Learning to Believe what is True, Love what is Beautiful, and Do what is Good

You’ve now had a few weeks to kick start whatever plan for reading your bible this year you may or may not have taken up. I wanted to take a second, before any of you get to the usual Leviticus moment where you abandon such plans in the name of not encountering anymore discharging sores and what to do about them (both with and without hairs in them), to encourage you to keep at it, and if you haven’t started - to begin. Here are three marvelous reasons to read your bible daily:

1. The Bible is True.
   We live in an age that has lashed upon everyone the terrible burden of discovering “my truth.” We are given a task that no human being was ever meant to take up, namely the task of defining what the world is, what we are, and who God is according to our own instincts and feelings. While many would assert that such a task is the definition of freedom, it is not. It is a weight no one can carry. We were made to discover what is true. We were made to believe what is true. We were made to learn to love what is true. In other words, truth was never meant to be some construct fitted to your own imaginations, it is something fixed and objective and real. It is outside of you. The task we have been made for is to see this truth and to live with the grain of this truth. God hasn’t left us in the dark to grope around until we find it. He wrote a book. We can read it. We can know what it says. Now, to be sure you can spend the rest of your life plumbing its depths, but what is true about the world, about you, about your neighbor, God and how we ware to live in the world can be known. This is a marvelous gift.
   

2. The Bible is Beautiful.
   Here is a book that reveals to us the beauty of God, of history, of redemption. Like all great beauties we must learn to receive it, to see it, to appreciate it. Here is a book filled with marvelous vistas, and startling detail as well as horrifying beauty and shocking grace. But here is a beauty by which we can learn to see and love all beauty again. We can learn to correct our own loves as we recoil before what ought to lead us to delight and find mundane that which should shock us with wonder. Read the Bible to see and delight in the very beauty of God.
   

3. The Bible is Good.
   In a world where there is much confusion and complexity over what the good life is, we need a word - an authoritative word to dispel this fog of madness. It is the Bible’s ethical clarity and even simplicity that jars us. When there is confusion over what a man or a woman is, when there is confusion over the morality of our own desires, and we’ve lost a sense of what is just and unjust we need God to speak. In the Bible, God tells us stories, he gives us commands, he gives stark warnings and he makes promises. And all of it is grounded in grace upon grace and saturated with mercy. God has given us a book that gives rich instruction in the good life.
   

A few warnings…. The Bible is all of these things, but it is not simple in the way that it delivers these things. It is rich and nuanced and shocking and counterintuitive. A lifetime of study yields countless insights and wisdom and understanding and yet it rewards all our real attempts to understand and to see. But as with everything else in this life, it is a gift to be received by faith. God speaks and calls us to believe - every word of it - and this can seem impossibly hard. We have been taught to trust our own intuitions, our own emotions and modern, secular ways of organizing the world. But the Bible confronts us on almost every page. In this book our God calls us to turn away from trusting to our own views, preferences, intuitions and to listen to him, to receive from him, and to commune with him.

Practical Considerations

Where to start? There are as many bible-reading plans as one can imagine. I don’t think it matters much whether you read the Bible in a year or in three. What matters is that you read it, all of it. Listen to it. Read it. Slowly or quickly. But take and read. Read it aloud, read it silently. Read it as a family. Read it with your spouse. Read it with friends. If you get behind, or miss a few days or weeks, don’t wallow in discouragement or shame - begin again. As you read, learn to listen, to pay attention and to observe. Let the Bible shock you. Let it frighten you. Let it comfort you and confront you all at the same time.

There are riches in these pages that will utterly transform everything about you. Come and see. Come and believe. Come and behold the God of all the earth.