Read Your Bible

11/09/11 Read Your Bible GUMC Youth

One of the single most important things you can do as a Christian is read the Bible. There is no shortcut to learning about God, knowing how you should go about your life and about the promises that God has for you that somehow lets you bypass the Bible and just listen to what other people have read. If you wanted, you could say that the whole message for tonight is a giant commercial for reading the Bible, but I hope it isn't boring.

Before we talk about some of the reasons why you should read the Bible, I want to share about my own experience reading the Bible. You see, I can give you all kinds of good reasons to read the Bible, but none of those reasons can possibly be as convincing as a personal testimony to how it has changed my life. Always remember that Christian faith does not always get a lot of good press these days. There are plenty of groups out there that make a lot of people decide that they want nothing to do with Jesus. With so many reasons not to believe floating around, we need to remember that the Bible is only convincing to people if they have already made up their minds that they even care what is in it. If the Bible is nothing more than a book, it is hard to get people to read it. It is only when you become convinced, either by your own experience or because you have been convinced by the experience of others, that God uses the Bible to speak directly to us today, that you will read it and make it a habit. Your personal testimony, your own growth, your own faithfulness, will do far more to convince the unbelieving world of the truth of the gospel than any academic argument.

Before I can say anything else about my growth through studying the Bible, you need to be reminded that I did not grow up in the church; not at all. I did not go to church and Sunday School until I was a sophomore in high school and I only went to a youth group for a little bit before that, and when I went to those things, it was just as much because my friends were going than because I was actually learning anything. So if that is you tonight, I know exactly where you are coming from. I know what it is like to sit in a youth room listening to someone talk about the Bible and have absolutely no idea what he is talking about, not sure where anything was in the Bible. I used to call myself "The worst Bible navigator ever." It didn't matter how many times we looked at a book in the Bible, I never learned where it was. I didn't know the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament other than their names. I barely knew anything about Jesus. I went more because I didn't really have a whole lot of friends and it gave me something to do on a Wednesday night.

What this means is that many of you have a much better start than I had. Many of you have been raised in the church, you have heard the stories of the Bible from an early age and you have been put into a position where you can hear the word of God being spoken to you and heard by you. I don't know if any of you have maybe heard God speak to your heart, encouraging you to become a pastor or pursue some kind of vocational ministry, but you are afraid or feel like you couldn't do it because you don't know much about the Bible, think again. My first pastor asked me if I felt called to be a pastor. When I heard that, I laughed at him. I couldn't imagine that someone like me could be called to be a pastor. I didn't know anything about the faith at all! And yet, as you can all see, here I am. This is my sixth year as a pastor.

Alright, so here's my story. I started going to youth group because my older brother (who, by the way, is still not a Christian) was going and I wanted to go, too. He wasn't always excited that I was there, but I sure was. Eventually, someone I knew from that youth group invited me to come to an after school Bible study that met twice a week. All during this time, I wasn't going to church at all. One Sunday, I got a call telling me that a guy from the Bible study was getting baptized that morning and that there was a reception at someone's house. So, even though I wasn't there for the baptism, I went to the reception. When I was there, I heard that some people were going to a study with the pastor of this church and asked me if I wanted to come. When we got there, some of the people said, "Hey Travis, you should totally stay for youth group" (this was a different church than before) so I did. Then, one of the kids from the youth group who knew I played guitar said I should stay because they had a small band that practiced after youth group. So, I went from not going to church at all to going to church, Sunday School, a study group, youth group and a band practice every Sunday all in one day.

Eventually, I became a Christian. I would say that I really became a Christian when I went to Chrysalis and things started to sink in deeper than they ever had before. However, just a few months later, my family moved to Iowa. I got involved in a youth group that I am amazed my faith survived. Eventually, I got plugged into a group with a bunch of people I went to school with and I really started to grow more, but I wasn't really reading my Bible. During this time, I got involved in a small group, let by my youth pastor, where I learned how to pray and talk about my faith. What is kind of funny is that it seemed like everyone else in the group except for myself and my friend David were certain they were called to be pastors or other leaders full-time, and, as far as I know today, only David and I are in full-time ministry.

All of that is important so I can tell you about what happened when I was in college. I became deeply aware of the fact that I hadn't spent much time reading my Bible and I knew that I should do it. I kept trying to make myself do it, but it just never seemed to work. Over a few months, I found myself in two or three different groups of guys and, in each of them we realized that none of us were getting into our Bibles like we knew we should. In one group, we split up into groups of two and my partner and I decided that we were going to try to help each other stay on top of our Bible reading. We both thought that jumping into reading it a bit everyday would be too much to expect, so we thought about doing it just a few days and then getting back together to see how we did. I didn't do it. Neither did he. We never met again.

The next group I was in decided that we were going to read one chapter of the Bible every day, and we'd all read the same chapters together, then we'd get together at the end of the week and discuss what we'd read. Now, at the end of the first week, I had the seven chapters read, but I didn't read everyday. I had to do a lot of catch up. When we got back together the next week, there was this guy, Nick, there. I had met Nick before and I had realized that he was really the first person I ever met who really knew his Bible. I suppose that my pastors knew their Bible pretty well, but Nick the first person I had ever met in my life who took reading his Bible extremely seriously and applied it to every aspect of his life. I knew that, if you want good suggestions on how to do something, you ask someone who has actually succeeded in doing it. I knew that I needed to ask Nick how he read the Bible and see if that would help.

What Nick told me was surprisingly simple. He said that, when he got started reading the Bible, he followed a simple rule: "No Bible, no breakfast." If he didn't read his Bible, he simply didn't eat. Now there are people in the world who just don't eat breakfast, so it might seem that this idea wouldn't work for them, but then it would just become "No Bible, no lunch," which doesn't have a neat alliteration, but would still be effective. Anyway, I am someone who has always eaten breakfast, so I thought this might help me and I decided to give it a try.

The next morning, I got up, and before heading down to the dining center for breakfast or eating something in my room, I remembered: No Bible, no breakfast. I went and sat in my chair and read the next chapter of John, the book that group was reading. It seemed so easy to do. I got up the next morning and did the same thing again. After months of repeated failure, after trying time after time to find some way to get the job done, something as simple as "No Bible, no breakfast," finally worked for me. Not only did I start reading the Bible, a chapter a day, but I quickly began to really love the Bible and I started to read more than one chapter a day. I found out the next book we were planning on working through and I read that. I started to get so far ahead of the group that I had to figure out what I was going to read on my own.

I went through all that about how hard it was for me to start reading my Bible so the significance of the transformation can be as impressive to you as it was to me. I used to see those "read through the Bible in a year" plans and was amazed. How could someone read the whole Bible in just a year? It seemed like such a huge book. What I realized was that, because I got so excited about reading the Bible, I wanted so badly to know what was in it, that I read the whole thing, without really even trying to do it, in five months. People have asked me when I first knew that I was going to be a pastor. I don't know exactly when it was, but when I started reading the Bible, I knew for sure I was going to be a math teacher. When I was done, I knew that I was going to be a pastor. Now, that is not to say that, if you read the Bible, you will become a pastor. I can point out all kinds of people who have read the Bible, even very quickly, who have not been called to be pastors, but that is how it was for me.

The whole reason that I tell this story, the reason why I put my whole past in the Bible out for you all to see is not because I want you to think about how cool I was to read the Bible because, if you think about it, I really wasted a lot of time. I had been a Christian for about three years before I started taking the Bible seriously. I didn't start reading the Bible until I was nineteen years old. I've only been reading the Bible with any regularity for about eight years. I don't know if you think I know anything about the Bible, but if you do, think about how much more you will know by the time you are my age, because you started so much earlier. Think about how much opportunity you would give God to transform you if you started today, or stayed on top of it.

Now that I've shared my story and now that I have made it clear that I think that reading your Bible is something worth fighting for, it is something worth making sacrifices for, I want to try to explain the "why" behind the "what" of my story. Folks, there is nothing magical about the Bible. It isn't as though every single page is going to flood you with joy, simply because every word on it teaches you some great and glorious thing you never heard before. If you approach reading the Bible like that, you will get discouraged so fast. It is true that the Bible has lots of great teaching in it, teaching that will strike you like lightning when you read it. Sometimes, even, something you've read a million times will jump off the page and change you when you read it just that one more time. But there are lots of things in the Bible that aren't what we would normally call "Inspiring." There are lots of things in the Bible that are challenging, that are frustrating, that are even frightening. Very often, the passages that make us feel incredibly uncomfortable are the ones that mean the most to us, that change us the most.

We read the Bible for lots of reasons. We read the Bible to learn how to live but, contrary to what some people will say, it is not actually a handbook for daily life. There is almost nothing in it, short of the book of Proverbs, that is ready-made to lift out of its context and shoved into our own. We read the Bible because it points us to Jesus. We read the Gospels because they tell us about Jesus' actual life and history on earth. We read the letters because they point us to how the reality of the Gospel transformed the lives of those first Christians. We read the Old Testament because it is only when we understand the whole history of Israel, when we know the stories, and what the law and the prophets say, that we can really understand Jesus how we ought to. We read the Bible because, in all its parts, it is a comprehensive witness to all that God has done.

I have said over and over again that who we are is partially dependent on those we surround ourselves with and that, sometimes, in order to change what we believe, to change what we think, we need to change what we do. It is completely true that God can speak to you just as much on the sports field, or in a musical rehearsal as he can in church. But if you are seeking God, if you are hoping to hear a word from him, where should you go? If you were an alcoholic and you wanted to get sober, where would you go? Would you go to a bar? Of course not. You would go to a support group, to a counsellor. You would go where you had a chance to find what you were looking for. You would put yourself in a position to be changed.

That, in many ways, is the reason we read the Bible. We read it because it is the record of God interacting with countless people over countless years. We have the promise that the same God who was in relationship with all those people in the Bible is the God who pursues relationship with us. Just like you can't get to know someone unless you spend time with them, we cannot get to know God unless we spend time with him, with his word in our hands and getting into our hearts. Let us pray.


AMEN