Lord Jesus, what do You want to say to me about my current lack of motivation to read the Bible?
“Shhhhhhh, My little one, do not be afraid. For how long you have seen My written word as something that wants to take Me away from you rather than bring you more of Me! You have seen it as the rations tickets that enable you to buy food in a war, which tell you, ‘You may have this much and no more.’ You cut, count, carry and trade your precious Bible-verse coupons because they are the only way you can ever get anything edible at all. Without them, you will starve.
And now you have discovered that the war is over, there is no more rationing, and you can feast on an unlimited sweet supply of whatever you want, whenever you want. And so of course the last thing you ever want to reintroduce into your life is any more use of rationing tickets! You are grateful that they kept you alive, but now you are too busy feasting to look at them anymore. They are not your limitation anymore, nor are they your only access to supplies. You have bad memories associated with them. You want nothing more to do with them anymore.
I understand. Not only do I understand, but I validate these feelings. If I had grown up with the same relationship to the graphe word that you have had, I would have some of the same feelings! If anyone had ever tried to get Me to replace or limit any of My ceaseless interaction with My wonderful Father and His wonderful Spirit to what I could show a Bible-verse ration-ticket for, I wouldn’t like them either. But I never saw the Bible verses as ration tickets, I promise. I saw them as sentences in a love letter that I was living inside, a love letter I had come to embody. It was like a long, perfume-scented letter from a husband to His bride promising, “someday we won’t be separated like this anymore, someday I will come in Person and kiss you.” And I AM that kiss, that coming in Person, the Person of Me, of God to humanity. And so I savored the letter that promised Me, and saw Myself as coming to fulfill it. I savored it because it defined who I AM and what I came to do. I wanted to make sure I fulfilled every single promise to My beloved. I knew how many nights she had cried herself to sleep with that letter under her pillow!
And so, just as any person would feel very different emotions about these two different types of document in a war, the document of ration tickets that both enable and limit what they can eat to survive, and the document of a love letter from their husband at the front, so You and I feel different emotions about the document of the Bible in the spiritual war that is human history up until now. Because you have seen and experienced it as the government’s ration tickets, and I have seen and experienced it as the husband’s tear-stained, uncensored letter. And if you let Me take your hand and share My experience of it with you, you will come to share My emotions about it and My love and hunger for it, not because you have to or you should, but because of what it is, because of all the lingering scent of perfume and the drops of tears and blood and battle-field grime from the Husband’s experience and the creases and teardrops from the Bride’s experience and the love-words written in the lines and between the lines. I want to share that with you. There is a lot of history in this document. A lot of the history of Me, and My experience, and My emotions, and those of My people.
But I promise I will never let it take Me away from you again.”
Read more in my book, Butter for the House of Bread: One Evangelical Daughter’s Journey to Rediscover her Father’s Voice (available for free download).
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