Episode #267 Having Heart to Hearts with God – Unforced Rhythms of Grace

Hey, friends, it's Jen. Have you ever thought about how different it feels to receive a personal message than a templated one? I'm sure you have, but maybe not in this context using that example to talk about how we approach and experience the Bible.

So think about it for a minute, maybe it's even the context of being grouped in as part of a team or department for a huge endeavor versus specifically being singled out or receiving a direct message about how your unique contribution impacted things. It's also the difference between reading a textbook or a manual and reading a personalized letter or something that was crafted specifically for you. Our intent, our assumptions, our anticipation of the message, all of those things are different because it's the difference between something that's just for the masses and something that's specifically for us.

Well, the good news is the Bible is both of those things. God gave us his written word for the whole world, and also he wants to speak to each one of us directly and personally through it.

As you know, if you've heard any of our recent episodes, I am rereading Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline. And I'm in this part in the book that's talking about meditation: thinking on, sitting with, and letting our hearts and our minds be full of, scripture. In his book, he actually is referencing Dietrich Bonhoeffer's approach to meditation, which is to accept God's word as words from someone you love.

He says, “just as you do not analyze the words of someone you love, but accept them as they are said to you, accept the Word of Scripture and ponder it in your heart, as Mary did. That is all. That is meditation.”
We get to be those who treasure God's word and ponder it as a loving form of communication with us.
But for many of us, me included, that's not always how we've been taught to approach the Bible. Or maybe it's how we were taught, but it wasn't something that we knew how to do.

One of the examples from my own life is actually the most famous Bible verse. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Now I knew that verse. It was one of the first verses that I ever memorized, but I never received that as personal to me. For years and years and years. I understood that as kind of this templated message for all of the world. I wouldn't have had the words or the understanding to describe this until a few years ago, but I also didn't really think God loved me specifically the way that he loved you.

I kind of assumed this wrong perspective of God that was mismatched, I'm sure, from all of these other experiences in my life. But the perspective I had was that because God so loved the world, he kind of loved me by default. Because the whole world was included in God's love he wouldn't go against himself.

And so I guess, yeah, I also kind of love you, Jen. Now, again, I wouldn't have known this to be able to communicate it to anyone, but this was how I thought about God. This is how I perceived his care for me. And so naturally that changed so much about how I approached him, how I approached the Bible. I didn't really think that if it was just me, Jesus still would've come for me.

But when scripture becomes personal, when we receive the words, not analyzing them, but accepting them, we get to experience them in a new way.

And it was actually this process of sitting with my view of God and my view of me and the struggles that I had, believing that he truly loved me like he loved you and other people, that I started realizing: I have misunderstood him. I have wrongly thought these things about him and about his love for me.

As I sit with scripture like this verse, I am then offered the opportunity to change my mind about what I think about God, to allow verses to become personal to me. Not that it discredits everyone else in the world. Not to remove myself from the body of Christ or the fellowship of the church, none of those things, but to look at how I misunderstood God and what is truer of him instead. for God so loved Jen, that he gave his only son that Jen would believe in him and not perish, but have eternal life.

It wasn't just whoever, because God didn't really care. He cares about the whole world, and that's not just me by accident or coincidence. That's me on purpose. And so my encouragement for you today is to take this question to God and see what he might want to talk with you as well about how you can receive his living and active word scripture as ministry and messages from his heart to yours.

And here's our question:

God, what would you have me receive today as a personal message from you to my heart?

Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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