“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” (Psalm 119:11)
There is, in a sense, a false security that can begin to creep into our lives if we trust in ourselves in regard to that verse instead of the truth of it. What I mean to say is that if we have hid some of the treasures of the Word of God in our hearts, contemplating them daily, we may find that we will begin to believe the excuses that we try to make in our minds for not reading His words each day.
We may not have the verses memorized exactly, we may not even know the chapter or particular book those verses we have hid within ourselves, but we have them in context, we contemplate them, we ponder His ways as we go about our busy lives, and then we berate ourselves the moment we lay down to rest for the night, for once again the entire day has unfolded, and the Book of the Almighty is still where we left it last time, unread again.
“The earth, O LORD, is full of thy mercy: teach me thy statutes.” (Psalm 119:64)
Any habit that we do without thinking is not a good habit, and in my opinion, setting a time to read the Scriptures can pose just as much of an inconvenience, if we let it, as any other attempt to perform repetitive tasks.
I have learned not to promise myself to read an entire chapter of the Scriptures simply because I know how much I will miss if the end of the chapter is my goal, the goal is to hear the truths of His Book that the Holy Spirit is attempting to help me to see, and if that means verse twenty of a forty verse chapter is where I hear Him, that is where I stop. I hide those words, in context, in my heart, and I contemplate them at length, but in that contemplation, as the necessities of the day are being accomplished, far too many times I find the sunset long gone, my eyes beginning to droop, and with the day spent, another day where His Word was not opened, read and considered at length.
So, I ask this question of you, if you are reading the Scriptures because the set time you have made arrives, are you being fed, are you being filled, or is it just the obligated time to do so?
The days I miss, the days that go by without picking up the Scriptures cause me to not just feel bad, but as one who has dishonored his Lord, as if He has waited all day for me and I never showed up. And I hate that within myself. But I also find it disgusting to read because it is time to, and that type of reading reminds me of a line from a poem.
“Everything I do I rush through, so I can start something new.”
“Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.” (Psalm 46:10)
“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (Romans 10:17)
Our faith, our trust in the Almighty in the direction of our life comes by trial and error, by learning from our mistakes, and two of those mistakes in reading His Word have been revealed to you in this short letter. The first is to say, “I will start here and finish there,” and my friends, if you do that you may miss much of what the Holy Spirit would have you to learn.
The second is to contemplate so long on a verse in context that, when accompanied with the cares of this world, may cause entire days to pass by without the Scriptures being opened by you. In either case we miss something, and in a way I cannot fully describe, I believe He misses us as well, waiting for us to arrive that day so that we can have fellowship together with Him, and we never showed up.
I hate the thought of Him waiting and I never arrived that day.
“I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find me.” (Prov. 8:17)
I pray if nothing else, that I have evoked an emotion in you about these truths.
