Don’t you think the Bible can be hard to understand? If your answer wasn’t a resounding “Yes!” go ahead and read a few chapters of Leviticus and get back to me. Studying the Bible isn’t easy. In fact, the odds are stacked against us! We can’t read the original languages. We aren’t historians who know the cultures that the Bible is interfacing with. We aren’t linguists who can decipher the meaning of words nearly lost to history. How are we supposed to study the Bible when we simply aren’t equipped to do so?
Well, I have some good news; we are not alone in our journey of understanding scripture! We are a community of people dedicated to following Jesus, and that means we get to read the Bible together. We all have our own God-given gifts, and all of those gifts are valuable to our church community. We have friendly individuals on the Welcome Team, we have skilled musicians on our Worship Team, and we have discussion-leaders and teachers leading ministries like Youth Ministry and Adult Bible Fellowship. We also have Bible-nerds. Now wouldn’t it be silly to assume everyone in the church should learn to play an instrument so we can all volunteer for our Worship Team? Of course, that’s ridiculous! Not everybody needs to play music on Sunday mornings. Well not everybody in the church needs to have their noses buried in Hebrew lexicons and textbooks on ancient near-eastern law codes either. In fact, it would be a waste of time if we did. The Apostle Paul tells us in the book of Romans that we should all use our natural, God-given gifts to serve each other.
“According to the grace given to us, we have different gifts: If prophecy, use it according to the proportion of one’s faith; if service, use it in service; if teaching, in teaching; if exhorting, in exhortation; giving, with generosity; leading, with diligence; showing mercy, with cheerfulness.”
Romans 12:6-8
Not everybody needs to be a Bible-nerd, right? I hope that takes some pressure off of your shoulders. It’s okay to be open about the fact that the Bible is confusing. It’s okay if you are not a Bible scholar. But we still need to read the Bible, don’t we? How do we even start to study the Bible when it’s so hard to understand? That is what Taking Root is; a way for me to use my gifts in service to my church community. My goal, as a self-proclaimed Bible-nerd, is to inspire you to interact with scripture in a mature way. My wish is to turn your Bible reading into something that is interesting or even exciting, not just another spiritual chore. I want to empower you to study the Bible for the sheer delight of it.
So how do we get started? The best thing we can do to start taking the Bible seriously is to approach it on its terms, not our own terms. We need to learn to start thinking about the Bible more critically by asking “what is the author trying to communicate?” instead of “what does the Bible say?” because the reality is that the authors of the Bible communicated very differently than we do today. We need to take off our “21st century American glasses” and put on our “600 BC ancient Israelite glasses.” This, at least in part, is what I will be talking about over the next few weeks! We will explore how we can understand the Bible the way that the authors intended us to understand it, and not impose our own modern ideologies on top of it.
I hope to see you next week!
Matt
