Every year millions of us write out New Year's resolutions for the coming year. Our resolutions may involve losing weight, exercising more, breaking a bad habit; and, for Christians, growing in our relationship with God. We Christians are given an extraordinary instrument of change - namely, the Word of God. God has personally communicated to us in the scriptures. When we open-heartedly receive God's self-revelation, we can expect to be changed. Here are some biblical pictures that express the transforming power of God's Word:
• Is not my Word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock into pieces (Jeremiah 23.29)? When God speaks to us, it is like an intense and penetrating fire. God's voice is an announcement that shatters conventional ideas and burns up comfortable ways of thinking.
• The grass withers, the flower fades; but the Word of our God will stand forever (Isaiah 40.8). In our world there is an abundance of words, many of them cheap and fleeting, but God's Word is permanently valid and unalterably true. The Word of God will stand forever when all else passes away.
• The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4.12). Like a piercing sword, God's Word penetrates into the deepest part of our being. Everything about us is laid bare and nothing in us is hidden from God's penetrating power.
• The sower sows the Word...and these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the Word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty, sixty and a hundred fold (Mark 4.14-20). The Word of God not only brings about conversion, but as it is sown into our lives it produces the incredible result of a transformed character us.
In other words, as we take in the Word of God we will not remain the same. Certain things in our lives will burn away: impatience, anxiety, bitterness, lust, greed, jealousy, selfish ambition and the like. Sometimes the changes are sudden and powerful. At other times there is a more subtle and gradual change. And as God's Word works its full effect, we will see more of the fruit of the Spirit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5.22-23).
Take In God's Word In The New Year
There are three major ways for us to take in God's Word:
1. Read the Bible - Many Christians have spent their entire Christian lives without ever reading the entire Bible through even once. This is scandalous! In an age when God has graciously allowed us to possess God's self-revelation in our own language (indeed, in dozens of modern translations), it is to our shame that many of us who have been Christians for years and who regularly read other things, have not read the whole Bible from cover to cover. A simple remedy for this would be to pick up Vineyard Columbus' Reading Plan and to commit to read the Bible this year.
Great Bible reading programs are also available online through the You-Version Bible App. You-Version has the Bible in almost every modern Bible translation imaginable. And it has lots of great Bible reading programs.
2. Study the Bible - Study goes beyond simply reading the text.To study, we read for understanding and assimilation. There are several questions that every student of the Bible ought to be asking: First, what does the text actually say? That's the observation question. Who is speaking? To whom are they speaking? What's going on in the text? What are the actual words? What is the grammar? Second, what does the text mean? That's the interpretation question. What did the original authors intend to express? A good study Bible or a commentary can assist us to find out what the text actually meant to the original hearers. Third, what does this text say to me? What do I want to say to God after reading this text? These are the application questions. How does this text make a difference in my life?
One helpful way to study the Bible is to use an aid such as the book, Search the Scriptures. Search the Scriptures breaks up the Bible into daily, digestible reading portions and asks thoughtful questions that force the reader to observe, interpret, and apply each daily portion of scripture. I personally used the book, Search the Scriptures, for years. It was one of the ways that I studied every text in the Bible over the course of a few years.
3. Meditate on the Bible - Over the past nine months I have, withthe help of a personal coach, been going through the spiritualexercises of St. Ignatius (a 16th century Christian). St.Ignatius taught Bible readers how to use our imaginations inorder to make scriptural meditation come alive. This worksparticularly well as we read through the gospels. We are to consider our five bodily senses. If we were present in the scene, what might we see? What might we hear? What might we smell? What might we taste, touch and experience, if wewere actually there listening to, or watching Jesus?
Ignatius encourages us to go beneath our thoughts and to get in touch with our feelings. For example, if we were meditating upon Mk 4:35-41 (in which Jesus calms the storm on the Sea of Galilee), we might ask ourselves: what would I be feeling, if I heard Jesus say to me, "Come with me to the other side of the lake?" What would it be like to be in an old fishing boat, if a furious storm came up? What would I see? What would I smell? What would my feelings be? What would I think and feel if I saw Jesus asleep in the boat? What would my fears be? How would I respond, if I saw Jesus stand up in the boat and shout, "Quiet, be still!" and I saw the wind and the waves immediately calm down? What might Jesus want to say to me about a storm that's going on in my life right now? What would I want to say to Jesus?
A great book to help you meditate upon the scriptures is Larry Warner's "Journey With Jesus".
This year let's go beyond New Year's resolutions. Let's embrace God's way of transformation by making a commitment to read, study, and meditate upon God's Word.