We’ve all heard of those word association tests that psychologists use. You know, they say ‘black’, you say ‘white’; they say ‘rabbit’ and we say ‘carrot’; day/night; God/mmm love; devil/mmm evil; Bible/hmm … Bible? How do we respond to that? Stuffy, old, irrelevant? Well, different people will have some different views but actually in Australia where I live, the Bible is one of the least trusted of all historical documents.

Over the last week and again this week on the program we’re going to be talking about reading the Bible for all it’s worth but this thing that we call the Bible, it’s a big book, it’s massive and it can be daunting. So today I thought it might be useful just to have a look to see what this Bible is exactly.

I want to share with you a secret, it’s sad but true. I never read a book cover to cover until I was in my early twenties. I managed to get through school and university and did pretty well I might add without ever reading a book from beginning to end.

I remember at university, in first year English, we studied the book Wuthering Heights which absolutely bored me to tears, I’m sorry and I never opened the book once. There are companies that publish crib notes, you know the summary of the book and a summary of what’s in it and a summary of what some of the critics say, so I just quickly read those, crib notes, wrote essays and did, by and large, reasonably well. And I never, ever liked libraries.

You know how libraries have this kind of dusty, dank smell; all of them are the same. Every library on the planet has the same smell. I thought about it for a while, I thought ‘Berni, why don’t you like libraries? Why did it take you so long to read books?’ The answer I guess has two parts.

Firstly libraries for me always felt really big and inaccessible. They have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of books and in the old days when I was at university, they had card systems for accessing, for finding things, I mean these days they have computers. The old card systems had what they call the Dewey Classification system and finding anything just took so incredibly long.

And secondly, when you did find the stuff, there was always so much of it, there was so much time involved to, I don’t know, look through all those books and research them. I mean, some people are natural book worms, well I’m not. I still frankly don’t like libraries. I’m sorry if you’re a librarian, I just don’t like libraries. I haven’t darkened the doorstep of one since I finished my last degree quite a few years ago now.

You know something; I think for a lot of people the Bible is like that. It feels inaccessible and big. There are many, many people who wouldn’t mind having a read but, for goodness sake, where do you start? Well today let’s break it down a bit, lets make it a bit more accessible.

I remember when I started Bible College only a few months after becoming a Christian, everyone took for granted that we knew about the Bible. The reality was, I didn’t and my hunch is, I wasn’t alone. Let’s unpack it a bit, lets demystify it a bit. All of a sudden you know it becomes a whole bunch more accessible.

The thing that we call the Bible is made up of 66 different books written by different people over somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 years. That’s the kind of period over which the Bible was written. And it wasn’t just written by different people but at different times and the last book was written, well almost 2,000 years ago.

There are essentially two parts to the Bible, this was complete news to me when I first opened it, the Old Testament and the New Testament, and when I started at Bible College I didn’t know which one was which.

The Old Testament, well the Old Testament is Gods story and the story of how He interacted with and engaged with His chosen people, the Israelites. The Old Testament is written completely B.C., before Christ, before Jesus came to be on earth with us here. What Christians call the Old Testament is in fact exactly the same as the Jewish Hebrew scriptures, Jews still use those same scriptures today, Christians call it the Old Testament.

It’s written mostly in the original language of Hebrew, the language of the Jews. Now there’s small parts of books like Daniel which is written in a language called Aramaic which is the language that Jesus actually spoke but by and large, the Old Testament was originally written in the language of Hebrew. And what we have today, the thing that we call the Old Testament is an English translation of that.

Now there are lots of funny name books, Deuteronomy and Judges and Chronicles and there’s Ezekiel, there are 39 separate books and there are kind of 4 main parts of the Old Testament. The first 5 books, Genesis to Deuteronomy, are the Jewish or Hebrew Law, the Torah and then you go Joshua through Ezra and Nehemiah and that’s kind of the history of what God did and how His people responded.

And then after that are the wisdom books, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations. And the rest of the books in the Old Testament are written by men called Prophets. Men whom God called to call His people back to Him. That’s the Old Testament, its a story of God engaging with Gods people.

The New Testament is 27 books. Now, it was mostly written in the language of Greek. The first 4 books, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are gospel accounts, they’re the historical account of Jesus’ life and His ministry and the next book, the book of Acts is the story of the first 20 or so years of the Church after Jesus rose again to be with His Father. Then there’s a whole bunch of letters called Epistles from people like Peter and John and Paul, written to Churches that they were involved in or in some cases, to individuals.

And before the printing press was ever invented by Gutenberg in 1450, the Bible, there’s this massive thing, the Old Testament and New Testament, was transcribed by hand. Copies were made by people called Scribes who copied them by hand. It’s hard to imagine. And these days, there’s a science called Textual Criticism. It studies whether any errors crept into the Bible after it was copied through all these manuscripts. And what it shows is, that having looked at thousands of manuscripts, is that there are remarkable levels of accuracy. I mean it’s a science, people have done it. There are very, very few words or sentences where there is any doubt what was originally written.

And today, this thing called the Bible is translated into contemporary languages, different translations. The Old King James was ‘thou art’, and I don’t know about you but the ‘thee’s and the thou’s’ doesn’t work much for me these days and it’s been replaced by really easy to read versions, contemporary English versions and you know, this thing called The Bible, over half of the 66 books, over half, you can read in half and hour or less.

Now in a few minutes we can’t hope to do anything but scrape the surface. Today we’ve just talked about some basic factual stuff. No-one really taught me this stuff. I remember becoming a Christian and going and sitting in a Church and people just teach from the Bible which is wonderful but no-one ever explained to me that it was 66 books written by a whole bunch of people over different periods of time. That some of it was stories and history and some of it was letters and some of it was poetry, we’ll look at that tomorrow on the program. It’s just a wonderful book.

And today you can get it in so many contemporary English translations and if English isn’t your first language, it’s available in just about every language. What I discovered, I guess by osmosis, a bit on my own, is that this thing the Bible is a whole bunch more accessible than I ever thought. Yeah! The Bible.

We live in an increasingly media savvy generation and one of the things that we often don’t think about is that there are different types or different genre of media and we treat them quite differently.

Take journalism, there’s reporting on the one hand and there’s editorial comment or opinion on the other, ha ha, they don’t always get kept separate but there are two types. There are movies of pure fiction and there are documentaries. I mean which one of us would take a poem and an article from a newspaper and read them in the same way?

This week on the program we’re continuing our series called Reading the Bible for all it’s Worth and one of the things that you discover in the Bible is that, in fact, there are different genres of literature in it and you can’t treat them all the same. When someone first explained that to me it was a real eye opener.

Different people approach the Bible from, well different perspectives. So you might say, ‘Berni, what’s your perspective?’ Well, I believe that the Bible is the living word of God, inspired by Him, they’re His words and as such, it’s living, active and alive. It’s different from anything else that’s been written. Yes God used the men who wrote the different books and He used their circumstances and He used who they were but the Bible is the living word of the living God.

Now other people think differently, other people say, ‘Well Shakespeare was inspired, Wordsworth was inspired, Beethoven was inspired, Vivaldi was inspired. Well so were the writers of the Bible, it’s not much different.’ That’s not where I come from, when I pick up the Bible and read it, I do it in faith believing that God uses His word to speak His will and His purpose and His love and His grace into my life. And over the years, God’s word the Bible has become so special to me.

To think that He’s gone to all that trouble, I mean there is 66 books in there, written over a period of some 1,000 to 1,500 years that God has preserved down through the centuries for you and me, here, now so that He can speak His word to you and me through His spirit, bringing His word to life. That’s why the stuff that’s in the Bible isn’t dry or stuffy or irrelevant, it’s here and now. God’s words are life.

But I also believe that, just like we need to learn to communicate with people, we need to learn to communicate with God. His chosen thing, the Bible, is 66 different books written by different people in different cultures and you know, in different styles of literature.

We’re going to look at some of those styles or genre today because it’s a simple thing that, once we understand, makes His word the Bible a whole bunch more accessible.

That was my experience, I used to read it as though it was all the same and it’s plainly not. Let’s look at some of the different genre of literature in the Bible. The first and in a sense the most obvious is the narrative style.

What’s a narrative? Well, narrative’s a story and lots and lots of the Bible is a narrative account of what actually happened. The Old Testament is full of historical accounts of Israel and how God dealt with them and how they constantly turned away from God and how He brought them back to Himself.

Now some people dismiss the narratives as fables, they’re sort of allegories from which we can learn, you know like Aesop’s fables. Well I don’t, this is the story of God and His people and when we read the historical accounts of what happened we learn who God is and how He behaves and what He honours and what He rejects.

Last week on the program we saw that the Bible is really about four things. Who God is, what His plans and purposes are, who we are and how we can respond. You know something; in the narratives, in the stories you learn all of those things, whether it’s in the Old Testament historical narratives like Judges and Kings and Chronicles or in the New Testament narratives, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts. We should never dismiss these as being fiction.

Jesus clearly believed in the Old Testament narratives. Those narratives hold themselves out to be true accounts and if this is Gods word it must be true otherwise Gods a fraud. However miraculous they might appear they aren’t meant to be taken as fables, they are meant to be taken as a matter of historical fact.

Now another form that you find in the Bible is poetry, you see a lot of that. Whenever we see words in the Bible that are kind of indented rather than them being left aligned, what we’re reading is poetry or songs. The book of Psalms in the Old Testament is basically the Hebrew hymn book and prayer book. It’s people who have written things to pray to God or to worship God. It’s a place where we discover God through the response of His people. It’s inspirational, it’s uplifting and it’s real.

I mean, there are so many Psalms people think of the book of Psalms as being the book of praise but there are more psalms of lament, there are more psalms saying, ‘God, woe is me’ than there are actually of praise and the reason that this poetry is so wonderful is we discover God in the responses of people. It’s almost like interviews, you know you get to sit down and say to someone, ‘Well what do you think about God? How has God impacted on your life?’ and that’s what this poetry is all about’.

Another sort are what is called prophetic writings. In the Old Testament they’re the books of the prophets, people like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea and Micah, all those guys and in the New Testament, you’ve got an equivalent which are the letters of people like Paul and Peter and John. Men inspired by God to speak God’s will directly to His people.

The Old Testament prophetic writings were calling God’s people back to Him. They were looking at what God’s people were doing, seeing how they were transgressing and writing to call them back to God.

In the New Testament you see letters to Church’s, like to the Roman Church and Corinthian Church and the Ephesian Church and in some cases, to individuals like Timothy. Now these are important documents because these are God’s prophets writing God’s will and speaking God’s words and these prophetic writings are places where we really need to sit up and listen and the last sort are the apocryphal writings, now its’ kind of a strange one because there’s no real obvious parallel in our culture.

The Hebrews, the Jews had a very picture oriented culture. They loved word pictures to evoke emotions and to teach concepts and ideas. You see a bit of that in Ezekiel in the Old Testament and certainly in Revelations, the last book of the Bible in the New Testament.

Now it’s easy to try and take these and cut them up into little bits to understand them and say, ‘well God means all this stuff literally’. Now don’t get me wrong, much of the Bible like the narrative genre is meant to be taken literally but you can’t quite do that with apocryphal writings.

The book of Revelation for instance, kind of paints this picture and sometimes when you read it, (have a read through Revelation), some of it is really weird, I mean some of its so far, it’s God opening up heaven and showing us what heaven is like and where everything is headed. And the writer, John, paints a picture and what we need to do is to stand back and look at the picture as a whole and say, ‘okay God, what are you saying through this whole picture?’

There are different parts in the Bible, different genre just like in the media today. When we realise the same is true across the 66 books of the Bible, all of a sudden they make a bit more sense, don’t you think?

I have to tell you, that thing they call the Bible was a real problem for me. I mean, first coming to grips with the fact that it is what it says that it is, the Word of God but then, just getting into it.

Its 66 separate books written over about 1,500 years in different times, in different places and different cultures. So there are words and names and places and concepts and ways of thinking. Well we’re not always familiar with them.

We’re continuing in our series ‘Reading the Bible for all it’s Worth’ and today, we’re going to get down and really practical on just how to get into the Bible.

Over the years I’ve discovered a few very simple helps or resources that have made such a difference and it turns out there’s a whole bunch of people much smarter than me who have done some great research and put the information together in such easy usable ways and all their work makes getting into Gods word, the Bible, so much easier for us. Today I just want to share some of those resources with you.

I remember a dozen or so years ago, just after I became a Christian, I started attending a tiny little Baptist Church and our pastor Phil was a passionate and gifted Bible teacher and that man had a great impact on my life.

At the same time the Church used to have these little home studies and we’d meet one night a week in someone’s house and you know half a dozen or a dozen of us would gather together. And at the time, the particular little home fellowship that I’d joined, was studying the Old Testament book of Hosea.

So we’d lob in there one evening and we’d have a cup of tea and some fellowship and then we’d sit down and do a Bible study together. And right through that book, over and over and over again, Hosea talks about Ephraim. And I remember asking these people, most of them had been Christians for a good many years, “Okay, who or what is this Ephraim thing? “

I mean, Hosea kept talking about it. And it seemed to be quite central to what he was saying but you know something, no-one could tell me who or what Ephraim was. Now it turns out the Ephraim was one of the tribes of Israel, Ephraim was one of Josephs sons and there’s a whole history around this tribe and how they rebelled against God but we didn’t know that in that Bible study so a lot of what God was saying to us, through this book of Hosea, well it was frankly lost on us.

Actually you know, it happens quite a bit. The story of the Good Samaritan. It loses its whole meaning if we don’t understand the Samaritans and who they were and what the Jews thought of them.

Now when Jesus told that story to the assembled masses they all knew the Samaritan story but we don’t, it’s not natural to us. And there are names and places and concepts and ways of thinking that are foreign to us in the Bible. It might have made sense to the people back then but not to us now.

I remember coming to grips with the Jewish system of blood sacrifice in the Old Testament. Now I kind of think about blood sacrifice and it’s pretty ghastly to me here and now but it’s something I really had to understand to understand what Jesus did for me on the cross.

So I decided I was going to find out, not just skim the surface, not read through a story and have them talk about Ephraim or Samaria or all these other things I didn’t know about and miss out on what God was trying to say to me through the story.

Now these accounts were written such a long time ago and Gods preserved them and kept them accurate for us here and now but there is indeed a gap of culture and time in history that we have to bridge to understand completely what’s happening in what’s been written. I mean after all if the Bible is God’s word and if God is speaking to us through the Bible, I decided I needed to know what He was saying. And it’s not as hard as it first seemed.

I’m going to talk about a handful of really simple resources that made absolutely the world of difference. The first one was my Bible, a simple English translation, not the King James with the ‘thees’ and ‘thou arts’, there are so many good contemporary language translations.

The New International Version’s really popular, I happen to use the New Revised Standard version. There’s a translation called The Message which is really in here and now language. Which ones the best one? The one you’re going to read.

You can get a thing called A Study Bible, it’s got not just the words of the Bible but it’s also got a huge amount of resources packed into it. It explains the meanings of different words, there are notes and maps and cross references. They’re really good, they don’t cost a whole bunch more than a Bible with just the Bible words and if you want to do more than just skim across the surface, it’s really good to have one of those – a Study Bible.

One of the most helpful features in a Study Bible is a summary of each book, who wrote it, when, to whom and why and context is so important isn’t it? Before I read Ephesians I read four or five paragraphs in my Study Bible which explains the context and all of a sudden the book of Ephesians made a whole bunch more sense to me. A Study Bible is a really worthwhile investment and it’s not much more than an ordinary Bible. You can get one from a Christian bookshop or you can buy one online.

The second resource was my Bible dictionary. Now I happen to purchase a Bible dictionary called the Holman Bible Dictionary, its one volume. You can get Bible dictionaries that are 25 volumes, this is one volume and it has pictures. So when I was reading and it talked about the Temple in the Bible I could go to my Bible dictionary and look at it and see a picture and plans and explaining the different parts and I read a few paragraphs and in just a few minutes, I’m there, I understand what the writers saying about the Temple, about the Holy of Holies, wow!

When the Bible talks about Ephraim I look it up, half a column, three minutes, I know who or what Ephraim is. The story of the Good Samaritan; who were the Samaritans? What was their relationship to the Jews? Ah! That’s what Jesus meant by the story of the Good Samaritan. I know, not everyone can afford, I mean for me it was about $40.00 or $50.00 I think I paid for my Bible dictionary but it is one of the best resource investments I have ever, ever made.

And lastly, the third one was a Bible timeline. Its one of these things you can fold out and it’s about four pages wide that show the chronology of the Bible. You read about King David, when was he king? Who was King before him? Who was King after him? What else was going on? Which prophets were writing when David was alive? And all of a sudden you put the whole Bible thing in time sequence, that’s huge.

I mean when I started reading the Bible it was just one big mish mash to me, you know there was no sense of chronology or who lived before whom or what happened after what. I still use it today, it cost me like $6.00 or something. It’s a simple resource but it meant that I could quickly and easily bridge the time and culture gap, it filled in the blanks and when we do that, you know Gods word is so much richer.

Three simple resources, my own Study Bible, a Bible dictionary and a Bible time line. Now maybe you can’t afford those but there’s a whole bunch of that material now available online. Here are two stunning websites, if you’re online, one of them is www.biblegateway.com and you can compare different translations of Bibles online, it’s a great site. The other one is www.studylight.org, it has Bible dictionaries online, it has meanings of Greek and Hebrew words, it has so many good study resources.

Let me ask you? Do you take Jesus seriously? If you do then we need to take the Bible seriously. And for just a small investment on our part in just a few simple resources, they pay such huge dividends in our lives in hearing and understanding what God is saying to us today through His word.

If you spend anytime with me here on the program one of the things you will know is that I’m really passionate about God and what He has to say. Not in a religious sort of a way but in a Jesus sort of way.

The thing that really strikes me about Jesus when you read about Him is how plain and matter of fact He was about sharing with people who God is and what His plans are. Over these last couple of weeks on the program we’ve been looking at what it means to read the Bible for all its worth.

It’s God’s word you know, its God speaking to us and He means to challenge us and stretch us and encourage us and bless us through His word. One of the ways that many people get God’s word into them is by listening to people speak. Radio programs like this or on television and of course, if you attend a Church but how can preaching and teaching be a part of really getting God’s word into us.

Over these last fifteen years or so, the time that I’ve been a Christian, I’ve seen two things. On the one hand I have been so blessed by some really good teaching and on the other hand I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff too.

In my very first Church, a little Baptist Church, our pastor’s name was Phil Littlejohn. Now Phil was a gifted teacher, he just had this ability to open Gods word and speak God stuff into my heart. I learned later this is a real gifting, different people have different gifts and abilities given to them by God and teaching is one of them.

Jesus had that, I mean time and time again when He opened His mouth people were amazed because He spoke with a plainness and a power and an authority that they hadn’t heard before. And you know something, He didn’t always tell them things they wanted to hear. “Love your enemy.” “Take up your cross.” “Follow me.” “Lose your life for my sake and you’ll gain your life.” It’s not exactly good marketing, I mean the spin merchants would not have let Him get up and speak like that today.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at how Jesus preached. It’s real, it’s powerful. It’s balanced on the one hand and radical on the other and it sort of, it cuts through all the selfish rubbish we go on right to the heart of what God wants to talk about. And my prayer is that when I discharge my gifting to teach in my own way I’ll try and teach like He did.

But you know I’ve also sat in Churches over the years and listened to people drone on with dry and theoretical, completely cerebral stuff that’s not relevant to my life. On more than one occasion my wife Jacqui and I have walked out of a Church and two hours later we look at each other and ask, “Do you remember what he talked about?” And the answer is, “No, not really.”

Or you listen to other speakers and there are lots of words and they’re very entertaining and they make people laugh and they tickle their ears with great stories and things they want to hear and they yell and people slap them on the back afterwards, ‘praise the Lord’ but I’ve been to some of those too and well, I felt like I’d been at the Lords table to be fed but I left hungry and empty.

The flip side of that is some other preachers, I remember years later what they were talking about, years later in difficult circumstances God seems to bring into my heart the words they spoke to me. A woman called Joyce Meyer is like that, I’ve watched a lot of Joyce Meyers teaching on the television. She’s had a big influence on my walk with the Lord. God has used her mightily in my transformation.

Preaching and teaching is one of the ways that God gets His word into us. You see it right through the Bible; He uses men and women to speak to others, to teach them. I mean the Samaritan woman at the well; she went and told people about Jesus, Paul and Peter and all the other guys that went out preaching. The question is, how do you get the most out of that? How does preaching and teaching play a part in us reading our Bible for all its worth?

Well, here are just some of my observations. I see people come into a Church on a Sunday and listen to the preacher and they don’t take any notes and they don’t bring their Bible and they don’t follow what he’s saying or she’s saying in the Bible.

I take my Bible with me, I open my Bible and I read what the preacher is talking about. People can speak all the words that they like, everything that they say, they can crack jokes and have great stories – the most important thing is Gods word, the most important thing is what God is saying. And secondly I take some notes. I mean you can’t even get through kindergarten on a half an hour a week without taking notes.

You know, if we take God seriously, if we want to follow Jesus and really take that seriously, you know something, we’ve got to take learning seriously.

Do you know what a disciple is? A disciple is a learner, that’s what the word disciple means, to be a learner and thirdly, the thing I do when I’ve listened to some really good preaching is I spend some time afterwards in Gods word looking at it for myself. Sometimes it’s not until you get home and you pray it through and you spend some time in that passage and maybe looking at some other related ones, that God really drops it into your spirit.

I mean, with Joyce Meyer, there’s one profound passage I’ve heard her teach on many many times. Its 1 Peter, chapter 5, verse 6 and 7. It says this,

“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God so that He may exalt you in due time. Cast all your cares on Him because He cares for you.”

Now I’ve learnt so much from what God taught me through her in this passage but I’ve learned just as much and maybe even more from pondering and praying over this passage and looking at other related passages.

Learning in my heart – that’s when I humble myself, when I get off my little tin throne and just walk each day faithfully with God. He’s the one who later opens the doors; He’s the one that’s got an eternity ready for me.

In fifteen years as I’ve looked at it I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of preaching; dead and alive. Dead preaching is full of words, it’s boring and dry or maybe it’s hyped up and frothy and bubbly but at the end of the day there’s no eternal food there because Gods Word is not being preached in the power of the Holy Spirit.

It’s only Gods Word by the power of the Spirit that can change us. I can’t change you, I can’t say things in my own strength that will change your life but if I’m speaking Gods stuff, if the Holy Spirit somehow takes God’s stuff and puts it into your heart, that’s when change happens and only God can do that.

Can I encourage you to be discerning as to what you listen to? Go and listen to the ones that are proclaiming Gods word to you. You know something, I have nothing to give you except what He gives me from His word and His word is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword. It’s capable of separating the soul from the spirit like, like the joints from the marrow. God’s word is able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the human heart.

Go and have a read about how Jesus preached in Matthew or Mark or Luke or John, the first four books of the New Testament. It’s edgy and profound and real and dealing with the hard issues, and find yourself some preachers like that. Not ones that just entertain and tickle your ears with things you want to hear. The ones that open up God’s Word and say, ‘Well, what’s God saying to us today’ and then take what they said home, open your Bible there where they left off and go and read the Bible for all it’s worth.

Habits are funny things, they say if you can do something that you’ve never done before every day for about 30 days or a month straight then you’ll turn it into a habit or the flip side is, if you can take something that you’ve been doing and stop doing it every day for a month then you’ve broken that habit. Habit is a powerful thing; it’s a pattern of behaviour that we repeat over and over again. We get so in that groove that we can’t help ourselves, we just do it.

Good habits: they’re great things to get into, exercise, healthy eating. Those sorts of habits bring life in all of its abundance. Bad habits: smoking, over eating, lack of exercise, well they drive us to ruin and destruction. One of the best habits that we can get into is spending time in Gods word, the Bible, every day for ourselves.

‘Well Berni, that’s easy for you to do. You’re a preacher; you get paid to spend time in Gods word.’ You know what I’ve discovered? I can spend time in Gods word to preach and not consume it myself. It’s really easy for someone who’s a preacher to read through a passage in the Bible and you immediately see three good radio programs and start taking notes and write, ‘there’s a series, I can do that.’ Early on what I discovered I was doing was, I was reading the Bible to preach and God convicted me that I had to spend some time in His word to hear what He has to say to me, not just to you.

My habit is that I get up early in the morning and I systematically read through books of the Bible. Right at the moment I’m in Luke. And sometimes I actually read quite slowly, I read in small chunks and I spend quite a bit of time pondering and asking God, ‘Lord, what are saying here about who you are and what your plans are and who I am and how you want me to respond?’ I love to tarry, to wait on God and sure, some of the things I read will end up in programs but primarily I do that for me because it’s my spiritual food.

Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness, He was starving because He had fasted for 40 days and the devil said to Him,

“If you’re the Son of God, turn these stones into bread.”

Jesus quoted back Gods word to the devil. He said,

“We don’t live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

Jesus had Gods word in Him because He had learned it. It’s like food, it’s like sustenance, you need food every day, we don’t just eat one day a week, we eat 3 meals a day if we can. And Gods word is like that. We need to get Gods word into us to feed us and encourage us and sustain us and renew us, day by day by day.

Think of all the stuff we take in. TV, radio, newspapers, books, what other people say, what other people think, advertising. All these messages and inputs flooding into our lives and we kind of sift them and unconsciously we accept so much of that stuff.

Let me ask you a question? If we spend two hours a day watching television and just a half an hour a week hearing Gods word, who are we going to end up believing? If we spend a lifetime taking in and accepting what everybody else has to say and just a small fraction of that time listening to what God has to say, who are we going to end up believing? God and Gods word or the world?

You know God and Gods word are absolutely inseparable. When God speaks, things happen. Read Genesis, chapter 1,

“Then God said, ‘Let there be light’. And there was and behold it was good.”

He spoke all of creation into existence. There is power in Gods word, power to change, power to heal, power to encourage, power to resist temptation, power to mature us and grow us so that we’ll be lacking in nothing. But if we never go near Gods word for ourselves chances are we’ll never experience that power.

People often misquote Jesus. They say that Jesus said,

“The truth will set you free.”

But you know when you only take half of the quote it’s as bad as misquoting because that’s only half of what He said. What Jesus actually said was,

“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

You see, unless you know the truth, unless we’re in Gods word and Gods word is becoming a part of who we are then the truth isn’t going to set us free.

Husbands, if you never sit down and listen to your wife, you won’t know what she’s feeling and thinking and going through. And wives, if you never sit down and listen to your husbands you will never know what he’s feeling and thinking and going through. Well der!!

Why would it be any different with God and Gods word? If we never sit down and just read a little bit of what God is saying and rest and pray and open our hearts and our ears and our souls and say, ‘God, what are you saying to me today?’ If we never do that, we’re never going to hear what Gods whispering.

And so often, God speaks with a small, still voice and if there’s all this other racket and jack hammering and television blaring away going on in the background, we’re going to miss Him. Why would we think that even though Gods gone to all this trouble to write and preserve the Bible for us, why would we think, “Oh but I never have to go there, I’m okay Jack”?

Are you serious about a relationship with Jesus? I mean are you really serious? Are you serious about laying down your life and taking up your cross and following Him? Now I’m not just talking about some ‘half baked insurance policy just in case there’s a heaven and hell’ kind of faith. I’m talking about that life changing, life transforming decision, ‘I want to follow Jesus and be like Him no matter what the cost.’ Are you really serious? Do you want to be a disciple of Jesus, a learner of Jesus, a follower of Jesus?

Then pick up your Bible every day as a regular part of your prayer and your fellowship with God and before you even open it pray,

‘Lord God, God/Holy Spirit. I’m about to come into your word, I’m coming here to listen to you speak. I’m coming here in faith believing that today you are going to feed me through your word. Open my heart, shine your light in and illuminate it with your love. Put your finger on my sin, Lord deal with me through your word in Jesus name I pray. Amen.’

Then open the Bible expecting to receive in faith.

As we do that every day some days will be awesome, other days might be a bit ‘ho hum’ but as time goes by, as we read our Bibles for all they’re worth, He will grow a harvest of fruit in us that we can’t begin to imagine right now.

I know, I was broken, I was lost, I was hopeless and I was completely at the end of my tether in my life when I gave my life to Jesus Christ fifteen years ago and when I first started my daily habit of picking up the Bible and reading it I was a mess. Today, I am not perfect, I am still a work in progress for God but I have so much joy in my heart. God has and is transforming me. Go on, read the Bible for all it’s worth, today, tomorrow, every day.