My greatest desires for the year were to read the bible cover to cover and to grow closer to the Lord. The first goal is relatively easy to accomplish: create a plan and stick to your reading schedule. However, the second goal is a bit ambiguous. How do you grow closer to the Lord? What do you need to do in order to grow closer to God and experience His presence in your life?
Initially, I thought that as I read through the bible that I would experience the Lord more and more in my life. However, to be quite honest, the more that I read the bible the further I grew away from the Lord.
**Disclaimer: please do not get me wrong; I believe that the bible is a great way to grow closer to the Lord and to understand the promises that only He can offer. However, I do believe that He customized this particular lesson for me.
Sounds a bit ironic but it is the truth. I would analyze every verse and try to determine exactly what God intended because I wanted to achieve His will for my life. I was the student that wanted to understand every detail of the assignment before I began because I wanted to do well. As I read the verse about loving your neighbor as yourself, I began to question, who is my neighbor? What type of love do I need to offer my neighbor? Do I offer him agape (“selfless”) or can I just offer him phileo (“brotherly”) love? I was the epitome of “analysis paralysis”. As I look back upon my life, I can only imagine how many times I walked by Jesus because of the fact that I was so concerned with identifying the proper type of love. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for me,” Matthew 25:40.
Although reading the bible was a great start in my quest for a deeper relationship with the Lord, I was missing a vital component to the equation: doing the word. “But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his own face in a mirror; for he looks at himself, goes away, and right away forgets what kind of man he was. But the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer who acts – this person will be blessed in what he does,” James 1:22-25. I was hearing the word correctly but I was not doing the word.
A friend of mine on the trip informed us of the different Greek words used to define knowledge: Oida (Book/Verbal Tradition Knowledge) and Ginosko (Experiential Knowledge). In my quest to grow closer to the Lord, I focused all my efforts on the Oida knowledge of God by reading and having deep conversations with my squad. However, I unintentionally did not exert much effort on practicing what I read or what I heard. It was not until I held an orphan in my arms, distributed food to the poor, gave away a free pair of eyeglasses to someone that could not see; that I was able to experience (“Ginosko”) love. All of a sudden, the idea of loving your neighbor became so clear. I did not concern myself about who was my neighbor. I did not worry about what type of love I should offer. I just loved. I was a doer of the word.
Both Oida and Ginosko knowledge are vital components of experiencing God. The bible is the inspired word of the Lord that allows us to be able to read and understand `His promises, but when we act on His commands we are able to see those promises come to life. I once heard that “the heart cannot follow what the mind does not believe” but then I heard that you need to “have an ice cold brain and a red hot heart;” two conflicting comments but two important concepts. It is important to have fundamental beliefs that will help guide you in your walk of faith, but it is also important to not let your thoughts paralyze your servitude.
