How not to read the Bible

For a very long time, I studied the bible with the exact wrong focus. I read the bible to see what it had to say for me, to me and about me. When I was in high school, I remember reading through the entire bible in a year, and guess what...I didn't remember a thing that I'd read. There would be days that I'd read a passage and 15 minutes later could not tell you one thing that I had read. The discipline that it took was God given for sure. But what good is discipline without affection? I walked away from that experience with no desire to pick up my bible on January 1 of the next year, and with no further understanding about the character of God. In my mind, I generalized the Old Testament as outdated and God as a higher being who essentially Jesus came to protect us from. I had no idea that every word of the Old Testament was pointing to Jesus. I've heard people say that the Old Testament God is an unloving, unforgiving "cranky" God, which is oh, so not true.

In the past year or two, I began approaching the bible in another way, taking myself out of the picture to see what it has to say about God...what a concept! I was (still am) embarressed with myself for taking so long in my Christian life to realize that I was reading the bible with the wrong motive. Our culture teaches all kinds of things that are self-promoting (take your pick)...that you're the center of the universe, that your happiness is essential, that the world revolves around you, that you should take the bull by the horns and conquer your dreams, that you deserve the best...So naturally, I approached almost everything in my life looking for what it had to offer to me...school, marriage, friendships, career, etc. I thought all of these things were aspects of my life to feed me...to fill me up...to complete me. How many of us go through life spending every waking moment seeking our own happiness, and focusing on one thing...number one.

So to be honest, my new approach to reading the bible took a lot of work at first. I had to pray initially that my focus would not be on myself. Sometimes I would read and try to interpret what God was trying to say to me specifically while I was reading, and then afterwards, try to come up with some divine message that God was speaking over my life. I'd have to stop, re-focus and remind myself that I'm reading the bible to learn about God, not about myself. Instead of focusing on what God is trying to say "to me", I'd focus on what God is trying to say "about himself". This new way of reading this book has made it come alive to me. While I do think that God has plenty of things to say to us and about us in the Bible, when your focus is on God and not on yourself, your affection for him will grow exponentially because He is so good.

So all that to say, I recently read part of 1 Kings that I found so encouraging. At this point the prophet Elijah has just in previous chapters been a part of God's ministry by predicting and ending a drought, miraculously providing oil and flour for a widow with nothing, raising a dead child back to life, and defeating the prophets of Baal in an offering contest (very cool...1 Kings 18:20-40). Elijah has clearly seen how powerful God is and in Chapter 19, he is running from the queen who wants to kill him. He asks the Lord to kill him. He feels defeated and only remembers his fear, none of the miracles that he's seen. He rests under a tree and an angel feeds him food to strengthen him for a 40 day journey where God will speak to him directly. What? A forty day journey ahead and he's at the point that he's so fearful and depressed that he wants to die! Why can't God just speak to him under the tree where he is right now! I love that it says "he ate, and drank, and went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb.".

I sometimes wonder why God won't just tell me what he wants me to know...without requiring a lot of pain, sacrifice, lonliness, etc on my part. Why oh why does he want me to go on a 40 day journey to a certain place when he could just tell me now? More specifically to me right now, why does he have to pull me out of my comfort zone where all my friends and family are, and move me across the country where I don't know anyone except my busy husband? Can't he just teach me something where I am? (Insert your own story of suffering or pain). I'm thinking it has a lot to do with the fact that God wants to provide for us. He wants to give us strength that we need for the journey. He wants us to know that we need him, He wants us to depend on Him. I still learn things about myself from scripture, even though it's no longer my main focus. The thing I learned about myself in this is that I'm a whiner. I easily become weak even after I've seen all the good that the Lord has done. The thing I've learned about God is that He still provides for us despite my weakness. He uses my weakness to make his glory bigger.