Opening God’s word

I love a good bookshop. I love to browse in good bookshops. Leave me in a secondhand bookshop for hours and I’ll be very happy. We have a fabulous bookshop here in Ripon and there’s another one in Thirsk where you can get a coffee as well. I discovered it has an upstairs the other week. I always vow not to buy any more books because I’ve no more room on the study shelves but I fail miserably most times. You see, a good book draws me into it. A good book invites me to invest in it. I may read a word in its pages that might change my life for ever. 

 

So it should be with the Bible. It’s an exciting and challenging and comforting and life changing read if we would only invest in it again and hear God inviting us to hear a word for today in it again. 

 

‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’

declares the Lord.

 ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’

 

And later you know we have an even greater promise…

As the rain and the snow
    come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
    without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
    so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
    It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
    and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

 

Someone once described the word of God as a span from heaven to earth. This was true every time a prophet spoke of old. And it became true in the most wonderful form in Jesus Christ.

In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son. (Hebrews 1:1–2)

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. (John 1:1, 14)

Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, is the all-sufficient span between heaven and earth. 

The rain and the snow have come down from heaven. 

God’s word is not just on a printed page, it lives in the person of Jesus. Isn’t that exciting? Don’t you want to read more and more of God’s word? Don’t you want to encounter more and more of the word incarnate? 

 

In The Handmaids Tale, remember the Bible is kept locked up, the way people once left tea locked up so the servants wouldn’t steal it. It is an incendiary device: says the text, who knows what we’d make of it if we ever got our hands on it. And yet we seem to have made it less important in our programme than it should be. Early Methodists met to study it, discuss it and learn from it, in small groups. Maybe we need to put some of those groups back in our church. Does the preacher on a Sunday bring the Bible alive for you? Perhaps better not to ask that question.

 

Remember the collect for Bible Sunday : 

Merciful God,

teach us to be faithful in change and uncertainty,

that trusting in your word

and obeying your will

we may enter the unfailing joy of Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

Trusting in your word… to do that we have to accept the invitation to be immersed in it. Do you remember the late Methodist minister and broadcaster, Dr Colin Morris? He once told a story about a Methodist  encountering a Jehovah’s Witness. The Jehovah’s Witness asked the Methodist to quote him a verse in Leviticus. And the Methodist thought: “Leviticus? Is it in the Old Testament? Is it in the New Testament? Is it the name of a racehorse?” And Morris concludes: “would you trust a garage mechanic to touch your car if he didn’t know what was under the bonnet? Everything your Jehovah’s Witness knows, he counts on you knowing less.

 

Let me put it like this. We trust other bits of words that are shared. My life mother thought the Daily Mail was infallible and that every word she heard on the Jimmy Young programme on the radio was Gospel. This week I got a cough from somewhere and I was put on steroids and in the packet of pills is a little leaflet you read throughly and urgently. But the Bible? Well…

We have to do better for the sharing of God’s word depends on us. 

 

Billy Graham once said “I’ve read the last page of the Bible, it’s going to turn out all right.” 

We have a positive, exciting and vital word to read, hear, live and share. Imagine what would happen in our communities and in our world if we really had this sort of faith in God’s unfailing word, and if we really were willing to accept God’s call on our lives. What a different church we would be then.