Reading New

I've recently fallen in love with reading.

My whole life I've been a huge reader and have always more than enjoyed it (holler Harry Potter).. but in the past year, I've been learning the passion behind it.

How what you read affects how you think.

How what you read can shape who you are.

I've recently fallen in love with my Bible.

Which is hard to do when you've grown up with a 1st grade Adventure Bible (confession: I had mine until I was 22 years old). While the crafts explanations teaching your family how to make Noah's Ark out of toothpicks was fun, I'm not sure how applicable it was.. in my late teens/early twenties. But thanks to an intervention by dear friends, I now own an ESV Study Bible. And it's changed (and changing) the way I live.

I just finished A.W. Tozer's book "The Pursuit of God" and he writes an entire chapter on God's Voice called "The Speaking Voice." It's a chapter on how God is speaking: continuously and articulately: and how the whole Bible supports that idea. God is ALIVE and His word is ACTIVE. It is the nature of God to speak. The Bible is the "inevitable outcome of God's continuous speech."

Tozer writes: "God is speaking. Not God spoke, but GOD IS SPEAKING. He is by His nature continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking Voice."

And this: "The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe."

GOD IS SPEAKING. He isn't past tense. I've heard how difficult it is to understand the Bible because it wasn't "written for us" or it was an "instruction manual written for a different time." Haven't you seen it like that? I know I have: during my Adventure Bible days and beyond, I wondered how it applied to me. I attributed the difficulty of Christianity to the Bible being vague. I've seen it more as an historical work.

But what if we saw the Bible as alive? As powerful? As God's voice? And what if we stopped reading the Bible as a book about us or about what we should do.. but saw it as a book all about Jesus? What if we took the spotlight off ourselves while we read it and focused on Who we're reading about? What if we saw it as God's mighty power and sovereign word fulfilling the promise of His Son?

As a book "living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4:12)?"

Or "breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17)?"

I think we'd find we'd been reading the wrong book our whole lives.

Clayton King spoke tonight on how to read the Bible, why we read it, and why it exists. He answered two crucial questions: what do I do when I don't know the answers? And what do I do to keep from sinning?

And the answer was the same for both:

READ THE BIBLE. Live according to His Word. God will use what it says.

What's it telling you?

Reading the Bible starts your process and it ends it.

It leads you to the Cross of Christ. It points to Jesus.

The One who is resurrected and alive.

"It is important that we get still to wait on God. And it is best that we get alone, preferably with our Bible outspread before us. Then if we will we may draw near to God and begin to hear Him speak to us in our hearts. I think for the average person the progression will be something like this: First a sound as of a Presence walking in the garden. Then a voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear. Then the happy moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures, and that which had only been a sound, or at best a voice, now becomes an intelligible word, warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear friend. Then will come life and light and best of all, ability to see and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord and All."

(Pursuit of God: Tozer)