This post is part of my ongoing series of writing down my thoughts on the Bible passages I read each day. Some days I hope to have great insight that the Lord gives me, and many days, I will likely struggle through the text and not know what to write down based on what I read. My hope and prayer is that as I make this a habit, just as I did daily writing for so long, that I will improve on my ability to read and understand the passages I’m reading. Please keep in mind that many of these posts may be published late at night or with little time studying and simply be my first thoughts after reading. This is in no way a commentary that one should use to discern the Bible, but my own personal thoughts.
Confession time!
Since part of the reason why I started this series on what I’m reading in scripture is to help me stay accountable to what I know I want to do, it seems important to me to confess when I haven’t done what I set out to do.
The last week has been a struggle for me to get out of bed in the morning and read my Bible. I’ve found almost without fail, if I don’t read in the morning, I won’t read at all that day. It’s almost as if by later in the day, my mind has too many things going on in it, so I can’t sit still long enough to concentrate on reading. I’ve never put a reason to why it might be, and there are clearly other issues at work, but I think that is actually a big piece of it.
Also a huge piece I’ve found that is detrimental to my reading is missing even one day. One of the reasons I wanted to have a specific plan for this year is so that I would know exactly what I needed to read every single day. I’ve found when I take even a single day off, my mind tells me that it’s all of a sudden okay to take another day off.
Satan catches us at both ends. At first it’s “Oh, it’s not that bad, you only missed a day, you’ll get back into it”…and then a week later you’ve missed seven straight days and now you get a whisper of “You’ve really messed up. You can’t do this, what were you thinking. No chance you’ll ever catch back up.”
As soon as one day is off, it opens up the door to missing more and more.
Some might see the approach I’ve taken and think that it makes reading the Bible a checklist item. In a way, they’d be right. But it’s the same with anything that you want to be better at. If I want to be a great pianist, that may start with some hard days sitting at the piano when my mind tells me that I don’t want to be playing the piano. However, I have to trust that the goal I’m going after is worth that time that I don’t want to be doing it. You also find that as you do it more and more, you enjoy it more and more and often want to do it as much as possible. I’ve found the same to be true with both piano and reading the Bible. The more I read the Bible the more I feel I gain and understand, so I continue to want to be fed by it.
So the above is a very long intro to say that I got almost 5 days behind on my Bible reading. Though I read a few chapters here and there, I didn’t read much, and I didn’t write anything down. I caught up this afternoon by taking a long run listening to it via earbuds until I was caught up.
I had not listened to scripture much when I ran, and I wasn’t sure if it was going to be hard for me to focus, but I ended up really enjoying it. There were a couple times that I wasn’t able to focus too much, but most of the time I felt like I got a lot out of it.
There’s a lot of rehashing what has already been said in previous books of the law in these chapters, but one of the biggest things that I saw in these chapters was that God was not trying to limit His people and hold them back from good things. As I’ve mentioned before, it wasn’t that God is holding them back, he was giving them a recipe for how to live the best life that they could live. The best life being a life fully devoted to God.
He makes it clear to them over and over again. He says if you follow what I say, you will be blessed, if you don’t you will be punished. It was as simple as that, yet the people of Israel constantly did what was evil and rebellious and turned away from God.
Deuteronomy is also a book that I found out has a passage that many Muslims believe help their case for Muhamad being prophesied. It talks about a profit that will come from their people. Such an interesting debate of what different religions believe to be the truth.