I like the words one nearby church uses to describe the Bible: “the very Word of God to man through men.” As God walked with believers through the ages, these believers told their stories of God’s impact on their lives, and we have their stories, written down and translated into our language, in our Bibles. However, God is still walking with believers, and God is still speaking to us and urging us to listen with our hearts and minds. So don’t be confused, my fellow faith walkers: God’s Word includes the words that God has given and is still giving to us now. When we read the Bible in the way God intends, we are opening ourselves to accept what God is saying uniquely to each one of us now.
I’ve started this post with a positive message, but I also need to include a critical negative message: beware of Christians who are worshiping the Bible.
Be alert for people who prefer to quote isolated phrases from the Bible instead of sharing the stories the Bible is telling.
Be alert for people who find comfort in worshiping what can be grasped in their hands rather than worshiping the One that holds all of creation.
Be alert for people who act as if the Bible was written specifically to people living in 21st-century first world countries, who dismiss consideration of the culture and era of the people originally receiving these messages.
Be alert for people who use the Bible to support their own opinions rather than those who allow God to transform their opinions.
Be alert for people who demand that you believe passages from the Bible in only the way that they present it to you, and be alert when these people accuse you of heresy when you disagree with them. If God is as big as we know God to be, God’s Word is much bigger than the cages these persons try to use to restrain the Truth for their own purposes.
Be alert and pray for these people that they will stop slamming the door on the Word and let the Word change their hearts.
This was a frightening revelation to me when I finally accepted what God was revealing to me about how to hear and understand the scriptures. It shook me so much that I changed the name of my website, so that when I encourage “Bible study,” I include it as part of a strong “faith walk” with God.
Growing up in an evangelical church, I was taught that the Holy Bible is God’s Word. As children, we even pledged our allegiance to the Bible in Vacation Bible School. We memorized and recited verses, often without learning the context in which those verses were recorded. As a child, it was helpful for me to receive child-sized portions of Bible stories, but we can’t let ourselves stay content with a child’s perspective. (In the same way, you can’t complete your income tax forms using only a second-grader’s math skills.)
Growing up in knowledge, in discipline, and in faith mandates that we re-examine what we learned and apply our more mature insights to our spiritual lives. This especially means to catch ourselves when we fall back on the “easy answers” we memorized as children instead of accepting the challenging truths that God is trying to show us today. This means that we cannot be satisfied with merely knowing what the Bible says, and instead we have to show what we have learned by how we act and love. Even more critically for our spiritual being, we have to give up our fantasy that we can “know” much of anything, and instead we need to accept our calling to step out in faith without knowing because we believe in the One who knows best.
JM
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