SEE & HEAR

God is smart.  I mean, really, really smart.  And He’s put His super-intelligent thoughts into this anthology of books we call the Bible.  Divine observations and commentary on science, relationships, politics, finance, psychology, human social behavior, and, most extensively, all aspects of spirituality from the origins of the human soul to the future end of the spiritual struggle against sin.

We’ve got all of this in one collection, and yet we still don’t know what the crap we’re doing in any of the areas above because we don’t read the frickin’ Book!  Or, we read the Bible like it’s a dvr’d 90’s sitcom.  We fast-forward to the same scenes we’ve seen a million times and just repeat the dialogue we already know without paying attention to what’s actually happening. 

(Think about the times you started your Bible time by opening to a random page, but you flipped some more pages because you’d landed on a “boring part,” and you kept flipping until you came to a “good part” that you knew so well that you didn’t really even need to read all the verses.  That’s dvr-ing the Bible.)
That’s why you feel like you’re not getting anything out of your Bible study.

I work with kids and adults who have been unsuccessful academically.  I minister to people who often say they don't get anything out of studying the Bible.    Here's what I've realized.

They have the same BAD study habits.   Whether it's the New Testament or the History of the United States, 1870-1940, I see the same pattern.

Does any of this sound familiar?

- You skip the "boring parts" so you have no context for the parts you do read.

- When you read the parts you like you don't pay attention because you think you already know that.

- You don't listen to the text or think of the names in the book as real people with feelings and individual voices, so it all seems abstract and pointless.

- What you call reading is really just running your eyes across the page.

- You don't put yourself in the text or connect what's happening on the page to your life or your community.

From now on, here’s what you do:  LISTEN & SEE. 

Let the text play a movie in your head and listen to the words on the page like the events on the paper are talking to you.

If you would LISTEN to the Bible when you read it you, if you would open your mind to SEE what Scripture says, then you would hear the Holy Spirit speak, you would EXPERIENCE God’s Word, and you would learn so much more than you opened the Book to find out.

Do that, and you’ll “get it.”  You won’t understand everything, but once you get a taste of how good the Bible really is, you’ll never think of this Book as boring again.

Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things from Your law. (Psalm 119: 18)

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Hall Memorial CME Church in Montgomery, Alabama, executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO) and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com

Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

To listen to sermons and learn more about the ministry at Hall Memorial CME Church, visit www.hallmemorialcme.blogspot.com .

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Hall Memorial CME Church

541 Seibles Road

Montgomery, AL 36116