Some years ago I got into some hot water for noting that the Bible nowhere says we are required to read our Bibles daily. I certainly didn’t advise against reading the Bible daily, nor did I deny that we are commanded in Scripture to meditate on His Word, to hide it in our hearts, to love, cherish and obey it. I had two goals in making this point. First, we should not add to God’s Word. God is not impressed when we do so. Second, we need to beware of taking a posture of seeing Bible reading as a sacrifice we make to demonstrate our piety.
How many of us have either felt burdens placed on us by others, or placed them on ourselves that God hasn’t given us? How many of us wear our spiritual accomplishments like merit badges? We are to delight ourselves in the Lord, which is something far different from performing duties.
The truth is that God delights in us, which ought to delight us. How often do we ask Him for this thing or that, because we don’t believe He’s already given it to us? “Hear me O Lord,” “Deliver me O Lord,” “Draw near to me O Lord.” These are good things to pray, as long as we also pray, “Than you O Lord that you hear me, deliver me, draw near to me.” We need less for Him to do more for us, more for us to know more what He is always doing.
Which is where we find one more reason to read our Bibles. It’s not that in reading our Bible we prove ourselves worthy of His attention and care. It is instead that in reading our Bible we find Him always proving Himself the One who give us His attention and care. The Bible is the story of God’s faithfulness. On every page we see people just like us failing Him, and He loving them. On every page we seem Him walking with people who were conceived in iniquity through the valley of the shadow of death.
The Bible is where we see men being men, to our shame, and God being God, to His glory. We seem Him execute judgment against His and our enemies, and manifesting His grace on we who were by nature our own and His enemies. It is where we see the end that awaits us, the fullness of His promises spoken against the backdrop of His perfect record as THE promise keeper.
Reading the Bible does nothing to prove how good we are. What it does is remind us of how good He is. Which is why reading it feeds our souls, renews our minds, equips us for every good work, rebukes, corrects and instructs us in righteousness. It is the very story of our joy, revealing that He is able, sovereign, and that He is for us, filled with grace. That’s a story we ought to hunger to read, delight to read, need to read.
Dear RC,
Do you not consider Joshua 1:8 as a command to read the Scripture daily, if not day and night? Or even Psalm 119: 97 or Psalm 1, although not a command, it is nevertheless an exhortation of the blessedness of meditating on Scripture.
No, I don’t. As noted in the piece, the Bible commands us to meditate on it, cherish it, love it, etc. all of which are found in those texts. Such redounds to our blessing. They can’t, however, be commands to read it daily since virtually no one had access to it daily for thousands of years. Hope that helps, though the point of this piece and the older piece it references isn’t to discourage anyone from reading the Bible daily, but to discourage all of us from a. adding to the Bible and b. thinking we earn God’s favor by doing so.
Food from God.