What Do People Want From The Bible?

There are people who have preconceived expectations when they read the Bible. They expect to find scriptural justification to their behavior. They want the way they live their life to be condoned by Holy Writ. They want to use the Bible to prove the decisions they have made are correct. These types of people are not looking for truth. They are looking for ways to justify their behavior.

When you read text like the Bible, you will find teachings presented in parables and symbolism. This makes it easy for people to twist the scriptures to suit their desires, whatever they may be.

The problem with this type of Christian is that if he or she can back up their bad choices with Bible verses, then they feel complete, and that makes them hard to reach and to see the error or their ways.

Since those types of people are hard to get through to, I’d like to try to help other Christian to avoid that mistake.

How to get the most out of your daily reading of the Bible?

1. Be Honest.

2. Be Humble.

3. Be Prayerful.

4. Ask “what does God want me to learn today?”

5. How can I apply this in my life?

If you use these ideas when your reading daily from the Holy Bible then you will see spiritual growth well beyond what you thought possible.

Let’s look at each of these points in detail.

1. Be Honest

Have an honest attitude. Don’t lie to yourself about what you want. Don’t have any preconceived positions when you read the scriptures. Don’t have the attitude that you already know what to do. Let the scriptures tell you what The Lord wants you to know. If you read the scriptures without honesty, no one will know except for you and The Lord. But that is all that matters. If you want to be like Jesus or know what would Jesus do then you need to be honest, otherwise you are just hurting yourself.

2. Be Humble

Being humble goes closely with honesty. Humility is, in part, being teachable. Being humble means you accept that you don’t know everything and are willing to learn from what the scriptures can teach you.

3. Be Prayerful

If your honest and humble and then add prayer to the mix you will be setting yourself up for some major revelation. You will learn things that only God can teach you. You will know the truth of the Bible, not what other people want you to know.

4. Ask “What does God want me to learn today?”

Have you ever read the same scripture over and over again for the tenth time and all of the sudden you feel like this is the first time you have read that verse before? It suddenly has new meaning. This very thing happened to me this week. I read Matthew 5:44, among other things it says to “Love your enemies.”

That verse is powerful with all that it teaches us. Let’s give it a glance: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

I went to Sunday school with a question in mind, “how can this ‘love your enemy’ phrase be applied when talking about ISIS?” They have been killing Christians for a long time but they’re also killing Muslims as well. They are a slightly different type of radical Islamic terrorist group. They are trying to start an Armageddon type war by provoking the West to conflict.

They started by kidnaping for ransom, then turned to beheading people and then burned a living pilot to death. Seeing the response they got they burned more than forty people to death on a beach. This could be the most hard core enemy the world has faced. They are an enemy to the west and to Christianity. How does one love that type of enemy?

We talked at length about this issue and determined that probably the only way to love them is to ask God for the gift of love toward them. We were thinking that it might be impossible to love an enemy like that on our own.

5. How can I apply this in my life?

As was said in section four “have you ever read the same scripture over and over again for the tenth time and all of the sudden you feel like this is the first time you have read that verse before?”

Now my response to this question is different from in section four. The reason why I believe this question is valid is because we grow over time. We grow spiritually and emotionally. We have many more years of life experience tucked under our belt. So with all that, when we read Matthew 5:44 or some other verse or passage, we look at it differently. The doctrine is still the same but our world view is different.

This alone is a good reason to continue to read the scriptures over and over again until the day that we die.

When we are reading a section or a whole chapter of Holy Writ, we need to ask ourselves, how does this apply to me? Or ask how can I apply this teaching into my life right now? Asking these types of questions take that word phrase or verse off the paper and into your life. It takes on a different meaning when you desire to act upon it. Acting upon what you read may be the most important blessing of reading the scriptures daily for the rest of your life.

As you are anxiously involved in doing good? It will be harder to be deceived by the evil one and put you in a place to be taught deeper meanings of the Bible.

Hopefully, these five tips can help your spiritual growth when reading the scriptures and you will not be inclined to use the scriptures erroneously to justify your vain actions. Ideally, these five tips justify the good word by becoming a better Christian by diligently reading and applying the word of God in your daily life.

Filed under: Christian Devotionals | Tagged: be honest, be humble, be prayerful, Holy Bible, holy writ, isis, love your enimies, reading the bible, scriptures | Leave a comment »