Not in 15 Minutes ...

Fifthteen minutes may be the span of some people’s fame in the current age, but I assure you that it is not enough time to get something from God’s word that will feed your soul for very long.

I’m thinking here, in particular, of all these devotional methods that Christian bookstores sell that are designed for “busy modern Christians.” I’m also thinking of books like “The Bible for Idiots” and “The Bible for Dummies.”

These may be good things to start out with if you know noting at all about the Bible, but let me give you a quote by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg that was given to me by Robertson Davies in Davies book A Voice from the Attic: Essay on the Art of Reading. Lictenberg said:

“A book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no apostle can look out.”

If you look into the Bible without the presence of the Holy Spirit of God guilding you, nothing very profitable is going to look back out at you. But when you look into the Bible with the presence of the Holy Spirit of God guilding you, it will not an apostle but Christ who will look back out. This is the culmination of all the reasons for the Bible being written. It is where prayer, the Word of God, and worship meet and where santification begins:

2 Cor 3:18

18 But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

(KJV)

In my own reading of the Bible, I have discovered that the Holy Spirit of God usually highlights something wonderful to me about fifteen to twenty minutes after I’ve given up waiting to receive something and have simply “sat down to listen.” The Holy Spirit of God does not generally uncover the things of God to people who are tapping their toes, waiting for Him to “get on with it.” Here, in the study of the Word of God, the Holy Spirit of God is the master and you are the servant. Behave like one.