Category: John

  • Read the Word. Read the Word. Read the Word.

    a marked up well worn bible evidence of someone having read the Word over a long period

    People who know me have heard me say it more than once. Read the Word. Read the Word. Read the Word. I did not pick that phrase because it sounds nice said three times in a row, though it does. 

    I picked it because three things have to happen before Scripture actually does what it was given to do in your life, and missing any one of them will leave you short. 

    You have to read it. You have to come to know it. And you have to understand it. They are not the same thing, and you cannot skip ahead.

    Read the Word

    The first one is the simplest, and the one most easily skipped. You cannot know or understand a book you never open. That sounds obvious until you look honestly at how many weeks can pass between sitting down with it on purpose. 

    The blessed man is the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night, like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in season (Psalm 1:2-3). 

    Notice that fruit follows meditation, not the other way around. Reading is not the finish line. It is the starting one, but you do not get to skip it.

    I have written a whole piece on why and how to actually build this habit, with a reading plan if you need somewhere to start. Why (and how) to read your Bible

    Know the Word

    Reading puts the words in front of you. Knowing is what happens when those words stop being unfamiliar, when you can recognize a passage before you finish the first line, when the story or the command or the promise has become part of how you think. But there is a trap here, and it is an old one. 

    The Pharisees of Jesus’ day knew the Scriptures forward and backward. 

    You search the Scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life, and it is these that testify about Me, and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life (John 5:39-40). 

    They knew the book and missed the Person the book was written to introduce them to.

    I have written before about that exact danger, knowing the Bible the way you know facts, without that knowledge ever becoming the faith it was meant to produce. 

    Knowing the Bible like the back of my hand

    Understand the Word

    Reading gets the words in front of you. Knowing gets them familiar. But understanding is the one piece you cannot manufacture by effort alone, no matter how disciplined you are or how many times you have read it through. 

    A natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14). 

    On the road, after the resurrection, Jesus did not just hand His disciples a clearer outline. He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (Luke 24:45). That opening is still His to give. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him (James 1:5). Understanding is asked for, not earned.

    So the next time you hear me say it, you will know I am not just repeating myself for effect. 

    Read the Word, because you cannot know or understand a book you never open. 

    Read the Word, until the words on the page become a Person you recognize rather than facts you have filed away. 

    Read the Word, and ask the Spirit to open what your own effort never could reach on its own. Three calls, not one repeated. 

    Together they are what carry you from the gospel you believe to the life you are meant to live.

    Hallelu Yah (Praise God)

    Be blessed,

    Kevin

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  • The Gospel – the best news you will ever hear

    You know the silence that falls right before you open an envelope, or pick up the phone, when you have already braced for the worst. Most of the time the news matches the dread. But every now and then it does not. Every now and then you brace yourself and find out the test was clear, or the debt was settled, or the answer was yes, and for a second you just stand there rereading it, because good news that size is hard to trust on the first pass.

    That mix of disbelief and relief is about the closest thing I know, in ordinary life, to what the Bible calls the gospel.

    The word itself simply means good news. But you cannot understand why it is good until you understand the news that came before it, and that part is not pleasant. Scripture does not soften it. All of us, every last one, have fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Not just the people we point to on the news. Us. Our sin is not a smudge to wipe off. It is a debt we cannot pay, and the wages of that debt are death (Romans 6:23).

    If the story stopped there, it would just be bad news, true and unbearable. But it does not stop there.

    Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. He was buried, and He was raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). That is the gospel in its smallest form, four facts that changed everything. And Paul will not let us read past the cost of it without feeling it. God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). Not after we cleaned ourselves up. While we were still enemies. He paid a debt He did not owe, for people who could never repay Him.

    Here is where the gospel parts ways with every other religion and every self-improvement plan you have ever tried. It is by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). You do not earn your way into this. You do not balance the scales with enough good deeds to outweigh the bad. The debt was already paid. The only question left is whether you will receive the gift.

    As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name (John 1:12). That word receive is doing a lot of work. It is not a transaction you negotiate. It is a gift you open. Faith is simply reaching out your hand and taking what Christ already purchased at the cross.

    And what happens next is not a slight improvement. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things passed away, behold, new things have come (2 Corinthians 5:17). You are not patched up. You are remade. Rescued from the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom you have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Colossians 1:13-14). That is not a metaphor for self-help. That is a change of citizenship, paid for in blood, sealed by an empty tomb.

    Some people can tell you the exact day they stopped bracing for bad news and finally believed the good news was real. I hope you have a day like that to point back to as well, the day you stopped trying to pay a debt you could never settle and simply received what Christ already finished.

    If you have never reached out your hand for that gift, today is a good day to start. Tell Him you know the bad news is true of you, and ask Him to make the good news true of you too. He has already done the hard part.

    If you have already received it, do not let the wonder of it go stale. Read those four facts from 1 Corinthians 15 again slowly. Let them surprise you the way they did the first day.

    Hallelu Yah (Praise God)

    Be blessed,

    Kevin

    More about the good news of the gospel.