Reading for Information or Reading for Transformation (Scripture V)

Reading in a spiritual way is reading with a desire to let God come closer to us. The purpose of spiritual reading…is not to master knowledge or information, but to let God’s Spirit master us. Strange as it may sound, spiritual reading means to let ourselves be read by God!

—Henri Nouwen

Nouwen’s quote captures the reality that Scripture is not about simply mastering information or downloading knowledge. You can, after all, have knowledge with wisdom, and you know Scripture without being guided by the Spirit. Nor is Scripture reading simply a task that must be done. Jesus seems to have related to Scripture not as a task to be completed (“I’ve read my chapter today, I’m good!”) but as a meal to be savored. He doesn’t read from The Human Paradigm (reading enough to earn something or knowing enough to prove himself), but rather he reads to become more aware of his Father’s goodness and more empowered for a life of loving and serving others. 
Think of Scripture, then, as a meal. Physical food releases energy into our bodies, and Scripture releases energy for becoming aware. When my wife says, “Dinner time!” I don’t grumble about having to eat another meal. I run to eat (she cooks well, after all). If we know the generosity of God, then Scripture reading, as with all spiritual practices, will become a meal to be savored. This doesn’t mean there’s not sacrifice or discipline in ordering our lives around such practices, it just means that our consistent experience will be one of delight rather than one of labor. That’s why Jesus tells us to let his words abide in us, his disciples, and that as they abide in us and as we respond to them, we will experience joy.

I worry that we have not been trained to think of Scripture as a meal, but rather as a collection of maxims or, worse, as data. In college, I went to a church’s Sunday School class which was led by a man who clearly knew way more about the Bible than anyone else in the room. People would ask him good questions about complicated topics and somehow, the “Bible Man” (as I immediately began to think of him) always had a crystal-clear answer backed up by three or four Biblical references. His answers were definitive. They were clearly meant as the answer to each question. 

I felt uneasy. My experience of life was (and is) not that cut and dried. Life seems to have unending levels of nuance, and sometimes the only answer I can see is that Jesus is good and strong.Sometimes that’sthe onlyanswer I have. And sometimes I’m trusting it more than I’m feeling it.

I worry that we have made having answers and “knowing the Bible” into just another way of procuring power, rather than heeding the Biblical invitation to cometo Jesus through our weakness. I worry that we have substituted our need for The Answer with lots of little answers, stitched together to give us a sense of control. This seems to be, after all, what Jesus so consistently chided the religious leaders of his day for doing. Perhaps we have, from time to time, substituted the Bible for the third member of the Trinity, giving us the Father, Son, and Holy Scripture. Perhaps we have substituted faith with certainty and trust with dogma. Human beings like being right, often more than they like being in relationship. The Scripture makes very clear that this is one of our favorite means of being powerful.

Jesus, in fact, spoke about those who use Scripture in such a way. Talking to some religious hypocrites, he said, “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me! Yet you refuse to come to me to receive this life.” Ouch. 

We must remember that Jesus never had a problem with honest sinners; it was always hypocrites, nearly all of them religious, who raised his dander. We can all read the Scripture to make ourselves feel invulnerable and right, but we’ll likely become religious hypocrites in the process. And we’ll no doubt miss God in the midst of it. Spiritual practices get ruined for us when they are more about being right than about learning to accept and be transformed by the unmitigated goodness of God in a confusing, death-touched world. 

What we need, then, is to orient to Scripture in such a way that we arehumbled by it and, as Nouwen said, read by it. This requires diligence and practice. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

Jesus Chooses the Story (Scripture IV)

I saw a Super Bowl ad a few years ago called “Run Like a Girl.” In it, a slew of people are asked to demonstrate what it looks like when a girl runs. The first six or seven people, all older, demonstrate a stereotypical “girly” run, wimpy and not very athletic. Then we are presented with a younger girl, maybe seven or eight. She hasn’t yet been imprinted with and overwhelmed by stereotypes, and so when she’s instructed to “run like a girl,” she does it with passion and power. There’s no limp wrist or fluttering elbow. And it’s transcendent, inspiring. Because here’s a human heart and mind untouched and unclouded by stereotypes and generalization. And here’s a young girl, therefore, who’sliving in a differentstory. 

The morals are many. Once a story takes root, it’s powerful. It can even become a prison. We all have stories in our brain, and it doesn’t matter if your story is true; if it’s true to you, then it’s true in all of its effects in your life. However, this reality also opens up to hope. What if there is a reality outside of our current experience with which we can align, and through which liberty, freedom, and abundance are available? In fact, this is what an adopted life is all about. As Jesus said,“I have come that you may have life and have it abundantly.” 

Living in adoption means living in a new story, and Scripture has the power to anchor us into the story of new life that God tells through Jesus. It’s not surprising then, that when we turn to Matthew 4, we see Jesus “run like a girl,” if you’ll follow my meaning: we see Jesus living from a different story, not from the templates provided by the dominant culture. Nor does he live out some self-produced story from the confines of a self-consumed ego, as we often do. Instead, Jesus lives from the story that the Spirit tells. Jesus is called “beloved” by the Father, and this is the story that he lives from, always.

Yet right after this declaration, Jesus’ trust is tested. Does he really trust the story of belovedness that the Father speaks over him? Will he believe that he's “in”? Or will he doubt his story and choose some alternate storyline? We read about that struggle in Matthew 4. There, Satan comes and says, basically, “It’s not enough to be a child of God. Prove yourself.” We should take note again that this is always the same strategy Satan uses with us, too, repeated ad infinitum. We should also note how Jesus responds: he answers with Scripture! He parries Satan’s blows with the story and authority of Scripture.

In other words, Jesus lives a Scripture-formed life. Clearly, he has studied it. He has read it enough to memorize it. And his Scripture-formed life is an adoption-formed life. He is living in Act IV, and not repeating Act II (grumbling in the wilderness, as his forebears did), nor Act III (turning to some more tangible comfort—like the bread offered him by Satan, as the Israelites turned to idols) to relieve the tension of trust and suffering. 

All stories—all the good ones, anyway—have a protagonist who clings to hope in the face of great tension and suffering. They remain anchored in their hope and faith, against great odds. We see this in Jesus. And then we discover that we, too, are the protagonists! We, too, can walk the path with Jesus, who has blazed the trail. We are empowered to do this as we let Scripture ground us into the story of our adoption, even when we don’t feel like it. Because we often doubt our adoption; our thoughts and emotions may well contradict it at many points. This doesn’t make us bad Christians, it just makes us human beings. But if we will allow Scripture to inform our story, as Jesus did, we will become grounded in a new story, the very one that God tells and asks us to trust. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

What is the Invitation of Scripture? (Scripture III)

You and I are, if we follow Jesus, currently living out Act IV, waiting for a promised Act V in which all things will be made new by Jesus when the reign of God comes to all the earth. We can live into this reality now as we follow Jesus, partnering with him as we come into the fullness of our adoption and learning to make present the Reign of God for others right now, completing the full circuit of discipleship.

The invitation of Jesus—and the only way out of the wrongs done to us and the wrong we’ve done and into redemption—is to trust God rather than continuing to seek our own ways of being powerful. In other words, the way we come to God is not through the size of our bank account or our good looks, not through any intelligence or cleverness, not even through fervor or religious zeal. It’s through humility. The way of the world is to “put our best foot forward” and “make a good first impression.” All things considered, these aren’t bad skills to possess. How strange, though—and perfect—that we don’t come to Godby having it all together, but by acknowledging all the ways in which we do NOT have it together. Everyone comes, at some point, to this place of self-knowledge, though if you are rich or wildly successful, perhaps you’ll be able to ignore it, to the detriment of your soul. Read the Bible for any length of time and you’ll see it’s full of people (and only full of people) who miss the mark and fail spectacularly. The message is clear: we don’t come to God through our strength, but through our weakness. We come not through our successes, but through our mistakes and failures and limitations. Not through our riches, but through our poverty. These are the doors to humility by which we can bow ourselves before the living God of mercy. This is a scandal in a world hell-bent on being (or at least appearing) competent and successful. It takes tremendous humility and character to come to God through our weakness and say “yes” back to His acceptance of us. To “delight” and “take pleasure” in our weakness. In a world obsessed with power and terrified of death, this sounds like craziness, as Paul himself says. 

As we read the Scripture and each of these four acts, we see that the meta-narrative of the Bible basically reflects the potential of our lives before and after knowing Jesus. In other words, we can find ourselves in the story. We can see our desire to be in control, like Adam and Eve. We can identify painful things that have been done to us, as in the Exodus. We can see ourselves in the grumbling of the Hebrews in the desert, reticent to trust God. We can find ourselves in the nation of Israel, clinging to the worshipof false gods over trusting the Living God, as we read in the Exile Narrative. And we can see ourselves as those invited to taste and be utterly consumed by the grace of God’s love. We can learn to heed the invitation not only to accept Jesus, but to follow him into a new way of living, rooted in trust rather than in the need to feel or appear powerful on our own. 

As we read the Scripture, we are invited into deep and abiding union with the God who loves us and who wants to love the world through us. But it takes tremendous humility and character to read Scripture in this way. Many people are more comfortable reading Scripture in order to get information, which does not necessarily have any bearing on transformation. Other people read just to be right. Indeed, in many churches the “good news of being right” often supplants the good news of Christ Jesus. But if you read Scripture to discover just how generous God is, and how vulnerable He has made Himself in pursuing us, then you can enter into His story and find that encountering the God of Scripture transforms you. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'