If you answered "NO", then you must be from another planet.
Ok, so truthfully, what do you do? Do you plow through it, determined to at least "get it over with"? Do you put it aside & think, "at least I tried". Do you hide it in the dog's dish so he will chew it up and call it "kibbles & bible" so that you can say your dog ate it, or do you just wait for Sunday and let someone else make sense of it for you?
The thing is, the bible is a love letter, or rather, a collection of 66 love letters from the God of creation, to His creation, that's you & me. If we never or even only seldom read it then we will end up with as shallow of an understanding of God Himself as most of us have of the bible.
I know in our world of fast, transaction, information (twitter, FB, texting, etc...) we like knowledge to come in short, simple, and instant bursts. Unfortunately this is also why we know about so many things, but understand so little.
But, what about the whole hard to read part? Well, I completely agree that there are parts of the bible that can be so difficult to understand that it just gets discouraging to keep reading, but there are other parts that are so so simple that my 3 year old daughters get it!
But I think that's part of the problem. Too often we read the bible so broken up, that of course it doesn't make sense.
Over the summer I saw the movie Inception -- which was AMAZING -- but that movie was hard enough to follow having started it from the beginning. If you saw it, could you imagine having only seen parts of the movie, not in order, and then asking several different friends to try fill in the blanks for you afterwords - exactly!! You wouldn't have understood the movie - AT ALL. Matter of fact I think you need to see the movie a few times over to really get it. I mean, what the heck, was the top going to fall or not at the end!?!?!
The bible is a best selling story of such epic conflict, and romance, and climax that there is no way to "get it" when we read it in pieces, or when we solely rely on other people to help us understand it. Heck, even if you were to read it cover to cover you'd still have a lot of questions, & doing it again would answer some of them while creating others still.
Point? The point is, did you walk out of inception in the middle or when it got confusing, did you decide to just go play video games in the lobby? Stay with it, ask the Holy Spirit of God to give you understanding, & enjoy the fact that this is humanity's most beautiful story.
The complexity is an invitation INTO the story, an invitation to move to the edge of your seat with awe & wonder - "what just happened...". So, sit at the edge of your seat, don't get up & don't leave.
I would recommend to help you see the fuller nature of the "story" and how it makes more sense when read together, that you get a book called, "66 Love Letters" by a guy named Larry Crabb. I promise you won't regret using this as a guide to the Bible. I'm reading it right now & LOVING it.
Move to the edge of your seat, the best parts of the story are yet to come!
Guerrilla Lovers Assignment #9
For those of you looking here for today's assignment, here it is.
So often the person we so easily miss being a blessing to is our spouse. Today do something for your spouse that will surprise them & be a gift to them. Dudes, may I suggest that a gift card to Victoria secrets is not a gift for them! If you are not married then write a brief note of thanks to a couple that you know that serves as an example to you of the kind of marriage you want to have, and the kind of husband / wife you want to be.
Go get guerrilla, changing our city, in the name of Jesus, one act of compassion at a time.
