The Sound of Forehands Clapping

Yesterday I let John Piper make the case that the God who created and upholds the universe and all the life in it speaks today.  He speaks to anyone who is willing to listen. He speaks through the Word of God.   The Bible is not just His recorded word, something He said “back then”, but it is also His living word that the Spirit amazingly, miraculously “re-speaks” to each one who has ears to hear.

That being the case and a mind blowing a case it is, why do I so often neglect such a precious gift?  I can’t claim ignorance as the cause – though my flesh would just love to.  I have known for a long time that God reveals Himself by His Spirit through this book and that this way is his primary means of doing so.

What are my reasons then? I think a big one for me is a prideful self-reliance. Jesus said that I should “not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Do I really need the words of God to live my day to day life?  I hear myself saying, “I’m getting along okay. I can handle this. I can figure this out. I can fix this.”

Sometimes I will go a bit farther then that.   “I’ve read a lot of the Bible before.   I mean I may not read it ‘as much as I should’ but I have a bunch stored up.”  Then I read

“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:1–2).

Maybe the psalmist is talking about a “baby Christian” though, someone who needs to be reading it a lot…  You get where I am going with this.  I need the Bible.   I need it to live.  I can’t function without hearing from God in the Scriptures.   I can’t.  And any notion in myself that says “Sure you can” is a self-exalting, pride-induced lie.

There are other reasons that I neglect the precious gift of Gods words.  One more that I’ll touch on is this.  The word of God reveals, well, God.  How do I see Him?  Is He amazing, full of glory and wonder, does His grace seem more precious to me then anything else, does His imminence and transcendence encompass and surpass mind?  Hmm, often not.  He seems maybe distant, kind of in black and white.  If that’s how I see Him then think about it.  How excited am I going to be to see more of that God?

The problem is of course that this is a vicious down-ward spiral.  Only the Scriptures can give to me that glorious vision of who He is, but since my vision of Him is skewed I don’t go to the Scriptures and, well, my vision of Him stays the same and so it goes.  It works both ways though.  See it can be an up-ward spiral as well, but it must be fought for and it can’t be fought for in my own strength either.

So two questions: 1) What are the reasons that you have told yourself that you don’t need to be in the Scriptures regularly and 2) What is the real reason?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 1:12 am and is filed under Bible, Books, Self Discipline, Stirring One Another Up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.