Reading
Your Bible:
God’s
Mystery in Our History
By Steve
Mueller
As we
become aware of God’s mystery in our history, we increase the degree of care in
our relationships. Although we often equate faith with accepting a list of
doctrines, faith is essentially our commitment to God and our relationship with
God. The root of the word faith in Latin means the “bond” which establishes and
sustains a relationship. This is synonymous with our sense of trust.
When we
trust someone, we entrust ourselves to them. So our care and commitment to
others in relationships always involves greater sharing. As one greeting card
company reminds us, “when we care enough we send our very best!” So our Bible
reading reminds us about the long history of other seekers who have discovered
God and committed themselves to a more conscious relationship. We can learn
from their example.
As we
begin to live a more conscious spiritual life, the effects ripple out to every
part of our lives. In our hectic world, we are bombarded by the need to make
decisions that affect our lives. Since decisions are based on values, when our
values change so will our decisions.
By encouraging us to look seriously at our
relationships with God and with one another, Bible reading changes our
priorities. By learning to notice God’s presence and activity, we add a
spiritual component—we include God in! When we see our world with God present,
we naturally shift our priorities to include God. And changing our priorities
will affect how we make decisions about how to live. Making decisions does not
necessarily become easier, but we see more clearly what is at stake and become
more aware of what values guide us.
Changing
our priorities through Bible reading helps us to deepen our family life because
it constantly draws our attention to the task of living out the significant
relationships. The Bible is a handbook for right relationships. It shows us
where God has been found by some other seekers, how they were changed by that
encounter, and how they found others with whom they could live in right
relationship to God.
God calls us into relationships and makes demands
about how we ought to live. Every relationship demands creating a community—a
co-mission with the other. When lovers commit themselves to one another, their
co-mission is to build a family. When believers join together, their co-mission
is to create God’s dream community. The Bible provides help for understanding
our common goal and the cost it will take to achieve it.
Bible
reading also helps us to reorient our work life. If we can begin to see our
work as a vocation rather than just a job, then the meaning of our work
changes. Since meaning comes when we connect what we are doing to something
else, the meaning of our work changes when we connect it to our relationship
with God and our commission to create the kind of relationships with others
which God desires.
Bible
reading can also provide help with our elusive search for “peace of mind” and
“the meaning of life.” Meaning cannot occur in isolation. Words become
meaningful when we connect them together into sentences and arrange them into
ever larger paragraphs and chapters. Meaning comes through placing elements
into contexts.
So the
meaning of our life as a whole comes when we put all the pieces together and
then relate it to some larger context. For some this might be their family, for
others a corporation or project. For religious persons the wider context is
God’s reality. The Bible provides the context in which our lives can be
understood. We are called to be in relationship with God in a community of
fellow believers.
© 2009
Steve Mueller