Our Delightful Duty

I read the Bible a lot. As a minister, that should probably be expected. But sometimes I ask myself the question, how am I reading God's Word? What do I receive for my time in the Bible?

These questions have become real to me as I have been reading David Saxton's book, God's Battle Plan for the Mind: The Puritan Practice of Biblical Meditation. This book is a map to what the Puritans have written about the Biblical meditation, which is quite a dense topic. And while reading this book I have come to a few realizations about my own Bible reading that I would like to share over the next few days.

First, I have to tell myself that daily Bible reading and meditation is not the same thing as sermon preparation. This is not to say that my daily Bible reading plays no role as I go to the study to prepare the week's message. Thinking and applying the Bible to situations each day, what the Puritans call 'occasional meditation,' is valuable in providing illustrations for a sermon. For example, when I see a beautiful sunrise, I can think to myself the opening words of Psalm 19, "The heavens declare the glory of God..." Such moments are important for the work of writing and preaching sermons.

But Bible reading each day is not about trying to find nuggets to preach about. One of my problems is that I try to figure out how to preach each passage I read. And while a valuable exercise, Saxton tells us that Biblical meditation should be about letting God's word get into your mind, and your heart. The question I often ask is "What can I do with this passage?" The meditation question should be, "What does this passage do to you?" And it leads us to meditate on things that can be difficult. Sin and holiness. Sexual sin and marriage. Death and life. It involves looking past ourselves to what God is saying through this passage. As Saxton writes,

Without a return to the delightful duty of biblical meditation, the believer will continue to handle God’s Word merely intellectually. (location 99, Kindle)

Delightful duty...what a beautiful way to describe our time God's word.  This book is telling me to get past my brain and to open up my whole self to God, his Spirit and his Word. Get past using the Bible as the text-book for preaching, and embrace it wholeheartedly as God's Word, now and always.