Living Waters Church, January 21, 2024
Watch or listen to the sermon here
Early in 2024 we’re asking a few key questions: Why and how do we pray? Why and how do we read the Bible? Why and how do we serve? Why and how do we share our faith? These practices have given shape to countless Christian lives, how are they giving shape to our lives? These are not so much just things Christians do, they are, in a way, how to be Christian at all.
We live in a society which prizes consumerism and convenience, and these practices often run against those values. There are exceptions, of course, but these things tend to take discipline, even sacrifice. But as we also know, the thing about essential things which bring life is the tendency to take them for granted or even neglect them to our determent. It’s a little like staying well hydrated. We all know that water is essential to life, and yet many of us would confess that we’re probably underhydrated. The crucial foundations to our physical health can go neglected, and so to it is with spiritual health. So, without being legalistic or boring, how can we encourage one another towards healthy nourishment, and what do we need to know about these practices if we’re going to be shaped by Jesus through them?
Kirsten shared last week on how to pray, and this week I’ll share a little on how to read the Bible. I do want to reiterate that no one is claiming expertise here. In fact, if you sense we’re a little sheepish about sharing on these topics, it might be because we’re well aware that mastery in these practices is impossible and the lack of hydration we can all suffer from. We’ll do our best, and always trust Jesus to make up the difference.
There’s only so much we can say on the topic of how to read the Bible in a few minutes. So these Sundays are meant to be discussion starters, not discussion enders. We’re wary of the pitfalls of focusing too much on our activity over/against God’s, but are still committed to encouraging health practices. To that end, let’s mix it up and start with some tools before teaching when it comes to How to Read the Bible.
RESOURCES
First, an invitation to join us on January 29th for a more in depth GROW session also called How to Read the Bible with Rikk Watts. If you’re serious about getting the Bible into your regular life and letting it shape you, this will be a key evening to prioritize. We’ll also record and release the session on podcast to make it as accessible as possible. Rikk is a Biblical scholar and a gift to us in this regard. Books are also helpful, and one of the most influential books on this topic is called How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart. Everyone who wants to read the Bible with some confidence and clarity should own this book. If you’re going to have one tool, this is a good start. Another resource we’ll direct you towards is the Bible Project online, which is a great library of short videos about the Bible and its contents. These short videos efficiently and creatively put a lot together for you. They can be especially helpful in family life for children, teenagers and young adults. The final tool we’ll recommend is to ensure you have a decent study Bible, and though everyone has their preference, we’d probably recommend the recent NIV study Bible. It includes add on articles, and has gathered together the world experts on each book of the Bible to give notes. So there you go. Usually, you end with resources or tools, but we may as well begin with them today. If you head nothing else today, take some action in 2024 to better equip yourself in scriptural engagement by accessing these tools we’ve curated.
And, as always, remember that our pastoral team is at your service to sit and talk about any of these topics anytime! If you want to learn more about prayer or Bible reading, we’re here to help with that. No question is off limits, and we’d love to provide guidance or direct you to others in the community you might learn from. If you really want to learn to pray or read the Bible, there are people who can show you how and walk with you out of a great wealth of personal experience!
HOW TO READ THE BIBLE
We’ll spend the rest of our time today in four areas: What is the Bible? Can we read the Bible? How do we read the Bible? Finally a couple thoughts on Getting Practical. Let’s start with asking What is the Bible, and for that we’ll turn to that resource I mentioned a moment ago from the Bible Project.
Now, in light of all that information the question that may come to mind is can I read the Bible? I think there are two extremes when it comes to this question, a kind of yes or no answer approach. On one hand, taking in what we heard a moment ago, you feel like saying “no, I don’t think I can read the Bible”, it can seem incredibly out of reach. Written in ancient language, steeped in distant history and custom, the Bible can feel inaccessible. And there are those who will even tell you that it is, that you need a bunch of fancy letters behind your name to even begin to comprehend its original meaning, let alone how that meaning might translate to your life today. There are even some who take pride in totally demolishing people’s trust in the Bible and their chances of being influenced by it. And they do, in one sense, have a case. The Bible is not something we can casually or flippantly open without an expectation of effort to understand it. But it’s also a shame when people use the intellectual respect we should have for the Bible to slam it shut on our noses or demolish our trust in what we have learned simply from Scripture at an early age.
The other extreme to the question “can I read the Bible?” is an overly simplistic and irreverent “yes!” There are some approaches to reading the Bible which quite frankly hold Scripture with little to no respect, reading the it like we might that little bit of paper you get in a fortune cookie. When we read the Bible this way, we tend to think that we have everything we need in ourselves to accept or reject what we read based on what we like or don’t like. So, if we’re not mindful, we can unthoughtfully press the Bible through a narrow personal lens, rather than work to understand it’s context and content, not giving the Bible the reverence it deserves, or approach it with curiosity and humility. We should respect the Bible as an ancient and complex book.
But far more importantly there is the reverence we might hold for the Bible not because it’s an incredible historical library, but as the central text of the Christian faith. Above and beyond that, a reverence for Scripture because as Christians we trust that it’s the very word of God, living and active and authoritative in our lives. In other words, we read the Bible with reverence because of who stands behind it. The gospel of John holds a moment when Jesus’ first followers are faced with the opportunity to unfollow him or keep following him after he gives a difficult teaching. Jesus asks them if they’re going to unfollow him and famously, Simon Peter answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life…” (John 6) What do we have of we don’t have the living message in the middle of our shared lives? When we take a moment to remember that reality, some of our fortune cookie-like readings, or cold, high-minded academic readings of the Bible can feel pretty silly. Christians believe Jesus is at the centre of all this. We’re yielding to and devoting ourselves to him, trying to follow him under the direction of Scripture.
I would add to all this, as many of us have experienced, that the Bible upon simple reading can be incredibly powerful because it’s alive and active among us. There are countless stories of those like one 20thcentury German Bible scholar, who had a dramatic encounter with Mark’s gospel which set his life on a new course. The young man was in Scotland in 1945 as a prisoner of war. As one writer puts it, “he and his fellow-prisoners had just been shown photographs of the horrors in the camps…and were dealing with the nightmare realization that they had been fighting for a regime responsible for unimagined atrocity. He had little Christian background and no theological education, but when an army chaplain distributed copies of the Bible, ‘I read Mark’s Gospel as a whole and came to the story of the passion; when I heard Jesus’ death cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ I felt growing within me the conviction: this is someone who understands you completely, who is with you in your cry to God and has felt the same forsakenness you are living in now…I summoned the courage to live again.”[i] The Holy Spirit enlivens and applies Scripture in all kinds of surprising ways.
So what’s the answer? Can we read the Bible? The answer, I think, is yes! I’d go so far as to say that the Bible wants to be read because God wants to be known. That’s one of its central themes, humans knowing and being known by God. So we should revere the Bible, and we should expect to be able to read it. Reading the Bible with reverence is a good place to start. This approach holds together the possibility that the Bible can speak to us right now, the Holy Spirit active in its reading and explanation! And this approach holds a humility in our reading, first because this is God’s word to us, but also because when we read or hear something we don’t understand, we don’t pass immediate judgement, but explore further with curiosity. Read it and revere it. The Bible wants to be read because God wants to be known.
But, how do we read the Bible? I’ll share four simple points here, though of course we could add more.
First, as Christians, it is wise to start with Jesus. That might sound obvious, but it can be strangely forgotten. Some read the Bible without a preoccupation of getting to know and follow Jesus. Imagine trying to be a Christian without focusing on the person whose name is the title! This is why we spend so much time together in the gospels as a church. The gospels deal with the central figure of the Bible, God among his people in Jesus. Now this doesn’t mean the rest of the Bible isn’t important or shouldn’t be read – far from it. But there is a real danger in people spending all kinds of time in the Bible and never really focusing on Jesus. As Christians we believe that if you want to know what God’s like, you look at Jesus. So our general Sunday approach over the years has been to start with Jesus in the gospels and then work out from there. We want to know and follow him closely.
So if you’re wondering where to start with the Bible at home, get stuck into the gospels, because they are the biographies of Jesus. Of course, we can’t really understand Jesus without understanding the history he emerges from (ancient Israel’s story). For example, you might get to know about the first books of the Bible like Genesis and Exodus, because those are crucial in understanding Jesus. But if we’re starting out, and trying to follow Jesus, it does help to actually start with him, and follow the breadcrumbs elsewhere to the history he emerges from, and then his influence on the following biblical books.
Second, eat your greens. Similar to prayer, there is something about the volume of consumption when it comes to the Bible that makes a difference. Usually, the more you pray, the more time you’re giving God to get at you. Similarly, the more we read the Bible, the more chance we’re giving God to shape us by his Spirit through his word. If we expect to be shaped by God without regular engagement and learning from the Bible, we probably won’t be.
Now, this is the moment people around my age sometimes get their knickers in a twist, because we’re turned off by what we think are life-less rules. Just by someone saying we won’t be shaped by God if we don’t apply ourselves to prayer and Bible reading, we cry “beware legalism and oppression!” And I understand that. When I was a teenager Jesus-following became a little too task-oriented at times. If you pick up my Bible from those days, you’ll find check-marks next to chapters. The more check marks next to each chapter, the more holy I thought I was getting, even the more I thought God liked me. This kind of approach is not what I mean when I say eating your greens. Eating your greens is simply to say that we can ingest God’s word weekly and daily, without becoming legalistic or life-less. We give ourselves a much better chance of being shaped by the Bible, if we actually open it. So if our Bible isn’t open, what is one way we could open it this week? Could we put it somewhere, or keep the app open on our phone? What’s one step towards giving ourselves the best chance of interacting with the Bible with a growing regularity?
So start with Jesus, eat your greens, and ask questions. When it comes to Scripture we do need to educate our pallets (which is a phrase I’ve borrowed from our friend Rikk), meaning we don’t always know what we’re reading, so it’s going to take some curiosity and learning. We might consider getting a notebook out, reading a passage, and writing down some questions that come to mind. That’s engaging with the Bible, a good place to start! This is an interaction, which means it may be slow and take some time, but it also means it can bring change.
Last week Kirsten used the Lord’s Prayer as an example of how to pray, a kind of form we might follow. She got this prayer by Jesus from, you guessed it, the Bible! So when we do things like pray the Lord’s Prayer we’re interacting with the Bible. But the Lord’s Prayer is more than just a form to follow, it’s steeped in biblical history, and shows us the shape of Jesus’ work and action in the world. So we can pray the Lord’s Prayer in form, but we can also study and ask questions of it. For example, why is “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” smack in the middle of that prayer from Jesus? What does that mean? Where does that idea come from in Scripture before Jesus? What was Jesus doing with that in relation to his life and death and resurrection? And what implications do words like that carry for our everyday lives? What do those words have to do with that friend at school who’s hurt me, or the co-worker who’s rude or hard to work with? There’s a lot to learn about the Bible, and a lot to be learned through the Bible. Asking questions, opening ourselves to change while reading the Bible is where the rubber really hits the road.
Depending on our familiarity with the Bible, this kind of engagement happens various levels. The questions we might ask as someone totally unfamiliar with the Bible will be different than someone who studies it professionally, and that’s okay! It also helps to know that there are some parts of the Bible which are more accessible than others, which we’ll get into in the GROW session. The point is to learn and be shaped in our character, so that we look more like Jesus under the instruction of his word.
So, start with Jesus, eat your greens, ask questions/educate your pallet, and finally, go for it. Not long ago, the Bible was somewhat closed to people like you and me, but we now have this unprecedented access to the Bible and tools for reading it. In a couple of weeks someone in our church, Jon ImBeau, is being installed as the new President of Wycliffe Canada. Living Waters has supported global workers from Wycliffe for many years, and these folks do the hard, patient work of translating the Bible into languages in which it’s yet to be written. And when you look at the work of groups like Wycliffe, you begin to appreciate how rich we are in Scriptural access. We’ve got the Bible in our languages, and many helpful tools. So, we don’t need to fear the Bible, but get on with reading it reverently, expecting to be changed together. We have more than enough to benefit from the shaping of Scripture than probably anyone on the planet and in history. That’s so exciting! Because it means we can get to know Jesus better through his word. And anything is possible when we start doing that!
So, that’s a little on what is the Bible, can we even read the Bible, and how do we read the Bible. Let’s close with a couple practical cues. I think that two helpful approaches with Bible reading are: growth over goals, and tools over rules.
If we’re going to go for it, let’s remember this is about growth over goals. Growth in Jesus, over goals. Meaning, that setting a goal is great, taking action is good, so long as it’s in service of genuine growth. So a question I’d leave with us today is: what’s motivating you to pick up the Bible? Or what holds you back from reading the Bible? Think about that. If we want to grow, we are helped by asking those kinds of questions. Aim at growth, let the goals be in service of that growth. This isn’t about getting good grades, but being educated and nurtured in our humanity under Jesus’ care.
And if we want to grow, we might think in terms of tools over rules. By that I mean we should spend more time being curious and discovering tools to help us engage the Bible, rather than having a “I had better read the Bible” approach in the form of lifeless rules. Bible plans, and devotions and all these things are great, so long as they are in service of our diligent focus on Jesus and his word, and our growth in becoming more like him. And let’s be perfectly clear, Jesus loves you because he just loves you. He love is not conditional on whether or not you read all of 2 Kings at 4am tomorrow morning.
Here’s a last thought. If you don’t know where to start, or feel deep down you need to start again, why not begin with the Lord’s Prayer this week? These are Jesus’ words to his first disciples, showing them not only how to pray, but how to live. Why not try reading it a few times this week, or writing it out, or reading more about it? Or better yet, why not try asking Jesus in a simple time of prayer, what part of his prayer needs to come through in your life this week? What is he saying to us through this prayer, about himself, about ourselves, the world around us? Now we’re cooking with gas. Using Jesus’ words to interact with him, letting those same words encourage and shape us. Jesus, give us this day our daily bread!
[i] Meeting God in Mark, Rowan Williams
Luke Knight 