In A Word

I’m sitting in my recliner in my little study at home.

It is early Monday morning and my Bible is open to begin my quiet time in the presence of the Lord. This is the most important time of the day for me. If I sleep in or get distracted by emails or texts and plan to get my quiet time with the Lord later in the day…it will never happen.

For some reason, before I even opened to my first chapter in the “history” books of the Old Testament, I was suddenly struck by the great pains the Holy Spirit went through to get God’s revelation to us. Think also of the lives lived that are recorded in the pages of God’s story and even those who gave their lives to protect it down through the millennia in order to get it into my hands this morning.

It is all pretty amazing when you think about it.

Desiderius Erasmus, William Tyndale and Martin Luther were some of the first to translate portions of the Bible and make them available to the non-clergy public. Tyndale paid with his life. A number of attempts were made to translate the Bible into English from the sixteenth century on, but it’s spread led to the death penalty for anyone found in possession of the Scripture in English.

All of this seemed really significant to me this morning before I had even opened my Bible.

With a fresh, deep gratitude for God’s Word I opened my Bible.

As I began, the first thing I did was invite the Holy Spirit to reveal to me the heart of the Father and make His Word live in me. Dr. Rob Wall, of Seattle Pacific University, believes that this is a practice every Christian approaching the Word should observe. He believes it is possible to be a Christian, to have the Holy Spirit in residence in your life, and read the Word, oblivious of your need for His revelation and enlightenment.

He needs to be recognized and invited into the process.

We cannot read the Word without Him.

Dr. Cheryl Johns, of the Pentecostal Theological Seminary, believes that it is more important, when reading Scripture, to allow it to read you. And that too requires the active role of the Holy Spirit.

This is the revelation of God in my hands!

No wonder my Dad would not permit anything to sit on his Bible. I’m not talking about worshipping the Bible. I’m talking about a deep appreciation for how it got to me and the supernatural power it has in the hands of the Holy Spirit in my life.

Soak in it. Don’t rush through what you read. It’s a conversation. Hard to have a conversation when you’re in a 100 yard dash to some prescribed finish line or other “important” activity to get to.

Have a reading plan that encompasses all of Scripture so you can be confident, over the long haul, that you are getting the complete view of who God is…but use your plan as a guide not a rigid prescription. The goal isn’t reading Genesis to Revelation in a year. The goal is hearing His voice and inviting the kind of transformation that comes from “beholding Jesus” (2 Corinthians 3:18).