No 20

(I read, I read but…)

God’s Word is a treasure and we should be thankful that we have it in such abundance. There are countries where the Bible is outlawed and people are persecuted if they are caught reading it. Once there was a man who defected from the USSR when it was a communist country and had only scraps of the Bible to keep him nourished. Of course when he asked for asylum in Canada, our government said yes and placed him in a hotel room while his immigration papers were being processed. He arrived in the room, sat down on the bed and opened the drawer of the night table and lo and behold – a complete Bible. WOW!

We are used to having complete Bibles and many Christians have more than one; they say that the average Christian household in North America has 8 Bibles. Have you ever come to the point in your reading where you say – I read, I read but I cannot remember most of what I read? Well, don’t get discouraged, this is quite normal. In Psalm 119: 113, we read “I hate vain thoughts: but thy law do I love.” When we read the Bible on a regular basis, it becomes our spiritual nourishment (See study # 131) and we do tend to forget specific passages, but it does its work in spite of our lack of retention.

There is a story about a wise old Christian who was asked by someone what to do because he had difficulty in remembering what he read. So the wise Christian gave him a little object lesson – he handed him an old basket and asked that he go and fill it with water at the creek nearby. The man went and filled the basket with water; but as he was returning to the man’s house, the water leaked out. The wise Christian asked that he do it again; he did, and the same thing happened – the basket was empty when arrived back. He did this three times and the wise Christian asked the man “Now do you understand?” To which the man said “No, I don’t, what is the meaning?” The wise Christian told the man that although the basket had not retained any of the water, in the process, it was cleansed; the dirty old basket was now clean. He said the same thing applies to us when we read Scripture. It’s possible that we do not retain everything we read but in the process, our hearts are purified. The Bible says “Thy word is very pure: therefore thy servant loveth it” (Ps 119:140). And in the New Testament, we read “Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently:” (1 Peter 1:22). If we hang in there and read Scripture continuously, the result will be the same as with the basket – our thoughts will be pure. Sanctification is a work in process, it does not happen overnight.