Read With Your Heart
By Wes Ellis
“Shout with joy to the Lord, all the earth! Worship the Lord with gladness. Come before him, singing with joy. Acknowledge that the Lord is God! He made us, and we are his. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good. His unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation.” -Psalm 100
In our first session of our Lenten Bible study on Wednesday night, we started by reading Psalm 100.... but we didn’t just read it. We tried to truly listen to it.
We did a variation of what’s called a Lectio Divina (You may recall that Pastor Nerice recently wrote about this practice). Aware that we were soon going to be reading the text with our brains, I thought it was prudent to take a little time to start by listening to the text with our hearts.
As someone who truly loves to examine the text of scripture, to analyze it and mine it for all its meaning, I recognize that sometimes what we need isn’t to worry about what the text means to us, but to consider what it might do to us. If we let ourselves simply listen and imagine God speaking to us, what might happen to us?
When we allow the scriptures to simply wash over us, we might encounter God in ways we hadn’t expected. And we might discover God saying something to us that may not have had much to do with the meaning of the particular text we’re reading.
Now, of course we don’t have permission to just make the bible say whatever we want it to say. Unfortunately, the church has a long history of doing just that.... taking meaning from the text that was never there in the first place (this is where we get strange and unbiblical theologies that support things like the crusades, slavery, and the Left Behind series). The actual meaning of the bible is of utmost importance. As a theologian, in fact, I am predisposed to prioritize that. We should always read the bible with our brains! We must think critically to determine what it is that the Bible is trying to communicate. But we do also have permission to allow God to speak to our hearts through the words of Scripture.
After all, the point of the Bible isn’t to transmit information about God. It is to bring us into relationship with God.
When we read the scripture in this way, closed our eyes and listened for what stuck out to us, more that one of those present at the bible study were struck by the phrase, “we are his...” This feeling of belonging washed over us and we discovered again that the point of all of this—the point of understanding theology, tradition, and scripture—is to experience God as a minister and to encounter the love of God.
So I hope that in your prayers and in your reading and in your worship you are able to encounter God. Indeed, whether we know it or not, we are God’s. And God’s unfailing love continues forever. Let yourself experience it.
