engulfs the small "rushes" of checking the boxes on a to-do list.

How do you approach Bible reading?

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 5, 2017 at 5:34 PM

    Back in the day, when I was your age, I had the opportunity to read through the bible in a year using the One Year Bible that is already divided up (like a devotional)
    I am happy to report that I accomplished reading through the entire bible that year.
    Funny thing, when starting over, at the beginning of the new year, I bogged down, failing to do it again.
    Contributing factors may have included a chage in circumstamces, but being honest and not looking for excuses, the real real why I bogged down was because I had 'just read that,' so the material was not new.
    In fact, as I read ANY passage now, with the benifit of having seen it before, my mind will explode with ideas and understanding, completely derailing any hopes of having a normal quiet time, acclomplishing any normal devotional in the prescribed cadence.

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