Rhythms of Grace: Meditating on Scripture Daily

Bonhoeffer took his friend in a boat, and they sailed across the Oder Sound to an airfield where Hitler was training his troops. Fighter planes were taking off and landing on the runways of a nearby squadron, and soldiers marched about following orders. And they walked up onto a hill nearby, and Bonhoeffer gave a speech to his friend about the complicity of Protestants and Catholics to the Third Reich, explaining how the church had been compromised by it. He talked about the discipline that the Third Reich used to form people, and pointing to the seminary, said that this must be stronger than that, pointing to the airfield. [00:40:42] (38 seconds)  #ConfrontingChurchComplicity

And it's important to read and reflect on that truth in a world where the cunning and deceitful serpent still attempts to tell us lies. We're wired for story, and there's lots and lots of different false narratives around that try and draw us away from God's truth. These stories make us believe that God doesn't have our best intentions at heart and that he is withholding good things from us. And if we choose to believe these stories, then we think we can do better, and so we redefine good and evil, and we think we can say and do whatever we want because it will lead to our happiness. [00:45:22] (39 seconds)  #ResistFalseNarratives

And, I think it's really important because like the Psalm says, it will bring us great delight if we spend time in the Bible, if we spend time in scripture. This book is a book of great importance, and we need something to get its story into us because this must be stronger than that. And I'll leave you with this quote from Charles Spurgeon. He says, all other books might be heaped together in one pile and burned with less loss to the world than would be occasioned by the obliteration of a single page of the sacred volume of scripture. At their best, all other books are butters gold leaf, requiring acres to find one ounce of precious metal. [01:02:33] (48 seconds)  #ScriptureIsPriceless

First one out is be still. So you find a place that is quiet and distraction free. You find a time that is unhurried, if that is possible for you, in your stage of life, and settle your body and open in prayer. And this step is really important. My practicing the way group that meet once a month around the dinner table, we've just been doing the practice of solitude and silence. And, actually, a minute is a long time when you put the timer on and feels really difficult at the start. But as you get into that practice and ask God to fill the space and just take a minute in stillness, you will learn that the author is in the room with you, that Jesus wants to be there, and that we can meet him on every page that we read in scripture. [00:56:54] (47 seconds)  #BeStillAndPray

And so the idea is that as we put these things into practice, as we take the words of Jesus and think about how we live them out, that we don't come away with more to do and more to take on and more to add to the to do list, but that we actually just take some daily, weekly, monthly, monthly, annual habits that we can put into place to create a framework where there's more space for God to speak into our everyday, ordinary lives. We turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, placing them before him as a sacrifice, putting these practices in first so that everything else around them feels much more manageable, becomes much more manageable. [00:43:16] (49 seconds)  #RhythmsForEverydayGrace

Like, it just it's not. It's very broad, it's very good, and it's, you know, very biblical, but it's not specific. It's not small. I can't measure it. So get really granular with that step. Really important step, though. Right? Joshua was told to obey the law, not just meditate on it, obey it as well. Not turning from the right or to the left. And that is the thing that God says will make successful and prosperous. So it's not good enough for us just to have a great theology and not actually see any impact in our lives. [00:59:36] (34 seconds)  #ObeyNotJustMeditate

So in Hebrew, the word used in both passages is hagar, and it most literally means to murmur, which probably refers to an ancient practice where they used to read scripture in a quiet voice under their breath. But can also be translated as to growl over, And Isaiah uses that word in that sense when he writes about a lion growls, haggars, a great lion over its prey. So, you can think of a lion and its prey, or you can think of a dog and its bone. [00:51:40] (33 seconds)  #MurmurTheWord

So hopefully, you see, that the language there in both of those passages is almost identical. And, the people at the bible project would call that a kind of hyperlink. It's where the author, the authors of scripture are purposefully looking back at a passage from the canon of scripture, and they're purposefully using a a word or a phrase to draw your attention to it. And so these two canonical themes do more than just stitch together those three parts of scripture at Jesus' day. They teach us how to read scripture as well. The idea is one of meditation. [00:51:03] (37 seconds)  #ScriptureHyperlinks