James’s Blog: Don’t Keep it Outside.

Here’s a quote that I came across last year, and I’ve really appreciated it. It’s from a guy called Andy Peck.

“As my old pastor used to say, it’s not how often we go through the Bible that counts, but whether the Bible goes through us.”

I like it, because it is clever, but also because it is insightful. The purpose of reading the Bible is not to consume, or to be filled with knowledge, but to be changed.

I have benefited greatly over the years from being familiar with the Bible. I’m a big believer in the value of memorising parts of it, especially in this age when we don’t have to memorise anything because it’s available to us 24/7 as long as we have the internet. It’s nice to have constant and immediate access to the Bible on our phones, but it’s not going to do us any good if it just remains at the end of our fingertips. We have to get it inside us.

I’ve been listening to the BEMA Podcast and one piece of advice I’ve heard on there is to not try memorising the Bible by piling all the verses on top of each another. If I decide that I want to memorise, for example, the book of Romans, I shouldn’t try and cram the whole book into my head so that I can reel off all sixteen chapters at once. Instead, I should memorise whatever size section I find manageable, and then move on to the next chunk, leaving the previous section alone. My job, as they said on the podcast, is to get it in my head. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to bring up the relevant parts at the relevant time, and He can do that as long as I’ve done the groundwork of lodging it somewhere. I’ve found this an incredibly helpful approach, and I’m sure that it will do God’s work in me unseen while I remain blissfully unaware of what dynamite I have consumed.

Recent events, whether it’s the Coronavirus or the murder of George Floyd, should have made us Jesus followers even more aware of how desperately we need the message of the Bible not just on our lips but actually inside us. After all, we can all read the Bible, or have a surface-level familiarity with the contents of each book, or even hold one in our hand while we pose in front of a church for photographs. None of that means anything unless there are women and men who are prepared to let those words get inside them and shape the way they live.