Friday, March 7, 2014

Lenten Devotional – Day Three

Q. 3. What do the Scriptures principally teach?

A. The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.

“But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)

“the Old Testament book of Psalms gives great power for faith and life. This is simply because it preserves a conceptually rich language about God and our relationships to him. If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life. – Dallas Willard, “The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God.” , p. 65

Micah68  As important the content of the Bible is, the Presbyterian catechisms, creeds, and confession refuse to limit the Bible to being a textbook full of true ideas about God and life. The Bible is also a meeting place, a place of encounter. As we go to the Bible, God comes to us and speaks to us, becoming for us a living presence.

  In his book Experiments with Bible Study, Hans-Reudi Weber tells a story from an East African village:

A simple woman always walked around with a bulky Bible. Never would she part from it. Soon the villagers began to tease her: “Why always the Bible? There are so many books you could read!” Yet the woman kept on living with her Bible, neither disturbed nor angered by all the teasing. Finally, one day she knelt down in the midst of those who laughed at her. Holding the Bible high above her head, she said with a big smile: “Yes, of course there are many books which I could read. But there is only one book which reads me!”

  E. Dixon Junkin, former Associate for Discipleship and Spirituality in the Presbyterian Church (USA), reminds us that "our commitment is not to 'study' Scripture but to 'listen' to it. It is not as if Scripture were a subject like mathematics, a useful tool that we learn, nor is our goal to analyze Scripture as if it were any other piece of literature. We are not out to learn Scripture as we would various historical facts. The point of our reading is less to master the words of the Bible than to offer ourselves to be mastered by the Word to whom they point." - As quoted in The Gospel and Our Culture 5 (June 1993), 7.

  Augustine of Hippo says: “As Christians, our task is to make daily progress toward God. Our pilgrimage on earth is a school in which God is the only teacher, and it demands good students, not ones who play truant. In this school we learn something every day. We learn something from commandments, something from examples, and something from sacraments. These things are remedies for our wounds and materials for study.”

  If we approach God's word submissively, with an eagerness to do everything the Lord desires, we are in a much better position to learn what God wants to teach us through his word. Jesus is the perfect teacher in that he does not base his claims on what he says but on what he does. The word of God is life and power to those who believe. Jesus shows us the way to walk the path of truth and holiness. And he anoints us with his power to live the gospel with joy and to be his witnesses in the world. Are you a doer of God's word, or a forgetful hearer only? - Gospel Meditation by Don Schwager

  The confessions are not really interested in making us either spiritual or religious; instead, they are interested in making us human. “We frequently believe we are humans struggling to have a spiritual experience, when the reality is we were created as spiritual beings who are struggling to have a human experience.” - My personal paraphrase of a quote originally written by Dallas Willard.

  “’Spiritual’ is not just something we ought to be. It is something we are and cannot escape, regardless of how we may thing or feel about it. It is our nature and our destiny.” (Dallas Willard, Divine Conspiracy, p. 79) Scripture helps make us into better human beings, humans as God intended for us become from the beginning of creation, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8, NRSV)

  The first two questions of the Shorter Catechism have to be taken together. How does one become a full human being? By glorifying and enjoying God. And how do we do that? We cannot do that, thus we cannot be fully human, without the guidance of Scripture. First, we need the Bible to be human because of what is in the Scripture, and second, we need the Bible to be human because of the One who meets us there.

  Allow the scriptures to make you fully human during this Lenten season by opening yourself to the Word and let God’s character and nature be revealed to you within the pages of scripture.

Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning Psalm: 119:121-144
Evening Psalm: 53, 144
Deuteronomy 7:12-16
Titus 2:1-15
John 1:35-42

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