Elemental Season 1 - Day 24

I don’t know how you have interacted with the Bible throughout your life, but if you are like me, it is a on-again-off-again relationship. While I love scripture, there are times in my life where I am closer to it, and other times where I am further away. Some people read through the scriptures every single year, and some have never read it all the way through. 

Whatever your relationship with Scripture is, you need to think about what it ultimately means to you, your faith and your spiritual journey. Is it a source of authority? What kind of authority? Do you think it is perfect, flawed, hogwash, or the direct spoken words of God? 

There are a lot of different ways to view scripture, but what does it actually mean to you? If you haven’t figured this out, then you will have a hard time figuring out how to read scripture in a way that makes it coherent for your experience. 

One of the reasons I like being a pastor is that it allows me to spend time with scripture in ways that I think I would have a hard time doing if I didn’t have that sermon deadline coming up every single week. It forces me to search the scriptures for what it says to us about life, about Jesus, about the church, and about how we are supposed to respond as a community to the values that it expresses. Having to look at it again and again, to wrestle with it, to fall in love and out of love with it again and again makes a difference. 

I lament that not everyone is able to do this, but we do all have to figure out what place the scriptures will take in our lives. Are they instructional, narrative, an amalgamation of good thoughts to live by, or are they something else entirely? 

So today, I need you to take some time to think about what the Scriptures really mean to you, and how you can interact with them in a more coherent and thoughtful fashion. 

I used to open up the Scriptures each day hoping that there would be some sort of miracle that would jump out from the page. More often than not, this wasn’t the case. I had no rhyme nor reason to the way I approached scripture, and I wasn’t even sure about what it meant when I did find something that was meaningful to me, at least for that day. It was as if I was forcing God to create a miracle each day to find some meaning. While this was a fun method of study, it wasn’t all that beneficial, nor was it systemic in any way. It was point-and-shoot and I hoped for something meaningful. 

Luckily, I have grown since then. When we begin to discover how to study scripture, and when we couple that with a deep understanding of what Scripture is for, then we begin to make real headway! 

1. How do you study scripture? 
2. Do you study scripture? 
3. How can you know the place that scripture holds in your life?