The Life-Renewing Words of Jesus by Adam RamseySample

“The Scriptures bear witness about me”

Imagine you are in a situation where a tornado or hurricane is bearing down on you. Lightning flashes all around. Thunder rumbles. Wind whips about you. And there ahead of you is a door marked “Emergency Shelter.” On the other side of it lies safety and life.

As you approach it, however, you notice a group gathered around it. The storm bears down on them, too. But instead of entering in, they have struck up a conversation outside the door about the door itself. Some are admiring it. Others are inspecting it, discussing the merits of the door for withstanding storms. But none have entered through it. They have completely missed the point of it.

Reading the Bible in a way that doesn’t move us towards Jesus in worship and trust and hope is exactly the same. The Bible is not a destination in and of itself but a doorway into the life-renewing truth of who God is for us in Jesus Christ.

Jesus, here, was addressing a group of religious leaders who were very serious about the Old Testament Scriptures. They read them, searched them, memorized them, and recited them, but they had missed the point of them.

The entire point of the entire Bible is Jesus.

The problem was not in the commitment of these religious leaders to searching the Scriptures. The problem was they had missed the purpose of the Scriptures because they had missed the person about whom the Scriptures testified.

How would your approach to Bible reading change if each time you saw that precious book sitting there on your kitchen table or by your bed or on your desk, you saw it not merely as a destination (to which, you know, you really should pay a visit) but as a daily doorway into life?

Quote for Reflection

“...Your Word is life, but not without the Holy Spirit. I may know this book of yours from beginning to end … and yet it may be a dead book to me and I may be a dead soul. But Lord, be present here … Ah, then we shall read the book so differently … I will read it knowing that … that He is the proof of this book as well as the writer of it—the sum of this Scripture as well as the author of it...”

Charles Spurgeon, “How to Read the Bible,” Sermon 1503