Read Yourself into the Story

Couldn't have said it better...

Barnabas Piper:

It’s as if we have forgotten that the characters in the Bible are humans. And so are we. We become parsing, nitpicking, lesson scrounging cyborgs when we read the Bible. We read every other story as story – relatable, emotional, and rational all wrapped into one. We treat the Bible, though, as if those relatable and emotional aspects are absent or off limits.

What we need when we read the Bible is whole heap of imagination to go with our commentaries and lexicons.

What are we missing of God by reading the Bible without imagination? Wouldn’t we understand him better if felt what Joseph felt while abandoned in an Egyptian prison for a crime he didn’t commit? Wouldn’t the reality of “the Lord was with Joseph” be more meaningful if we wrestled through the bitterness or loneliness or desperation or depression that he might have suffered?

What would happen to our self-righteousness if we put ourselves in Peter’s shoes that night at the high priest’s house and looked around to see angry faces and the bloodlust in the eyes of the leaders? If we read it like any other story we would be torn between fear and uprightness. We would know the right answers to those questions, but we would know just why they were so hard to give. We might have denied Jesus too.

The Bible needs imagination to truly live. God didn’t create us as unimaginative and then give us a story to confuse us. He gave us imagination and gave us a story. He gave us a spirit to breathe life into our minds so that the right stories would live in us and us in them. We can’t read the stories of the Bible like anything other than what they are: stories.

Ministry that Depends on the Holy Spirit

I've gone through my email and am ready to get into sermon work. Reading this was a good way to get started.

Bobby Jamieson:

What does ministry that depends on the Holy Spirit look like?

It looks like preaching to dead people and praying that the Holy Spirit would give life as only he can (Eph. 2:1-3). It looks like shining the light of the gospel as brightly as you can, and praying that the Spirit would give people eyes to see it (2 Cor. 4:6). It looks like aiming for things only the Holy Spirit can give to people: new loves, new hearts, new lives, new selves.

What means does the Holy Spirit use to give new life? God’s Word.

“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). The Spirit causes us to be born again “through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet. 1:23).

Therefore, Spirit-dependent ministry is by definition Word-centered and Word-driven ministry. Ministry that believes in the Holy Spirit trusts the Spirit-inspired Word to do the work God has promised it will do.

And to return to [Francis] Wayland, he argues that such Spirit-dependent, Word-driven ministry will in fact fill churches:

If we preach in such a manner that the disciples of Christ are separate from the world, prayerful, humble, earnest, self-denying, and laboring for the conversion of men, the Spirit of God will be in the midst of them, and souls will be converted. The thing will be noised abroad. There is never an empty house where the Spirit of God is present.

Is there a Holy Spirit? There is, and he speaks through the Word. And when he speaks, the dead hear and rise to new life.

Reading Old Testament Stories

It's been many months since I've posted anything here, and I'm not sure I'm "back in the saddle," but since I just preached Genesis 43-44 last week, this is the time to post this video. Interestingly enough, I ran across this video here, just a few days before I stopped blogging back in September, and have been saving it until now.