“(Author’s Note: The Bible is vital to our growth in our relationship with God and I highly encourage you to make it a daily addition to your life, this is simply my confession of my humanity and the ability of a loving dad to use that to make me love him even more.)”
The last few weeks of my life have been a little crazy. But that can be said by any of us, the holidays tend to be a little chaotic at times. Add into that bowl of fun the fact that my beautiful wife is pregnant, and we were packing up our house to move to a new state, to start a new job and new season of life and you have all of the ingredients for a cake of crazy!
On this side of all of that I have begun to realize that I have learned a ton, some of that because of good decisions that I made, some of it because of bad decisions that I made and even a little was learned because I made no decisions.
In all of that I have a confession to make...
There was a span of about 3 weeks in the middle of all of this that I didn't read my Bible.
Now to many of you, you are thinking, 3 weeks thats it! I have got you beat by a long shot! Some of you are freaking out and thinking in your head "This guy is a pastor and he wasn't reading his Bible..."
For me this was the longest period of time that I have gone without reading my Bible consistently and what I learned scared me a little.
What I learned was that I have been guilty of reading my Bible instead of living out what I was reading.
I don't know if you are like me, but I sometimes get into this rut of doing what I have always done, because well I have always done it.
I realized that I had been reading my Bible and crossing it off of the list without allowing it to permeate my life and change me.
Now before you start thinking that I somehow went buck wild and threw all caution to the wind and went crazy in some sin for three weeks let me tell you what I was doing in those three weeks.
I was praying.
I know that sounds so holy and righteous, but it wasn't some carved out sacred time or incredibly powerful interactions where God split the heavens and spoke audibly to me.
It was simply an ongoing conversations throughout the day that I found myself having with my Poppa God. It involved people I encountered, conversations I found myself in, my wife, my new child that is on the way, my friends and so on.
I realized I had been reading the Bible and not talking with the Father.
Following Jesus is all about relationship and to build that there must be communication and interaction. I was thinking that by checking the box on reading my Bible I was building relationship, but I realized it was like sitting in the living room with my wife, playing on my phone thinking I was building a thriving marriage.
I'm not advocating we all quit reading the Bible, or even that we should stop, what I am challenging is if we are continuing the conversation after we check off our reading plan or close our devotional.
I am grateful for this last season of really busy and hectic, it threw off my routine, and caused me to fall more in love with Jesus. I think he knew it would do that all along!
I love the Bible and just so you know I am back reading it regularly, however I have a new found love for the words of my King, having heard them in the context of my daily life as well as in the words written in red.