Something to Think About

I have long struggled within myself regarding whether or not I spend enough time in the Bible. What I mean by that is, day by day what is the appropriate amount of time one should spend in the word? Is one hour enough? 10 min? 3 hours?

In the past I struggled because I would read the bible and I would only see the same things over and over again. I would never seem to really learn anything new. That made it very difficult to spend large amounts of time in the Bible. Maybe you have felt that way yourself. You go to the bible because you believe you need it and you believe that God wants to speak to you through his word but day after day, week after week no matter where you chose to read, the same things are simply repeated, I'm not sure if that makes sense but at the moment I cannot find any other way to explain it.

It got to the point with me where I didn't want to read my Bible anymore because I already knew what it was going to say. Now I would to clarify this, I am not talking about being convicted of the same thing over and over again while not responding to the Holy Spirit, that is an entirely different matter. I wasn't being challenged anymore, I would try to do verse by verse word studies to look for hidden meaning but all I ever saw were just the same old connections.

I knew that I should be learning new things, I wanted to find the deep things of God, but every time I would pray & and open my Bible, there it was same old same old. I don't know why I did it but I started just taking a passage of scripture and reading it studying it and then staying with it for awhile and I would look for ways that that story or passage applied to my daily life. And I didn't just find one application and then move on I just stayed with it.

The funny thing about this whole process is that it wasn't a conscious decision to do it. It just started happening. But the results have been amazing. Now I haven't just put down the Bible I still go to it to check out the things that are being revealed to make sure that all things are according to scripture.  From time to time new scripture is introduced and as I spend time with it there is a transition time where I am seeing how it relates to what I came to understand from the previous text, and then The Lord begins opening the new passage up in its own unique ways.

It occurred to me yesterday afternoon that this would have been the way that all Jews and then Christians would have interacted with scripture for most of history it has only been in the last 500 years that the Bible was so widely available, so even Jesus would have used a method similar to this. When He would go to the synagogues  and read or listen to the scriptures he hear a passage and then until the next time he was able to access the scriptures he would have had to try to understand what he had heard in light of his day to day life and the other scriptures which he had in his memory.


Have you ever experienced a time when it was hard to spend time in the word?... How do you get past those times and engage the Scriptures in a meaningful way?