There’s a funny thing about getting back into the habit of something when you haven’t done it in a while: sometimes it’s terribly difficult. Even when it’s something as good as reading your Bible.
Here’s some background. Lindsie and I started running again and it’s been a few days weeks since either one of us really did it with a purpose. And after two days, we can barely walk. Now is about the time when we could give up. Maybe “just take a few days off” until we’re not so sore. The problem is that it’s easy for a few days off to turn into a few weeks off. And suddenly you’re back where you started and the next time you go running, you’re sore again. The cycle starts all over.
The same thing can happen when it comes to your walk with God. I know it happens to me all the time. Specifically with reading my Bible. Although Lindsie is great at reading hers consistently, I sometimes struggle. With so many great comic books and novels out there to read, sometimes I just feel like using my “free time” for something more exciting…more entertaining.
The past two nights, along with running, we’ve been reading our Bibles together. And it should be easy. I’ve read the entire Bible once in my life, and I’ve read it off and on for years since then. It’s not like it’s a book written in some foreign language or something. But for whatever reason, I can only manage to get deeply involved with my Bible for a few days and nights before I’m ready for more entertainment again. I can somehow manage to find more time for a Captain America comic than I can find for God.
The trick is not to give up. The trick is not to take “just a few days off.” In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, demons are personified as intervening in the spiritual lives of their “patients” (i.e. – humans). Their goal is to disrupt their patients’ spiritual walks in whichever sneaky, evil ways they can. Although what Lewis wrote was fiction, I do think that’s what truly happens to us. Demons can recognize when we’re really getting into the groove with our faith. And they’ll do whatever they can to throw that off in any way possible.
Like I said – the trick is not to give up. There’s some great stuff in the Bible. Truly entertaining, attention-grabbing stuff. Last night we read James, chapter 1 and it seemed like almost every word in that entire chapter was speaking right to me. There’s a reason that’s the case. Because God WANTS us to read his Word. He wouldn’t have written a cruddy, boring book just hoping someone might suffer through it out of obligation. He wrote something that is truly alive. Something he wanted us to want to read.
So if you try to read your Bible and you aren’t quite feeling it like you were hoping you would, please don’t give up. Just like getting back in shape after a long exercise hiatus, it’s never easy. Especially right after the start, when you’re most sore. Fight through the spiritual soreness and stick with it.
Eventually you’ll get back in shape. And I guarantee that’ll feel really, really good.
