This past Friday, I finally accomplished (four and a half months early!) one of my goals for the World Race—namely, to read through the entire Bible. I didn’t want to do a cursory reading, either, skipping over genealogies or battle descriptions, but rather a full, in-depth study of the entirety of how God has revealed himself to human beings through the written word.
Reading (and teaching) from the Bible, however, has been much more than a personal activity done in addition to ministry during the World Race. Rather, it has been a central part of our ministry itself. This Wednesday evening, for example, our team split up and led Bible studies in various “home cell” groups around the village our church is in. We did the same thing, at the church itself, in Rwanda. Our evangelism sessions earlier in the week were fueled by and rooted in the word of God. Even our children’s ministry these past two weeks has been focused on teaching the word of God! The word of God and the act of sharing and teaching it are not only some of our main focuses in ministry, but also what gets us, as missionaries, through the day.
The Israelites were commanded: “Repeat (the words of the Lord) to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and as a symbol on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:7-10).
On the World Race, we may not have doorposts or gates to write words on, and we may not ink John 3:16 on our foreheads, but the point remains the same: our lives should be, and (for the first time in my life) are, completely saturated and permeated with the word of God. My Christian life has improved with direct proportion to the amount of time I spend reading the Bible.
I thank God, however—and I really do thank him, for I submit that he has acted upon me—for the work that he has done in legitimately helping me to desire to read the Bible. At the beginning of the race, I supplemented what was lacking in my desire with obligation. As the World Race has progressed, however, any remaining ounces of obligation have been replaced, bit by bit, by desire.
David says, in Psalm 19:10, that, "(The ordinances of the Lord) are more desirable than gold, than an abundance of pure gold; and sweeter than honey, which comes from the honeycomb." I do not believe that he was being insincere or flattering here. First, the entire tone of David’s psalms is a tone of radical honesty—which isn’t to say that the entire Bible isn’t! “Lord, how long will you forget me?” David complained in Psalm 13:1, for example, and he called himself a worm (Psalm 22:6) and admitted to being utterly mocked—a tough admission for a king—in Psalm 22. David poured out honesty in his Psalms. Thus, I legitimately believe that when David said that he found God’s words to be more desirable than gold and honey, he meant it!
Secondly, though, I am seeing this to be increasingly true in my own life. I legitimately look forward to reading the Bible every morning—and afternoon and night. It is quickly becoming much more desirable to me, now, than gold and honey—and movies, iPods, and the other not sinful, though shallow things with which I used to fill my mind. On more occasions than I can count, I wrote in my journal about being in either a good mood or bad mood in the afternoon, and then explicitly made the connection to my mood hinging on whether or not I read the Bible in the morning.
If the Bible is not something you like to read, however, I would encourage you to gradually read it anyway, as I have found that the Bible is an acquired taste. In this way, reading the Bible is similar to exercise.
When I first started running, in the fall of my seventh grade year—one mile around the block, after school, every other day, in my jeans and Atlanta Braves jacket—it was purely out of obligation. I knew that it was good for me and that it would help me to run a sub-seven minute mile in the Spring, but I certainly didn’t desire to run. I would much prefer the non-running days, the days where I could eat coffee-cakes and popcorn right when I got home from school and would not have to wait until after a run! Over time, however, as I realized the powerful effect that running had, not only on my lungs and heart, but also on my entire mood, my entire psyche, and, by extension, my entire quality of life, I began to run more and more and began to do so out of desire. By the time I reached my senior year of High School and my freshman year of college, I was running 100+ miles a week—out of desire.
Similarly, I remember the first time I ever read the Bible, two years ago. The way that Moses, David—and even Jesus—spoke was confusing to me. Other than the few common “Christian culture” verses that I picked up on (“Love your enemies”, for example), I would finish my short Bible-reading sessions feeling largely confused. When Jesus would say something like, “But those who are counted worthy to take part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. For they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are sons of God, since they are sons of the resurrection…He is not a God of the dead, but a God of the living, because all are living to him”, I would ask myself, “What the heck does that even mean?”
As I read more, though, and understood how every part of God’s story fit with every other part, and how books, chapters, and verses foreshadowed, complemented, bolstered, and completed other books, chapters, and verses, God’s story became easier and easier to understand—and thus, more and more beautiful. Just as running became easier and easier—as it was no longer the case where every day and every run was a struggle against my own poorly-fit lungs, so too has the word of God become easy to read, and thus enjoyable, beautiful, and glorious.
I never even used to like reading in general! In fact, I still don’t really enjoy reading most things other than the Bible. I rarely finish books—ask my parents! When I really pondered my less-than-perfect history with reading, however, I was clearly able to see the glory of God working in my testimony. I usually didn’t like reading for three reasons. First, I had a really short attention span and would often get distracted while reading. Second, I would get bored of the story easily and would want to move on to other stories. Third, I would hate the fact, as silly as this sounds, that the characters would never do quite what I wanted them to do! For this reason, I have always liked writing (because I can control the plot!), but haven’t always like reading.
Harry Potter was a great series, but I wished that Harry had ended up marrying Cho Chang. I was unsatisfied. (Spoiler alert)—they should have won the game at the end of Friday Night Lights! Are you kidding me? The Bible, however, is my long-awaited exception to the three reasons why I didn’t like to read! Its riveting nature overrides my short attention span, the action starts right away in the book of Genesis, and there was never point where I had wished the characters did something differently than they did! The plot is completely satisfying. It was designed to be.
The Bible absolutely trumps every story ever written in every way possible. It puts every love story to shame. Romeo and Juliet, Jack and Rose, and Forrest and Jenny combined are nothing compared to a bloody man on a cross, pleading, with dying breaths, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing!” It puts every war story to shame—Joshua dwarves Braveheart. Its author is more talented than any other author. Its appeal is timeless—literally. People around the world today live and die by words spoken over 2,000 years ago, though I have never heard of anyone face and accept martyrdom through hope in the words of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great.
The best part of the Bible is that I believe it actually happened. It is at this point where we, as Christians, differ from the secular world. Though some of the stories seem far-fetched—I am not blind to this fact—I think that an in-depth study of the composition of the Bible and its manuscripts will make you more confident of its historicity. The purpose of this blog is not to provide a full apologetics argument, however—as tempting as that is.
The one thing we absolutely must not do, though, is patronize the Bible. Doing so patronizes the God who wrote it—the height of all arrogance. We can dismiss the Bible as irrelevant—as many have done— or we can submit to it with humble obedience. To cherry-pick certain morals we want to live by, while dismissing the rest of the text as inapplicable is equivalent to either telling God that he must submit himself to our judgments or telling the human beings who thought they were inspired by God that they were sadly mistaken and were likely delusional. Neither of these two implications are pretty and both of them are prideful. C.S. Lewis says the same thing, when referring to Jesus Christ himself, the grand subject of the Bible:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either the man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Let us desire the word of God. "All scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16). Take it from me, the one who used to hate both reading and the Bible. The Bible is good. Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it!
