Holding onto treasure

This week in Calm my Anxious Heart, we're reading about letting go of What ifs and entrusting our future to God. This is a powerful vision: What if I could let go of my What ifs and let God take care of the future? I mean, I think for most people, that would be a life changing gift to be able to let go of anxiety about what might happen. So how do we get there?

Scripture memory is a discipline that helps us trust God, but everyone (including me) wants to skip it because its corny or hard. This is unfortunate. When I think about pivotal times of deep emotional stress, it helped to have a truth from scripture to hold up to the lies I wanted to believe. It's not that I didn't wander off into dark places, but when I got there, I had light.

I believe that we should treat God's word like treasure. When it comes to treasure, people have given their lives hunting for treasure, searching for gold, searching for oil. But followers of Jesus are told that:

[The decrees of the Lord] are more precious than gold,
than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
than honey from the honeycomb.
~Psalm 19:10

This is a guarantee. The word of God is freely available to us in the Bible, and its value is beyond measure. The question is not, "Is the Bible worth hanging onto?" The question is, "How to I keep this?"

The Navigators have an illustration, which I've replicated at the top of this post, that describes five ways of holding onto the Bible: hearing, reading, studying, memorizing, and meditating. Notice that the two fingers most important for gripping, the index finger and thumb, are memorizing and meditating.

You can get a long way to hanging onto your treasure by memorizing and meditating on God's word. Worry is simply mediating on an undesired outcome. Holy meditation is "worrying" on God's goodness and promises. Having scripture already memorized helps. I mean, nobody sits there and writes out their worry list for the day. The worries are already there. So if we're going to "worry" on scripture, it helps if it's already in our minds.

Here are a few verses that have been helpful for me, (and were part of the Topical Memory System that I learned in 1998.)

Isaiah 41:10 – “ So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous hand.”

Isaiah 26:3 – “ You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.”

Luke 9:23 – “Then he said to them all,” If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up the cross daily and follow me.”

Mark 10:45 – “ For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as ransom for many.”

John 13:34-35 – “ A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love on another.”

Galatians 6:9-10 – “ Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who
belong to the family of believers.”

Hang on to your treasure. "Worry" on the word of God. 

Preparing for Lent

After a few years of celebrating Advent and Lent, I am finding them a nice "spiritual corrective". If in Advent, I am taught a particular lesson, I have a few months between Christmas and Lent to apply that to life, and then Lent starts and I get to reexamine my apprenticeship with Jesus and then a bit more than half a year to practice before another Advent and another season of reflection. Anyways, Lent this year is rather late and starts tomorrow, March 5th.

Lent is frequently associated with "giving up" something of removing something such as meat from the diet, or sweets, or tv, or social media. People have lots of reactions to this. One useful voice in the commentary is this talk on asceticism by Dallas Willard. The language is a bit heady, but it's worth the work to get through.

Lent is typically conceived of as the 46 day period between Ash Wednesday and the Saturday before Easter. A number of people have recommended using the time for focused reading in the Bible. Here are a few plans I found.

Small: The Gospels
Medium: The New Testament
Large: The whole Bible

For something different: Readings from the Church Fathers
EDIT: The above link lists a website for the readings that is incorrect. It should be http://www.churchyear.net/lentfatherscomplete.pdf


God bless you as we journey toward Easter.

Why I don't study the Bible (much anymore)

Short answer: Stalking is not friendly.

Long answer:
Without going into details other than that I an a sinner saved by the grace of God, I was a stalker for a while. Not in a call-the-cops kind of way, but definitely in a that's-kind-of-creepy kind of way. And when I think about why I, as a bona fide nerd, have turned away from study of the Bible, the best answer I can come up with is that stalking is not actually the same as friend-ing.

I love to stalk ideas. Right now I'm on the hunt to find out what the latest and greatest is on multilingual brains. Exciting stuff. But when it comes to God, at some point I realized that rather than stalking God, I should accept the invitation to be his friend.

In my stalking God phase, I could geek out on Greek verb forms and textual criticism and commentaries and translations and I could tell you a lot about some passage or idea in the Bible, but there was a disconnect between that and submitting my life to Jesus as King. Kind of like knowing when someone would wake up and waiting for the light to go on in their window versus actually, I dunno, meeting up for breakfast.

Eugene Peterson writes books with provocative titles including Eat This Book about which I remember just about nothing except the encouragement to be nourished by the word of God. This for me is the much healthier way to engage the Bible. The Bible is not a mysterious text that I need to intellectually know and master. Instead, it is one way that the infinite God has chosen to reveal his work and nature to me.

First, there are other ways to interact with God; prayer, service, the sacraments like baptism, marriage, and communion, signs and wonders, the list does rather go on. As a cerebral person, I had to learn that God is in my life not my head. Second, God is beyond our comprehension so "mastery" of the Bible will not lead to mastery of God or mastery of our understanding of God. Instead, as the Holy Spirit guides our reading we can be drawn to know our loving Creator in an intimate, meaning close to our hearts, fashion.

This is not to say that no one should study the Bible ever. I have benefited greatly from reading the work of Bible scholars past and present. I assume they have been given a different grace than I and are not creepy God stalkers.

And I think that all believers would benefit from having a few tools to help them understand the Bible which was written long ago for a culture rather different from ours, and that's before you even step foot in the translation wars. A few tools is a world apart from having a dedicated detached workshop.

The great commandments are to love God with everything and to love others as ourselves. This may require the occasional in-depth study, but I think more often it is staying near God, saying yes to Jesus in big and small ways, day after day.