on daily bible reading in 2019.

I’ve been a professing born-again believer for most of my life, and therefore I’ve been reading my Bible for most of my life. I don’t take that for granted, you know.

Being raised in a home where spending time learning God’s Word was the norm, something I was encouraged to do almost without thinking.

That heritage was a gift given to me by the Lord that I did nothing to deserve.

And honestly, I’ve had varying and changeable motivations for reading my Bible (or as I’ve called it “having a quiet time”) over the years, probably the primary one being from my Enneagram One-ness, which, if you’ll remember, is the Perfectionist who’s very anxious to follow the rules and please authority.

I’ve read my Bible as a Christian because I know I should read my Bible and pray, so that I’ll become more like Jesus. But I’ve also genuinely read it as an act of faith; even when I don’t feel God’s Word changing me (or changing me fast enough for my liking), I’ve believed His promises that it will change me. And so I obey.

I’ve clung to it, as a lamp to my feet and a light for my path, and it has been.

I’m thankful for all those years, I really am.

God is strong and able and faithful, and He’s used His Word hidden in my heart, in so many ways — to encourage, strengthen, remind me of His life, convict of sin, and spur on to love and good works. This is one of the things I love about growing older, about hitting “my late thirties.” I see years of investment in Scripture (even 5-10 minutes a day many years) bearing fruit.

Not because I’ve been faithful — because God has been faithful to hold onto me, and because His Word is living and active.

But in the last couple of years I found myself with a new longing, and a new prayer.

I started asking God to make me love reading the Bible, to make me hunger and thirst for it like King David in the Psalms.

I saw a disconnect between the way the Psalmist yearned for God’s Word, and the way I perched on my bed in the lamplight with a mug of coffee and my open Bible in the mornings. I believe I’d really moved beyond duty many days to seeing my need to spend time with God. But I wanted to want it more, to treasure it the way I treasure a good novel.

 

 

Well. Be careful what you pray for.

Very soon after I began to make this request,  I found myself in a parched and barren land, smack in the middle of some painful circumstances and a several-month depression. And it wasn’t the first dark depression I’ve encountered in my life — which made it feel worse sometimes. I know this darkness. So I had both the current darkness, and the memories of other darknesses to keep me company in the sleepless nights.

During those long days, when just getting out of bed seemed like a monumental task, I kept opening my Bible, day after day, like Jacob wrestling with the angel of God, “There are promises for me in here. Even now, even in sorrow and depression. I’m not letting You go until You bless me.”

I felt like God was giving me the exact opposite of what I asked Him for. I wanted to love and delight in His Word. But instead I felt desperate and unfulfilled and very lonely.

In that dark time, I discovered that sometimes God lets us thirst awhile.

He doesn’t always answer our prayers immediately, in the manner we want. Sometimes He leaves us in that dark and desperate place, not because He’s forgotten us, but to get hold of our attention, to stretch our desires and capacity for Him, to give us a better idea of our tremendous need.

I read His Word most days in that wilderness season of depression, and it did not feel satisfying to me. But by the grace of God, I hung in there, and what He did was nothing short of transformation.

He answered my prayers. He did it. Not able, skilled, perfectionist me. I can do many things, but when it comes to changing my heart, it turns out that I am helpless.

God had good, hard work to do in the darkness.

 

 

I asked simply to enjoy my morning Bible reading time more, but He wanted to give me something infinitely deeper and better, something I couldn’t get without the gift of suffering.

He chipped away at the rock-hard pride that has crept up over the course of my firstborn, Type-A, Enneagram 1, perfectionist lifetime and choked my soul. And He laid the real Julie bare.

He showed me the ugliness of my self-sufficiency and performance, the way I prize it because it combats the anxiety that hounds me and tells me I’m a bad person, that I’m worthless. The way I use it as a protective barrier against my Savior and against other people — even the people I love most in the world — so that I won’t get hurt, the way I lash out in defensiveness and anger at anything that threatens to topple that barrier.

And there, in that raw, scary place of coming face to face with some of my darkest fears, my Father showed me that I couldn’t possibly enjoy reading His Word the way I was.

We’ve drilled down quite a few layers in my thirty-something-year journey of sanctification, but lo and behold, there are more to go.

If I was coming to the Bible each morning as a fix-it manual to polish me up a bit and make me a better person (which I realized I was), if I was laying in bed each night praying, rehearsing my list of sins and failures from the day, gasping and squirming with anxiety over how I’d failed the people in my life. How I’d failed God.  Again. If that’s the way I read my Bible, I’d continue to live empty and miserable.

I certainly wouldn’t treasure God’s Word. I’d quake before it.

He had to show me that at my core, so much of what I come to Him for has to do with what He does or doesn’t do for me — and not for who He is. Not because I just want Him.

That, my friends, was a hard place to sit.

But don’t stop reading now: there’s good news. God cares infinitely more about His own glory than I do. And He’s glorified when human beings, who are made in His image, worship Him and are satisfied in Him.

 

 

It’s what we were all created for. Even if we like our life and our freedom just fine (we settle for so little, our appetites so small), we’ll never be fully, deep-down satisfied unless we’re spending our life doing the sole thing we were made for: to worship God. To treasure His Word as the means to know and treasure Him.

He is the prize. Not my anger management. Not the easing of my anxiety. Not my better performance. Not even my vibrant quiet time.

It’s just Him all along.

In His great kindness, God answered my prayer by showing me that there were things I was worshiping above Him. My comfort. My reputation. My ability to fix people. My control.

And I was paying a price for clinging to those idols above God my Father. I was enslaved to them. I built my identity and self-worth on them. I lacked joy. And I lacked freedom. I lacked real intimacy with my Creator and Savior.

That’s what was keeping me from truly loving His Word.

I didn’t even realize that I wanted both/and.

I wanted to be a good, growing joyful Christian who encouraged people at church and complained less about having to grocery shop and didn’t lose my temper so much at my children, to read my Bible each day and check off that task in my bullet journal — but I also wanted to hold onto some idols.

I wanted to be pretty and popular and wear casual-cute clothes and unique shoes, to have well-behaved kids and a husband that people admire. I wanted people to like me and for my house to be welcoming and neat.

But it wasn’t working for me.

I couldn’t serve two masters. We never can. So His often Word felt dry and unappealing. I felt the disconnect there, but for the longest time, I couldn’t name it. I didn’t even know what my root problems were — I thought what I needed was a band-aid when what I really needed was surgery. The Holy Spirit had to take me by the hand and show me.

In the darkness and discomfort my eyes were opened. As long as I came to God and His Word for what He could do for me, I’d be forever locked in a negotiation with Him. I’d feel inflated when He answered my requests and extraordinarily let-down when He said “no.” I’d dare to say, in my most private of moments, “How could You let this happen? Don’t You see the way I try to live for You?”

I deserved His judgment for that evil sin of presumption, for God to turn His back on me. But He didn’t.

His love is so generous that He took me to the dark place to gently pry my grip free. He took a surgeon’s scalpel to my pride-layered heart and whispered, “You were created for more than this life you’re trying so hard to live. Trust me. I hurt to heal.”

It was not a pretty journey. And all the while I pleaded the promise of Hosea 6:

Come, let us return to the Lord;
For he has torn us, that he may heal us;
He has struck us down and he will bind us up.

Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord;
His going out is as sure as the dawn;
He will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth.

I came out of that achingly dark season last spring with a deeper knowledge of the sort of surrender God is calling me to, the laying down and dying to myself.

And this entire year has been a process of identifying and naming and dying to those idols. Again and again.

 

 

And here, my friends, is where I come to my point: Enjoying and loving and treasuring God’s Word.

I didn’t want to start with a post about the logistics of my daily Bible-reading habit, to give you some inspiration and a little boost in the new year.

I need you to understand where I’m sitting right now, why I’m still doggedly praying this prayer in 2019, and why I’m daring you to begin praying it for yourself — that you will love to read God’s Word, that you’ll hunger and thirst for it.

I won’t pretend it’s not a scary request and a scary journey, but I can promise that it will be good, because God is good.

I can promise that nothing in this life can happen to you outside of God’s Sovereign plan. You’re not in control of anything anyway. Why not surrender to God and learn to rejoice that He is in control?

He doesn’t waste anything. Not a single heart-breaking thing. In the words of author Joni Erickson Tada, “God often allows what He hates to accomplish what He loves.” It’s okay that you don’t understand the “why.” He is wiser than you are. He’s stronger and holier and more beautiful than any empty promises of freedom and fulfillment this world has to offer. Surrender to Him.

He’s able to answer your plea to know His love better and cherish His Words in ways you can’t imagine.

It’s worth it, I promise.

I’m not living under any illusion that there aren’t lots more layers to chip away at between now and when I go to meet Jesus face to face, more idols to be toppled. But I’m living with a new hope and a new spring in my step.

There are sins I struggle with every day, idols that creep back in the moment my back is turned, mornings that His Word feels dry. Not because it is dry, but because my appetite has shrunk again. But the reign of these sins in my heart is over. Now that I’ve felt the taste of real freedom, of intimacy with my Savior, they can’t make me cower the way they used to. The battle has been won.

I can be exposed because I am safe and I am loved. I have nothing to fear. Christ is enough for me today.

My cup runneth over.

This is what I want for you too, why I want you to come to God’s Word day after day after day.

Because it is for freedom that Christ set us free.