Crossroads Bible Fellowship

Hey everyone out there! I have not disappeared completely. I have been working on many things behind the scenes and wanted to kick  start things here on the blog again.

I have been reading this new biography by Eric Metaxas with a reading group on Facebook. If you are interested in being a part of that group, let me know. We are breaking the book into two sections. We have completed the first half of the book and are now starting to discuss it.

I am posting here my first thoughts. This is not a review of the book by any means. That is not my goal. I am thinking about themes in Bonhoeffer’s life and how they impact us today.

Bonhoeffer Biography Part 1

I want everything!

I know. There are certain things you should expect from a biography and other things that are too ideal. I get it, but I don’t buy it. I refuse to be satisfied with just learning some nice information and going on my merry way. There is too much at stake as I live out my life and I want my time, reading or doing anything else, to have more to offer me than just a good time or interesting facts.

I want to be moved!

I want to see things that I have never seen before, things that will of necessity affect everything I do from this point on. Lofty goals, right? But this is serious and you should want these things too from “a simple book.” Books are not just black marks on a white page glued together.

Books are ideas waiting to be unwrapped and lived. They are passion and drama and they are meant to be life changing, the good books are anyways.

So, why is Bonhoeffer of any consequence to me in this peaceful life in the suburbs with my particular problems and struggles?

Life and Belief

What do I believe more—what I say I believe or what I actually live out every day? Is it possible to have one set of “beliefs” that I talk about and claim to hold, while I act on the exact opposite? Are “beliefs” simply what we have decided is the best view?

The constant refrain through the book so far is that learning impacts living. Amen!

While trained to be an intellectual, Bonhoeffer saw through the problems of the day to recognize that learning divorced from living was not true discipleship. He saw “that the overemphasis on the cerebral and intellectual side of geological training had produced pastors who didn’t know how to live as Christians, but knew how to think theologically. Integrating the two was increasingly important to him.’ (page 195)

If I claim to believe something, doesn’t that doctrine need to get into my bloodstream and flow out to my fingertips? Sure, there is always a lag time, the moment I learn something it is not immediately shot through to my walk, but should Christ’s disciples claim to believe something they spend most of their time ignoring?

James helps us here.

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he is like.” James 1:22-24 ESV

What is your mirror and are you listening to it?

For Bonhoeffer, this was real, not a game to see who could come up with the right answer on a Bible quiz. Hitler was on a rampage and there were consequences for taking a stand. Believing and following Christ meant difficulty and possibly death. That leads to rigorous study. “One wished to arrive at answers that could stand up to every scrutiny because one would have to live out those conclusions.” (page 127)

Do you and I live out our conclusions?

Lately I have been thinking about how to increase my intimacy with Jesus Christ. If I want to interact with the world for Jesus, I should know how He thinks about things and be as close to Him as I can be.

Most people, when they talk about getting closer to God, describe their study time and prayer, the traditional “quiet time.” I hope that works for them. It doesn’t for me. I read and then I get up and forget what I have read. Or, worse yet, I don’t read and I feel guilty like I have ignored an appointment with God and left Him in the waiting room. I am not sure when Scripture reading and prayer became duties for me. I just know that I want more intimacy, not more information alone.

I need information for the intimacy to be truthful. That has always concerned me. Jesus Christ brought grace AND truth. I want it all. I just know that in my life, information often becomes an idol and replaces God. While I need to know true things about God, that information is meant to help me know God better, not so that I can get the right answers on the pop quiz later.

Quiet time normally means I take some time reading and then praying for needs in my life and those I love. This lasts between 15 and 45 minutes and then I move on with my day. That doesn’t work for me. I need God to be speaking into my life 24/7 even though I can’t read that often. I need what God describes in Psalm 1 or Joshua 1:8 where God’s word is the meditation of my heart day and night. If I cannot remember what I have read after I close my Bible, I can’t take it with me when I go out and live the life God has planned for me. Something has to stick. That is what I want. I want the kind of meal that sticks with you all day and maybe even the next day. There has to be some way for this to happen. That is my search.

You might not struggle like me. If you are able to sit down and read your Bible, pray the appropriate things afterward and feel close to God, great! I am very happy for you. I have struggled with that and now I realize I need to change.

So I stopped studying Scripture.

Now I want to dwell in it, to savor it. Before I tried to understand everything that was in it so that I could explain it to anyone. Now I want to treasure it and make sure I know how it works in my life. Now what it reveals about God Himself matters more.

Here is my plan. Over the last 8 months, I read through the whole Bible. It was wonderful and gave me such a great overview of God’s plan and story. Now I am going to do two things at the same time.
1. I am going to read through it again, quickly. I am using a plan where I read 10 chapters a day from 10 different places in the Bible. You can check out the plan for yourself. I am very excited about it and have already started.
2. I am going to meditate on one section every day. Right now I am spending time each day in Romans 8:28 and the surrounding verses. The point is not to see how many verses I can meditate on. The plan is to take as long as I need to see that verse explode in my life, changing how I live. I am going to start with meditating on this verse for a week and see if that is enough time. If not, I will take a second week.

What I want to resist is the “reading just to read” mentality. I don’t want the word to go through me like a pipe. I want it to take root in me. I want to live it out, not just read it through. Between the two plans above, I should be able to get a view from a skyscraper and a street level view of certain portions of Scripture—the best of both worlds.