What Happened When I Finally Read the Bible.

At the end of last year, I felt like God wanted me to read my Bible. As a disclaimer, I do read my Bible, but I’d never read it completely through. Some of those Old Testament books are incredibly hard to get through and I would always skip over them to get to the “story” books, like Esther or Exodus or Jeremiah.

I wanted to read through the Bible chronologically in a year. So I found a reading plan and hoped I could stick it out.

It hasn’t been easy. I’ve wanted to quit several times. In fact, it’s a miracle that I haven’t.

But we’re just a few days away from the end of this dumpster fire of a year . . . and I’m just a few days away from reading the final words of the Bible.

I’m not bragging about this. There’s nothing to brag about. There were days I was so far behind in my reading, I wondered if I’d ever catch up. If it was even worth trying. But I’m glad I stuck it out. Even more so, I’m glad that God showed me what can happen when you give Him an effort.

I’ve been in church most of my life and I’ve been in ministry for most of that time. But I didn’t realize how little I knew of God until I read His Word.

It became so clear that we could spend our whole lives about the Father’s business and have very little knowledge of the Father we’re trying to love and serve. And how heartbreaking is that? To be on the outskirts of such love and kindness and faithfulness and power and glory and not even take the time to know it for ourselves?

When He’s all we’ve known, or all we think we’ve known, we can take Him for granted. When we know all the Sunday School answers, covered all our basics, we can stop there and feel like it’s enough.

But good heavens, the truth in all of its glory is nuanced and rich and upsetting and surprising and awe-inspiring. Our God is not two-dimensional. He is not easily molded to our ideals and standards. He’s the beginning and the end, existing long before us and remaining into eternity.

He is not small enough to be manipulated by our imaginations. God is. That’s it. That’s the sentence. He is. In all of His glory. And though we’ll never scratch the surface of that glory, we come infinitely closer when we read His Word and come to know Him in a more real way than ever before.

It feels like a big thing to say, but reading the Bible changed my life. It changed my faith. And it very well may have saved my faith in this crazy year from Jumanji.

As we head into this next year and people begin thinking about resolutions, about the things they want to change or do more or less of in the upcoming span of time, I’m asking you to commit to reading your Bible. I’m begging you to get to know God better.

He is everything. Don’t miss it.