The Table of Contents

You know what it means to have a "personal" relationship with God. Once you decide to follow Jesus, your own personality and your experiences, your hangups and successes, become your own story that reflects the goodness of God. You don't just read in the Bible that He is good or hear other people say it; you yourself know about His goodness because you have experienced it.

What is your relationship with the Bible? You have heard other people talk about it; you hear a pastor preach from it. But is your own story enmeshed with the words on those pages? Instead of just hearing someone read Psalm 23 at a funeral, do you have a personal experience with that psalm that comes back to you when you look at the verses?

At the last Lunch at Angie's, I rambled a bit about my own relationship with the Word. James was my favorite book when I was first saved--it was so easy and clear. The psalms were early favorites too because they are expressive of our emotions. Once, I spent a year copying the psalms in my own voice, one a day, as my prayer to God.

I used to be very intimidated by Isaiah--I just didn't like it. And then I heard someone (teacher or preacher, can't remember) say that it was the book Jesus quoted the most. If Isaiah was Jesus' favorite book, then maybe I should look into it. There was a period of years when I was in love with Isaiah, and it was the foundation of many prayers, the way Psalms had once been. There was another time in my life when I was very frustrated with the gospels. Jesus just seemed confusing and unattainable. And another time, after a church we were attending split, I stayed in Matthew for six months, finding comfort and healing there.

When you look at the table of contents in your Bible, do you see a depth of relationship with the books listed there? I read my Bible alphabetically (mostly--I pull the gospels here and there, since they're kinda clustered around the middle), so the table of contents is my reading guide. After I complete a book, I put the two digits of the year next to it, so I can keep track of where I've been. I try to read the Bible through every three years. Over my lifetime, I hope to continually read it; it's not really a race. If I read it at a faster pace (like once a year), I find I don't meditate on it well. I start gulping it down like my morning organge juice, instead of savoring it like my coffee.

If you are simply feeling guilty about not reading your Bible, please stop. You should be honest: are you going to read it? If you're not, stop feeling guilty. Just say, I'm not doing that now. But if you do want to develop a relationship with a very large, lengthy, ancient book (c'mon, this isn't the easy read of a John Grisham novel), then set a specific goal. I want to read the little letters of the New Testament (Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, etc.), or I want to read Revelation. One year, my goal was to read a little every day, so I bought a perpetual calendar with a Scripture for every day. I could always find two minutes, standing in my kitchen, to read the Bible. My goal was to build a daily habit that I could expand on.

Pick something. Do it. Begin a relationship with your table of contents.