By Nancy DeMoss
Imagine that you went to your refrigerator, closed your eyes, and then opened the door and grabbed whatever items you happened to reach in order to make a meal. You might get a jar of mayonnaise, a pickle jar, and a peach—not an especially appetizing or nourishing combination. Yet that is a picture of the way many people approach the Word of God. They blindly “grab” whatever passage they come to first, in no particular sequence or order. When passages are separated from their context, their meaning is changed and well-meaning believers can easily be misled.
Others read the Bible much like a teenager whose preferred diet consists of pizza, chips, pop, and ice cream. Our bodies require a nutritionally balanced diet in order to stay healthy. Likewise, our spirits need the balance that comes from taking in the “whole counsel of God,” not limiting ourselves to those passages that seem particularly appetizing. The spiritual growth of some believers has been stunted due to a diet that consists primarily of the Psalms with perhaps a smidgen of the New Testament Epistles.
It’s true that not all parts of the Bible are equally easy to digest. For example, there are some passages in 1 Chronicles and Ezekiel that seem particularly tedious and even unnecessary, especially when compared to more “succulent” passages we might discover in 1 Peter or the Gospel of John. But Paul reminded Timothy that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16).
Yes, we need the Psalms and the Epistles. But we also need the Books of the Law, the Historical Books, the Prophets, and the Gospels. We need the whole of God’s Word. And we need to read in such a way that we get a sense of the flow of the Word…
Copyright Revive Our Hearts. Written by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. Used with permission. www.ReviveOurHearts.com
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