If I were to ask the average person one area of their spirituality they feel is most lacking I would dare say most often they would answer either their prayer life or their time reading the Bible. For some reason, as important as most people believe they are, these are two areas that more and more of us are struggling to make time for, or if we make time for them we are struggling to make that time meaningful.
I want to take just a minute and focus our attention on one of those areas that most people either don’t take time to do or don’t know how to do very well – reading the Bible. It seems that most often even when people do read their Bibles they get little out of it. And most often when that happens the assumption immediately comes that it’s because the Bible is irrelevant, out of touch, and pointless to their current state in life. Scripture, though, claims a much different reality. It claims that it is ever powerful (2 Timothy 3:16-17), active (Acts 20:32), and living (Hebrews 4:12). If a person believes the Bible enough to read it at least occasionally then they must accept that premise. So if it’s not the Bible’s fault that a person doesn’t get anything out of it, it must be theirs.
Often the problem simply resides in the way that a person reads the Bible. Reading it irregularly can space out our study so much that we don’t make any connection with the text. Reading it briefly can make it so shallow that we never get any depth. Reading it generically can mean that it never holds any personal meaning or application to us. But I’m afraid that one of man’s greatest faults in reading the Bible is when we read it under the assumption that we already know what it says and means. In other words we read it with a built in prejudice towards its message. This goes for Christians and non-Christians alike. If we are going to read the Bible for all its worth we must read it like we’re reading it for the first time.
Do we want its meaning to be fresh? Read it like it’s the first time. Do we want to be impacted by the simplicity of its message? Read it like it’s the first time. Do we want to approach the Bible objectively? Read it like it’s the first time.
Granted this can’t be done all the time. In depth study demands a reliance on what we’ve read and studied before. We have to cross-reference and make connections that necessitate a memory of what we’ve previously read. But every so often, just to remind ourselves of how beautiful, pure, and simple it is it’s good to read the Bible like we’ve never read it before.
If we could do that on occasion then maybe, just maybe, tradition would quit trumping truth. Maybe we would care a little more about what we read out of the Bible instead of what we read into it. Maybe, just maybe, reading the Bible objectively would help to bridge the generational, social, cultural gaps that are far too often present in the church. Maybe we would have more unity and less division. Yes, I believe the world and the church would both be in much better shape if every so often we would read the Bible like we’ve never read it before.
-Andy