was he hiding behind the door?

I don't often cross-post from my other blogs, but in this case I have to make an exception. I also posted this on eatthisbooklogos.blogspot.com. But I feel so strongly about it, until I will post it here, also.

My friend, Pam, forwarded this to me this morning. It is from Mark Batterson's 21-day Prayer Challenge based on his book about prayer, The Circle Maker.

I think he has been hiding behind my door, because these are the exact words I have been using to expound on the relationship between prayer and the Word!

Soak this in:

     The Bible wasn't meant to be read. It was meant to be prayed. Reading without praying is like eating without digesting. The nutrients aren't absorbed the way they should be. The way you get the word into your heart, into your spirit is by praying it. Let me give you an example. This morning I was reading about "the circumcision of the heart" in Romans 2:29. The Holy Spirit stopped me in my tracks. I knew I needed to stop reading and start praying. I spent the next several minutes having a heart-to-heart with my Heavenly Father about some of my heart issues.

     The spiritual disciplines are more interrelated than what we realize.  I used to think of reading Scripture and prayer as very different endeavors. In fact, I felt bad because it was easier for me to read Scripture than to pray. Then I read something from the Talmud that set me free. The Jewish Rabbis said, "An hour of study is as an hour of prayer." That's when I realized that reading Scripture can be a form of prayer, a part of prayer.  Many people don't know where to begin when it comes to prayer.  What do I say first? Here's my advice: start with Scripture. Start reading and you'll eventually come to something you need to talk with God about. Prayer isn't a monologue where we outline our agenda for God. Prayer is a dialogue. Scripture is the way God speaks to us. Prayer is a way we respond to it. And when you pray the word you can pray with holy confidence because God's word does not return void.

     Pray the Word!

© 2009-2012 by Melani Brady Shock

it all comes down to faith...

All the questions...and confusion...and "well, I think"...and you're taking it too far...and God wants us to be happy...and grace means I don't have to respond in any way at all to God's love except to just say yes...and yada, mumbo-jumbo, blah, blah, blah...

It just all comes down to faith.

Faith that the Word of God is absolute and that Every. Single. Word. was breathed out of the mouth of God. (2 Timothy 3:16 - "All scripture is given by inspiration of God.") Inspiration comes from the Greek word "theopneustos" meaning "to breathe or blow."  It implies sound--words--vocal intonation.

If Every. Single. Word. in the Bible was breathed by the God of the universe, then I don't have much room to quibble, do I?

The final question--the bottom line--comes down to this:  Do you really believe that every single word in the Bible was breathed by God?

The Nona Freeman Prayer for Night People

Kendra recently tweeted about praying the "Nona Freeman prayer" and how God took her up on it and she wasn't sure if she was glad about that or not. (Posted tongue-in-cheek, of course.) We got several questions as to what we were talking about and the explanation takes up more than the 140 characters Twitter allots.

Here is the story behind what we call "The Nona Freeman Prayer for Night People":

Nona Freeman was a veteran missionary for many years to Africa.  She told incredible stories and  probably died with more stories in her head and heart than ever came out.

She was a woman of faith and of prayer and a believer that God could and would do anything for His people...the problem was/is that we just don't ask Him enough and specifically.

She described herself as a night person.  One who was more alert in the evening, who would rather stay up late and sleep later in the morning.  She was not one who woke up early, chirping with the birds, and ready to conquer the world.  That came later in the day.  She was a night person.

However, she was a firm believer that God needed the first part of our day.  Therefore, she knew that in order to give that to Him, she must not sleep until the last minute, but must wake up earlier than necessary in order to have time with Him.  So, she prayed a prayer that went something like this:  "Lord, I know that I need to talk to you first thing in the morning.  But it is so hard for me to wake up and even though I set my alarm to get up earlier, I end up shutting it off to sleep until the last possible minute.  So Lord, I'm asking you to wake me up 30 minutes early every morning.  YOU wake me up.  Don't let me go back to sleep.  Wake up my mind and my heart so that You and I can have quality time together before our day begins.  I want to, Lord, but my flesh is weak.  So YOU help me.  YOU wake me up!"

I heard her tell this story at our church when I was just a young girl and will never forget when she said, "And the Lord has done just that.  Regardless of what time I go to bed or how little sleep I have received, He always wakes me up 30 minutes before I must begin my day."

I didn't pray that prayer for many years, because I am the ultimate Night Person and, quite honestly, didn't want God to answer it.  (Confession.) But as I matured in Him, I realized that it was absolutely vital that I spend time with him FIRST before anything else had a chance to enter my mind, my heart, and my spirit in the morning.  I realized all the scriptures in the Word that speak of spending time with Him first in the day, and was convicted.  So, I prayed the prayer.  He not only wakes me up 30 minutes early...He usually wakes me up 1 - 1 1/2 hours early!  And I'm fine with it!  I love it...there is no sweeter communion than the communion of first fruits.

I have challenged many of the young women in our church to pray that prayer.  I have tried to convey the necessity, the beauty, the love, the wonder that comes with meeting with Him first in the day.  I let them know they must mean it before they pray it, because He WILL answer it.

So, it takes them a while.  It's serious business.  And when they are finally ready to get serious about it, they pray it.  And He answers them.

It's "The Nona Freeman Prayer for Night People."

It's a prayer that will change your life if you are willing to allow your life to be changed.

thy word have i hid...or maybe not

I am not endorsing John Piper.  I don't know enough about him to endorse him or not endorse him. 

But the above clip has convicted me beyond measure.  We are in a fierce battle largely unprotected.  God help us.

Prayer=Bible=Prayer=Bible

LOVE this....it was sent to me by a friend and I have lost the source...I apologize.  But read it and ponder.


The Bible is a prayerbook.

You don't read it statically. You read it proactively. As you read, the same Holy Spirit who inspired the writers illuminates the readers. How awesome is that? The Holy Spirit quickens the Word and something gets in our spirits.
I'm convinced that the Bible is the means to just about every spiritual end. I promise you this: if you are reading the Bible, God will convict you of sin that you need to confess. So in that regard, the Bible is the key to purity. You will also find plenty of promises to claim. The Bible sanctifies our expectations so we have more confidence after we read the Word. In that regard, the Bible is the key to faith. And, of course, it's the key to so many other things. What I'm getting at is this: prayer is a byproduct of Scripture.It is the way God talks to us. Then prayer turns the monologue into a dialogue.

My point? I'm not worried about your prayer life if you're reading the Bible. I think the quality of your prayer life will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of Scripture you're reading.

Eat This Book: Can You Handle the Bible?

This is a text that reveals the sovereign God in being and action.  It does not flatter us, it does not seek to please us.  We enter this text to meet God as he reveals himself, not to look for truth or history or morals that we can use for ourselves.  . . .We do not read the Bible in order to find out how to get God into our lives, get him to participate in our lives.  That's getting it backward.

As we cultivate a participatory mind-set in relation to our bibles, we need a complete renovation of our imaginations.  We are accustomed to thinking of the biblical world as smaller than the secular world.  Tell-tale phrases give us away.  We talk of "making the Bible relevant to the world," as if the world is the fundamental reality and the Bible something that is going to  help it or fix it.  We talk of "fitting the Bible into our lives" or "making room in our day for the Bible," as if the Bible is something that we can add on to or squeeze into our already full lives.

. . ."Biblical" does not mean cobbling texts together to prove or substantiate some dogma or practice that we have landed on.  Rather, it signals an opening up into what "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, [but] what God . . . has revealed to us through the spirit" (1 Cor. 2:9-10)

What we must never be encouraged to do . . . is to force Scripture to fit our experience.  Our experience is too small; it's like trying to put the ocean into a thimble.  What we want is to fit into the world revealed by Scripture, to swim in this vast ocean.

~Eugene Peterson

Eat This Book: Indigestion!

For most of us, our first experience with the Bible is sweet; we find ourselves in this book, and that is so wonderful.  We acquire a taste for the promises and blessings of God, we learn to appreciate the sound counsel and direction for our lives, we memorize a few psalms that we can recite in dark and lonely times and find comfort.  There is so much here to delight us...

But sooner or later we find that not everything is to our liking in this book.  It starts out sweet to our taste; and then we find that it doesn't sit well with us at all; it becomes bitter in our stomachs.  Finding ourselves in this book is most pleasant, flattering eve; and then we find that the book is not written to flatter us, but to involve us in a reality, God's reality, that doesn't cater to our fantasies of ourselves.

There are hard things in this book, hard things to hear, hard things to obey.  There are words in this book that are difficult to digest.  John got a severe case of indigestion...

It is far too common among us to develop a problem-solving habit of approach to the Bible, figuring out what doesn't seem to fit and then sanding off the rough edges, so that is slips into our ways of thinking more easily.  We want to use it for comfort, and if it doesn't work comfortably we reconfigure it so that it will.  One good friend warns his students against becoming expert text-nicians.  Text-nicians learn this text, master it inside and out, so that they can repair it when we sense it's a little "off," so that it will run smoothly and get us where we want to go with our needs and wants and feelings...

We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers.  And that is certainly correct.  The text of the Bible sets us in a reality that is congruent with who we are as created beings in God's image and what we are destined for in the purposes of Christ.  But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge.  The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book.  Eat this book; it will be sweet as honey in your mouth; but it will also be bitter to your stomach.  You can't reduce this book to what you can handle, you can't domesticate this book to what you are comfortable with.  You can't make it your toy poodle trained to respond to your commands.

~Eugene Peterson

Eat This Book: The Bible Was Written For ME!

"...Here's the thing; every part of the [Word of God--every] revelation, every aspect, every form is personal -- God is relational at the core -- and so whatever is said, whatever is revealed, whatever is received is also personal and relational. There is nothing impersonal, nothing merely functional, everything from beginning to end and in between is personal.  God is inherently and inclusively personal.

The corollary to that is that I, because I am a person, am personally involved in the revelation.  Every word I hear, everything I see in my imagination as this story unfolds, involves me relationally, pulls me into participation, matters to my core identity, affects who I am and what I do."

--Eugene Peterson

I wish I could grasp that fully.  I wish I could completely understand that every word matters--to me--personally.

Even the begats.

Even the rules in Leviticus.

Even the details of wars about which I would rather not know.

Even the parts of Revelation that leave me confused.

Everything.

Lord, I believe.  Help thou mine unbelief.

Eat This Book: Doing Produces Desire

Eat This Book is a six-week course exploring How to Study the Bible.  I will be teaching 2 one-hour classes each week for six weeks beginning this Tuesday/Wednesday.  (They are the same class).  Those taking the class are encouraged to participate in this blog discussion as well as any who cannot attend but are following along through the blog postings.

(I do ask that if you are attending the class in person, please do not get ahead of the postings by bringing up a topic that may have been covered in class but has not yet been addressed in the blog postings.)

I will not be posting any of the first lesson until after the Wednesday class has met, but would like to share some interesting introductory material that I may or may not have time to get to in class.

I have compiled much of the material from other sources, and have added my own practices and observations, also.  I have tried as diligently as possible to acknowledge any other sources when they have been used.

Disclaimer:  I am just a fellow sojourner on this journey toward becoming a disciple of Christ.  This study has once again reminded me of how far short I fall.  I have convicted my own self through my study and am in the process of practicing what I will be preaching.

I have been reminded one more time that the more I learn, the more I want to learn.

The more I study, the more I want to study.

The more I read the Word, the more I want to read the Word.

Doing produces desire.

And I intensely desire to know His living Word.

Is anybody with me?

Eat This Book

And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. 

And he said unto me, Take [it], and eat it up; and it shall make thy

belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

Revelation 10:9

Several weeks ago, I began slowly reading a book by Eugene Peterson entitled Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading.  Reading that book, combined with the timing of several discussions regarding the lack of Biblical knowledge among those who read, ponder, and love the Word of God, prompted the formation of a 6-week class designed to further our knowledge of "How to Study the Bible." The class begins next week.  The plan was to limit it to eight people and go from there.  Well, it immediately grew to about 12-13 people, we added a second class and that one filled up, and now the classes are closed with a waiting list of 10 more asking to please do another one.  There is an intense hunger to know how to really unpack the Word!

So, in putting together the curriculum for the six weeks (I would NEVER just find someone else's curriculum and use it--no, no---that would be too easy!) my soul has been stirred and I have become increasingly convicted that I have not pursued the discipline of ingesting the Word into the fiber of my being like the Spirit intends for us to do.  But, instead of lamenting that fact, I am allowing this realization to change me and change my study lifestyle in order to be able to let my time on earth prepare me for eternity AND to allow any knowledge I gain to live on beyond the grave.  Hence, the formation of "Eat This Book" -- a study of what/how to fully become one with the living Word of God.

So, for the next few days/weeks, I will be posting snippets of the class.  It's where my heart, my mind, and my soul are dwelling right now.  I invite you to return daily (sometimes more than that!) as we explore some principles, methods, and treasures of The Book.