What would inspire me to learn German?  I can think of one powerful incentive. If my wife, the woman I fell in love with, spoke only German, I would have learned the language in record time.  I would have a desperate desire to communicate mit einer schonen Frau.  I would have stayed up late at night parsing verbs and placing them properly at the ends of my love-letter sentences, treasuring each addition to my vocabulary as a new way of expressing myself to the one I loved.  I would have learned German unbegrudgingly, with the relationship itself as my reward.

I began following Jesus at 18, at the beginning of my freshman year in college.  Prior to that, I had never really read much of the Bible, nor had any desire to do it.  It was simply a dry, uninspiring, irrelevant book collecting dust on my shelf.  After I decided to follow Jesus, something happened inside of me where I could not get enough of the Bible.  I spent my spare moments reading the Bible, as well as borrowing books about God and the Bible from other Christians so that I could learn as much as possible about what it meant to know God.  That dramatic shift was one of the clearest evidences to me that something had come alive inside of me that was previously dead, that an impersonal, distant God had all of a sudden become real and the most important thing in my life.  Like Yancey’s example, it was love that caused me to “want to learn German” in record time.

Of course, like any long-term relationship, feelings come and go.  No one is passionate about their spouse every second of their life – it takes work and discipline to keep the fire burning and the marriage alive.  A relationship with God is no different.  There are times, as Isaiah puts it, that we “soar on wings like eagles,” while at other times it is all we can do to “walk and not be faint.”  Having a discipline like regular Bible reading puts us consistently in a place where we can experience again the love, power, and intimacy of God, knowing that just like any relationship, there will be times that are sometimes dry and uninspiring.

The challenge, therefore, with reading the Bible is not to read it as if you are reading the Gettysburg Address, or the manual to your Toyota (the classic “Bible as owner’s manual for life” analogy).  The challenge, as some have put it, is to let the Bible read YOU, to read it on God’s terms, not so much dissecting it as letting it dissect us.  The theologian Eugene Peterson has written a book called Eat This Book (based on a metaphor found in Revelation 10:9) about reading the Bible, and that metaphor more than any brings to light what we are called to do when we read God’s Word.  We do not just read it in order to gain knowledge, but we are invited to meditate on it; as the very first words in Psalm 1 say, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.”  The Hebrew word for meditate is “hagah,” which is translate elsewhere as “growl,” as in Isaiah 31:4:  “As a lion or a young lion growls over his prey.”  When we think of meditate, we often think of someone emptying his mind, sitting in silence, but Biblical meditation is much more active – tasting and savoring what is written like a lion growling over his prey.