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Can we be brutally honest for a moment?
Did you read your Bible this morning? Confession: me either.
“Wake up early in the morning before the real day begins and read the Bible to help you fight the good fight.” Who wrote that, anyway? Probably not the yahoo whose car alarm woke me up at 6 this morning. I remember someone told me that Martin Luther responded to the question of how to deal with a busy day as such: “Work, work, from early until late. In fact, I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” What a keener.
Do you know what my Bible looks like to me at 6 am? “But who so loketh in the parfaict lawe of libertie and continueth ther in (yf he be not a forgetfull hearer but a doar of ye worke) the same shall be happie in his dede” (James 1:25, the really old KJV). Now envision that through eyes encrusted with salad croutons and a mind still fresh with a dream where blue-colored people take over Sunday morning worship singing bluegrass.
Here's another pop music reference. “Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ ‘cause it’s free,” are words from a Kris Kristofferson song. It means the good things in life come with a price. A $100 laptop sounds great until you try and edit a video on it. An iThingy from Apple always costs twice as much as anything else, but it also sells better than anything else because it works better. Organic fruit will cost you twice as much as the corner-store-pesticide version. You get the idea.
It’s the same with reading the Bible. If you spend the entire day shuttling children from the bedroom to the bathroom, then from the kitchen to the minivan, where you further taxi them from house to school, school to soccer, soccer to band practice and then onto bed, you have little left to give to that forgotten Book sitting under a tower of unpaid bills and forgotten appointment slips. Our lives bulge with jobs and school and church functions. On the weekends, to assuage our guilt, we sign up for a workshop to have some guy tell us how to make our lives less busy.
When was the last time you really read the Bible?
The same verse I listed above in Old English reads this way in the New International Version: “But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do” (James 1:25).
Ever read something and five minutes later forget what you just read? I guess that’s what this verse is getting at. God wants us to know his word, not just read it. I never knew my US Social Security Number off by heart until I joined the Army, where you say it and write more often than you say words like “and” or “but”. Reading the Bible like that comes with a price. It means getting up earlier or staying awake later. It means re-organizing the chaotic sock drawers of our lives. We want the Bible on top of the tower and not on the bottom.
Why?
Because the verse says that we will blessed in what we do. I don’t know about you, but I am a huge fan of blessings. I want my efforts to succeed, my words to change lives and my thoughts to please God. Even when life throws me curve balls, I want to be the guy who can say “Praise the Lord” without gritting my teeth when I say it. Don’t you?
So, Mr. Luther, I still think you were from a different planet, but I guess setting the alarm an hour earlier probably won’t kill me and I have something you probably never had: coffee. Read it like you mean it people, and the Lord will bless you.
I guess it’s time for me to thank my neighbor for his car alarm now.