Missing The Point
Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning.
– Thomas Merton
Quoted in sojomail.net 10/22/07
from Opening the Bible
Perhaps one of the best practices I’ve adopted is reading the Bible for myself. What I mean by this is taking the time to read scripture without an agenda, to begin with prayer purifying my motives and asking the Spirit to speak to me through God’s word. It’s so easy to come to the Bible to find something, a proof text, an argument, an “I-told-you-so,” or a lesson. It’s very difficult to take the time required to learn a new life truth for ourselves. This gets more difficult when you are under the gun to produce materials for a living! We want to find new and exciting truths to teach. But, how can we teach something that we have not allowed to teach us? How can we claim to have mastery of scripture until we allow it to master us?
Perhaps this is what James meant when he said in James 1:23-25, “For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act they will be blessed in their doing.” Let us stare into the perfect mirror of God’s ideal for us in scripture and let us be changed forever by the word.
Quoted in sojomail.net 10/22/07
from Opening the Bible
Perhaps one of the best practices I’ve adopted is reading the Bible for myself. What I mean by this is taking the time to read scripture without an agenda, to begin with prayer purifying my motives and asking the Spirit to speak to me through God’s word. It’s so easy to come to the Bible to find something, a proof text, an argument, an “I-told-you-so,” or a lesson. It’s very difficult to take the time required to learn a new life truth for ourselves. This gets more difficult when you are under the gun to produce materials for a living! We want to find new and exciting truths to teach. But, how can we teach something that we have not allowed to teach us? How can we claim to have mastery of scripture until we allow it to master us?
Perhaps this is what James meant when he said in James 1:23-25, “For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act they will be blessed in their doing.” Let us stare into the perfect mirror of God’s ideal for us in scripture and let us be changed forever by the word.
-
-
