Spiritual reading of scripture entails an awareness that in some profoundly relevant way we are deeply related to the God who is proclaimed and portrayed in scripture. God who breaks into human history in the Bible is also deeply involved in our own personal history and the history of our own time.
The realm of God the scripture reveals is an order of being of such wholeness that it is totally destructive to anything that does not resonate with its wholeness…We must come to the scripture therefore with an awareness that our entire order of being will be brought into the presence of an order of Being that will ultimately challenge anything and everything in our being and doing that is not consistent with its wholeness and life.
Our reading of scripture should be conceived as an encounter with the living Word, a means to God's shaping of our lives. If this encounter and shaping is to take place, then our reading must be an activity we offer up to God consistently as a loving discipline, released to God for God's use, on God's terms, in God's time. We cannot view our spiritual reading of scripture as a means to any goal of our own devising. It must be a steady, consistent discipline we offer to God with no strings attached, no demands made, no expectations fixed, no limits set.
We are not, by the discipline of spiritual reading, transforming our own being or doing in our own power. We are offering ourselves to God to be transformed by God's power.
Keep asking yourself, "What is God seeking to say to me in all of this?" By adopting this posture toward the text, you will begin the process of reversing the learning mode that establishes YOU as the controlling power who seeks to master a body of information. Instead, you will allow the scripture to become an instrument of God's grace in your life. You will begin to open yourself to the possibility of God setting the agenda.
The expectation of instant gratification in our culture is a by-product of our grasping, controlling, manipulative way of living. It is feedback we require to affirm for ourselves that we are effective persons. If what we do doesn't provide such gratification, it might mean we are not capable, effective controllers of what is "out there." We have extreme difficulty in abiding, in waiting patiently, trustingly, perseveringly to be shaped by God according to God's agenda.
Robert Mulholland
"Shaped by the Word"
Other Thoughts to Ponder:
