Reading your Bible and enjoying it.
Learning the character and personality of God.
While speaking with a long time friend on my relationship growth with God, and how I got there I was brought to the topic of reading the Bible and how to go about it. For him, and from what i have witnessed for a lot of people it was hard to get started and hard to stick with.. He mentioned how boring it got and how he got sleepy every time he would attempt it. He stated that he knew it was important and that for as long as he had been claiming to be a Christian it was kinda crazy that he hadn’t even read it yet. I have realized this is the case for lots of people. Especially from where I live which is considered the “Bible Belt” of America. A lot of people run off the knowledge of the few scriptures they memorized in vacation Bible school as a kid, the excerpts they hear in sermons on Sunday morning and most likely the few they have hung on their walls from hobby lobby. This was such a huge realization of so many things about our culture and view of Christianity. How are you supposed to truly know God with out reading the one thing he has left for you to get to know him. How are you supposed to see the answers to your prayers if you don’t even know what he is saying. Most importantly how are you supposed to have discernment in weather the thought and voice over your life or situation is that of God or Satan if you don’t know what the details of Gods Character look like.
So I sat down and helped work out a plan thru the Bible and what had worked for me when I started out. I’m sure there will be PLENTY of people that may disagree with me and that’s fine. I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to go about reading the Bible in my opinion as long as you are reading it. For me and most of the people I have helped thru this stump of getting interested in reading it..I think is so important to pay attention to where you START in the Bible, instead of just beginning in Genesis and pushing thru the whole thing.
The New Testament
Beginning in the New Testament in my opinion gives you a chance to see the New covenant. To understand how things are now. It’s begins with the story of Jesus
It takes you through his birth, life, and crucifixion in the first four books. Most importantly it give you the chance to get to know Jesus. It gives you a chance to fall in love with him and who he is, you begin to unfold and see the ways that we are made in his likeness. You’ll start to realize thru this book that I compare a lot of the way I navigate God is how I would see a healthy relationship develop between two people. It may be a little backwards, but it works for me and it may work for you too. To me it’s like going on a first date.. you aren’t going to sit down at dinner and start rattling off all your past.. diving deep into your past traumas, and drawing out a family tree so the person knows your grandmas name and who your great uncle on your moms side is.. You’re going to talk about your life now. you’re going to let them get to know who you are in this moment. Not that everything else isn’t important because it is, but for you to develop a relationship and further your feelings for each other you need to know the version you are getting into now. Then later on when you fallen in love, that’s when you start talking about your past.. that’s when it becomes interesting to hear about lineage, and past experiences of the person. It even starts to connecting the dots for how the person came bout to who they are now. For me that’s kinda how i looked at the Bible.. first date kinda nervous lets dive in to who God is now, and how who he is, learn all you can about Jesus and his time here, after all He IS the person we are trying to be most like. THEN, once we have gotten there we can go back to the Old Testament and see how it all connected to that one point in history. Suddenly the lineage isn’t as boring it’s exciting to see how each person was connected to each other, and the bloodline to which a king was born. It’s captivating to see all these stories of people following in faith to lead us to the birth of a messiah, and if you are anything like me you can deep dive in to all these crazy small details through out the Old Testament that gave clear proof Gods son was on his way, and that that was the plan all along.
So lets open up our Bibles and lets get to know who Jesus is.