It just keeps happening over and over: the Bible speaks directly to people, to their everyday lives. It keeps changing those who come to it with an open heart.
And because the Bible tells the truth—the truth of who God is, and who we really are as His own beloved children—it not only speaks to us but it frees and heals us in precisely the way Christ jesus promised it would when he stated that "the truth shall make you free. "
"..the Bible should be read... with an ear to what the text might be saying to me. Simply doing responsible exegesis is not enough, as enlightening as it often is. The next steps are listening to the text, reflecting on it, asking not merely what it means, but what it is asking of me, what it is asking me to hear.
"What I had been unable to understand was what Soren Kierkegaard called the 'contemporaneity' of the Bible. The past does not merely parallel, but actually intersects the present. The Christ who called his disciples to follow him is calling each of us at this moment. I had been reading the Bible as if it were describing a world in which I might find parallels. I now came to understand that when I read the Bible, I am reading about a world that in some sense also now is. . . .
"I was afraid to hear what the Bible might say because I suspected it might ask me to change my life. It did...."
Excerpted from "The Jogging Monk and the Exegesis of the Heart." Copyright © 1991 by Christianity Today. Used by permission.
