What Happens When We Read The Bible?

Are you a morning person. I think i am, but to the detriment of being an evening person. It's not much good firing on all cylinders at 5am if you can't hold a conversation with your wife at 9pm! But i like the mornings, the cool air, the grey light getting slowly brighter. I like the fresh, unused air outside, i like the coffee, i like reading the Bible.

It was probably at the beginning of my second year at Reading Uni when i realised that reading the Bible for myself was a good idea, and probably near the end of that time that i started regularly doing it. Now, thankfully, it's part of my life, i miss it when i can't or don't read, not out of guilt, but because i actually enjoy it.

What happens when we read the Bible? God speaks! How can that not be exciting?! The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob speaks across time and space, to me, in the back room of our house in Greenville. That's worth getting up for. When we read the Bible we hear, and see God the Father showing us His Son. Jesus tells in Luke 24 that the whole Old Testament is about Him. The law, the genealogy, the prophets, the songs and the love stories all find their meaning in Him.

Reading the Bible then, puts us in the place of the bride in the Song of Solomon. In Song 3:2 the bride says 'i will rise and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; i will seek him whom my soul loves.' Is that what we do when we read the Bible? We pray and ask God to speak, but He has spoken, we need to pray that God would give us open ears and a soft heart. We need to pray that in Isaiah, in Deuteronomy, in Romans, we'd see Jesus. We'd see His face reflected in the Psalms, His purposes in the history, His work in the characters. We need these things, not for the sake of a snappy tweet, or clever devotion, but for our lives. We should be as hungry to see Jesus as we are for our morning cereal.

Seeking our beloved in the city streets of scripture stops the Bible becoming boring. If you think that the Bible is Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, of course you'll be bored by the genealogies, of course the command not to boil a goat in it's mothers milk (three times! Three!) will seem hopelessly outdated. But if, with all our hearts we're looking for Jesus, then the Bible will never be boring, and never be irrelevant. Jesus is perpetually, eternally, interesting. Jesus is ever-relevant.

Open the Bible, ask for help, begin the search, hunt for morning satisfaction from him whom your soul loves.