Streams of Living Water

The Second Petition in the Lord’s Prayer
‘Thy kingdom come.’ Matt 6: 10.

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(I) Why Should I Read the Bible?

Read: Luke 8:1-18 esp. vs. 18 “consider carefully how you listen”
Someone once asked – ‘what is more important in the Christian life – prayer or bible reading?’ To which the answer came back (a rather hackneyed answer in St. V’s) – ‘what wing of a plane is more important to it, the left or the right?’ Prayer and Bible reading are both vital elements in Christian discipleship and growth. So I thought, after spending some time talking about prayer, we should spend some time talking about reading the Bible, and just as we looked in Ephesians 6 at issues surrounding the ‘how-to’s’ of prayer, so we are now going to looking at issues surrounding the ‘how-to’s’ of reading the Bible.
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[II] What should I do before I read the Bible?                          

Read: Psalm 119:9-40
“Zaccheus was a very little man and a very little man was he, he climbed up into the sycamore tree for the Saviour he wanted to see. Now as the Saviour passed that way he looked up to the tree and he said, ‘Zaccheus, you come down, for I’m coming to your house for tea’”. A nice child’s chorus, but as so often, the children have much to teach us. What did Zaccheus do so that he could get a better view of Christ? He climbed up into a sycamore tree. Such an action from Zaccheus had far reaching consequences – it led to Jesus coming to his house for a meal and it led to Zaccheus’ repentance and, we believe, new birth. If we want to get a better view of Christ, what should we do? What is the sycamore tree which we must climb if we are to improve our view of Christ? The catechism answers – we are to use the means God has given us for doing so – the Word, prayer and the sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper). Using these gifts of God won’t get us a better Christ, but they will help us to get Christ better – and you never know what will happen once you start using them – they might even result in a total change of life for you, just as they did for Zaccheus.

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(III) What should I do as I read the Bible?
 

Read: John 5:31-47
Over the last few weeks, we have been looking at the subject of ‘reading the Bible’. We have used different pictures to describe how we are to view reading the Bible. The first week, we saw that the Bible is like a bucket with which we draw waters from the wells of salvation – it is through the Bible that we understand and appropriate for ourselves all that Christ has done for us. Then last week, we saw that the Bible is like Zaccheus’s sycamore tree – the vantage point from which we get a better view of Christ. I want to begin this week by pointing to another descriptive picture we have of the Bible – that is the Bible is like a ferry across the river of our sin. God and all the blessings of salvation stand on one side of the river. We stand on the other side of the river. The Bible is the ferry which carries Christ and the blessings of His work from His side of the river to us. Every time you read the Bible, the ferry sails and you get more of Christ.

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[IV] What should I do as I read the Bible(2)

                                                
Read: Acts 17:1-15
In 1850, the first Europeans settled on a remote hillside in Queensland, Australia, and formed a community called ‘Mount Morgan’. These settlers scraped a meagre living from the land through farming. But in 1874 a certain William McKinlay discovered gold, and since then 247 tonnes of gold, 40 tonnes of silver and 247 tonnes of copper have been mined out of Mount Morgan. For 24 years, the settlers were scraping away a living when, if they had dug a bit, they would have found gold and never had to plant another potato. The 1850 settlers on Mount Morgan literally didn’t know the riches they were sitting on.
This true story illustrates a very important point for we Christians. We have our Bibles on our shelves, perhaps even on our bedside cabinets – but you know if we would only dig we would find riches even more valuable than gold because we would find Jesus. Don’t you know that whenever you hold your Bible in your hand, you are holding something more valuable than any precious stone? But to mine its riches you have to dig.

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 [IV] What should I do as I read the Bible? (3)             

Read: Psalm 119:9-16, esp. vs. 11 – ‘In my heart I have hidden your word in order that I will not sin against you’
 
Over the course of the last couple of months we have been using Q.90 of the Shorter Catechism as a template for considering the topic of ‘Reading the Bible’. My question tonight is, what links our activity as we read the Bible and after we read the Bible? The answer is ‘laying it up in our hearts’. I would contend that this phrase ‘laying it up in our hearts’ contains both memorization and meditation. The first is the one we do as we read the Bible – and that is memorization; the second is the one we do after we read the Bible – and that is meditation. It won’t take you long, as we shall see later, to connect these two activities together – both because one cannot meditate on a text one has not remembered and one will not memorize a text for no reason.

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The Lost Art of Christian Meditation

(I) The Theory of Meditation
Read: Psalm 77:1-20
I enjoy watching natural history programs on TV. There is a program on at the moment about lost tribes – tribes which are still basically living in the stone age. They wander about with no modern clothes on and they live in a completely pre-technological age. But, for all their ‘primitiveness’, there are many things these tribes know and understand which have been long lost to us. They know, for example, how to catch and kill their food, whereas we only know how to pull a chicken off the shelf at Tesco. They know how to heal wounds and illnesses using leaves and roots, whereas a trip down to our local chemist’s is the norm for us. These tribes have retained many arts which have been lost to us.
We, in the modern Christian world, have also lost an important art which our more ‘primitive’ forefathers practised in abundance and to their great spiritual benefit. The greatest lost art in the modern Christian life is that of meditation – that of fixing our mind on considering and applying the excellencies of God in Christ to our minds and hearts.

I enjoy watching natural history programs on TV. There is a program on at the moment about lost tribes – tribes which are still basically living in the stone age. They wander about with no modern clothes on and they live in a completely pre-technological age. But, for all their ‘primitiveness’, there are many things these tribes know and understand which have been long lost to us. They know, for example, how to catch and kill their food, whereas we only know how to pull a chicken off the shelf at Tesco. They know how to heal wounds and illnesses using leaves and roots, whereas a trip down to our local chemist’s is the norm for us. These tribes have retained many arts which have been lost to us.We, in the modern Christian world, have also lost an important art which our more ‘primitive’ forefathers practised in abundance and to their great spiritual benefit. The greatest lost art in the modern Christian life is that of meditation – that of fixing our mind on considering and applying the excellencies of God in Christ to our minds and hearts. Read the rest of this entry »

The Lost Art of Christian Meditation

(I) The Theory of Meditation (II)

Read: Psalm 1:1-8

What a remarkable woman Ellen MacArthur is! You would have had to be living on Mars not to know that she has just smashed the world record for circumnavigating the globe single-handed. She survived for over 70 days with less than 15 minutes sleep at any one time. I don’t know what drives Ellen MacArthur; I don’t know what kept her going as she sailed around Antarctica; I don’t know what inner ambition sustained her for 72 days of torture. But whatever it was, it is an example to us all of preserving endurance.

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The Lost Art of Christian Meditation

(II) The Practice of Meditation (I)

Read: Psalm 63:1-11

In 2^nd Century BC China, according to writings discovered in a Chinese tomb, the Qinghao plant was used as an anti-malarial treatment. However, it was not until 1971 that the active anti-malarial ingredient of Qinghao was isolated by Chinese scientists – it is called Artemisinin and is a very potent anti-malarial drug – an alternative to quinine. Countless other examples of ancient wisdom surface in pharmacology, where long-gone cultures used plants to treat complaints, only for modern scientists to isolate active chemicals from these plants showing just how wise our ancient fathers were. But it was not only in medicine that our ancient fathers have much to teach us. Ezekiel Culverwell, a Puritan who lived four hundred years ago and wrote the introduction to John Owen’s famous work on Meditation, himself wrote, “Meditation applieth, meditation healeth, meditation instructeth. If thou lovest wisdom and blessedness, meditate on the law of the Lord day and night, and so make use of these Meditations to quicken thee up to duty, and to sweeten thy heart in thy way to the heavenly Jerusalem.”

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