Out of the billions of facebook and tumblr posts, instagram
pics, and tweets, out of all the ideologies and sermons that we hear
everyday in our music and movies, out of the billions of ideas and thoughts and images within our grasp every single day
… If you don’t read the Bible and don’t know what the book is basically
about, you’re inevitably going to take in all that stuff and choose the
bits and pieces of ideas you like that can at least (or at best),
empathize your hurts and ultimately put you as the only one worthy of
all affection. If you don’t ever get to reading the Bible for yourself
and understanding the main idea of it, you’re going to watch movies and
buy the sermon they’re preaching that leaves you with no answers and
only a small glimmer of hope that things will somehow work out. If you
don’t get the gospel, you’ll enter friendships with the idea that
everyone should value you as awesome first and foremost. You’ll enter
relationships that have marriage nowhere in sight. Your favorite music
will be songs that understand how hurt you are and that’s all music will
be for you … a message that you’re not alone … that we’re all
hopelessly broken people … a justification that no one can judge you.
You’ll play hours and hours of video games to escape thinking about
things or you’ll change your lifestyle so that you live at such a fast
pace that you’ll simply have no time to think about the deep realities
of life or the direction you’re headed in. You’ll make something the
only thing worth living for and stop at nothing and stop for no one to
get it. Or maybe you’ll even dig yourself so deep that one day you’ll
find yourself asking how you even got this way … so low.
Honestly, I just came off of playing LoL (which apparently is
#1 pc game now … great haha) for hours and hours and I just kept feeling
this sense of emptiness and I was questioning “What did I do with
today?” I can justify it by reading a small passage of the Bible but in
the end, it’s no use. And I just can’t help but feel this weight that’s
telling me that this is what we do and are. We obsessively attach
ourselves to these things, this job, this game, this relationship, this
hobby, this whatever, and we just go and go and go because maybe then
we’ll never have to confront the truth that we’re not just victims of
the “injustice” of others’ neglect of us. We’re actually sinners. We’re
actually offenders of God, people who willingly rebel against God in an
instant and worship created things over the Creator. We’re actually the
people responsible for the cross of Jesus. We crucified Jesus.
If only we would give up. Give up on the theology of “I’ll get
it together myself … somehow.” If only our pride would be overthrown and
we’d ask the Spirit to help us want to read and understand the Bible.
If only we’d then by faith, do the work of reading and studying it
instead of thinking we know how life works better than how God already
said it does with Him and His glory at the center. If only we’d turn and
repent of trying to be our own saviors … Then maybe we’d see that the
Bible isn’t just a prognosis of what’s wrong with us or how lovely we
are. Maybe then we’d know life isn’t at best just a clawing for survival
in a cold, fallen world. Maybe then we’d get it that faith isn’t just
some blind one-in-a-million, “spray and pray it hits” type of hope but a
backbone of steel in a finished work by a perfect God-man. Maybe then
we could live out the identity Christ purchased for us and stop feeling
sorry for ourselves for not having what everyone else seems to have.
Maybe then we could cry tears of joy rather than tears of despair. Maybe
then we’d be marked as redeemed people who rejoice instead of a tired
people who are primarily the same as everyone else but with a religion
attached to them.
There’s good news in the wreckage that we’ve made. That’s what
the Bible is all about: God is the good news, despite the wreckage that
we are. Please, let’s read what He gave us. The invitation to the
banquet is open as long as it’s called “today.”
Father, help us want to read Your Word. Help us want to study
it. Give us a hunger for it. We want meat that will nourish. These other
cheap substitutes are starving us. Help us. Thank You Jesus.
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