Thirty Minutes

Isaiah 43:1-45:13

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I tend to agree with them… whoever “they” are.

Yesterday I told you that if you hadn’t read the Word of the Day yet then you should. Today I’m going to be telling you the same thing. Just look at all the red I put on those pages this morning!!! This is good stuff and you’re missing it if you’re not reading it for yourself!

Most of the time I spend my words on you regurgitating what I’ve just read back up to you, and that’s OK because it’s good for us to share with each other. But I would be a horrible teacher if I were just giving you your daily fish instead of teaching you how to catch it yourself.

This Sunday Pastor Josh mentioned a statistic that literally took my breath away. Less than 30% of people in church read their Bibles on a weekly basis. I was literally stunned. It’s no wonder the church is in the state that it’s in today!!!

There is TREMENDOUS power in the word of God and many of us are forsaking that power and opting to go it alone all day. And for what? So we can go out there and fail?

Don’t get me wrong, I was certainly one of those people who rarely picked up my Bible to read it. You know, sure, I’d read it occasionally, when things were really going badly or I was really upset about something, but never on a regular basis and certainly never with the sole purpose of just sitting down to hang out with God every day.

But I can tell you from experience that getting into a measured amount of reading every day has completely changed my life! I’d love to say that I can’t imagine my life without His Word in it every day, but sadly I can imagine it; because I’ve done it. Some of you may remember that time in fact. I went for what, maybe half a year without reading and writing daily. And while things didn’t go horribly horribly wrong or anything, I can tell you that when I started back up again…. WOOOO! Was I ever down on that carpet begging God, with every fiber of my being, to never let me do that again. I didn’t don’t want to go another single day in my life where I’m not spending those thirty minutes with Him in the Bible. The spotlight that His word shines onto my life is so bright that when it’s removed, the light that is left is just plain old dim in comparison. And I don’t want to live in that dim place ever again.

There’s something magical and special about the way that His Holy Spirit can make the words on those pages literally jump off and smack you in the face. They shine into the dark places of your life and bring hope and love and redemption. But the really amazing part is how the reading seems to ALWAYS FIT what’s going on in your life. There are days I just sit there and shake my head in amazement at how in the world that particular phrase could “happen” to be in that particular day’s reading. The best example I can think of is the day my daughter brought home a scarecrow she had made at school and then made a huge deal about it for the rest of the evening. The next morning I read about a scarecrow in the scripture! I can’t seem to find where I wrote that down, so I can share the whole story with you, but I’ll look for it and try to share it with you tomorrow if I can. It’s an awesome story.

Let me leave you with this today; the Spirit of God hovers over the Living Water of the Word in the Bible. If you’re not reading it on a regular basis you’re truly missing something. We Christians today have a blessing that hardly anyone in all of history has had. A personal Bible.

We can reach into our back pocket, pull out our phone and look up any scripture in any translation or language that we want with just a couple of taps on a screen. Nobody has ever been able to do that before. And honestly, it’s pretty foolish of us not to take full advantage of that opportunity God has given us. And considering the times and how they are a changin’ it very well could save our very lives to know His Word just a little better than we already do.

Normally I don’t write posts like this, but I’m feeling pretty strongly on this one. Jesus died to bring you the Great news that came along with His death. The apostles died to carry this message to as many people as possible so that they too could drink from the streams of Living Water flowing from the well of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Many men have literally lost their lives in order to translate the Bible into English for us. Obviously, these people found great worth in the words that can be found between those book covers, or behind that phone app. If they thought those words were worth dying for, shouldn’t we at least consider spending a measly 30 minutes a day reading them?

If you can watch an episode of the Big Bang Theory for thirty minutes, or play a video game for thirty minutes, then you can certainly spend thirty minutes reading the Bible. It’s really not that much time when you think about it.

Trust me, I speak from experience (an experience that has inspired me to write about it every day), those thirty minutes will turn into the best thirty minutes of your entire day, every day. How? Because in those thirty minutes you will learn more about how awesome God is and how desperately He loves YOU. Isn’t that worth thirty short minutes a day?