Bible Reading in the Zone
One-to-one discipleship allows you to have great conversations about what’s helpful and important in your walk with Christ. Yesterday, I had one of those discussions with a young brother as we were walking down the avenue of grace1 of Bible Reading.
The first thing that I like to help other guys with is the motivation for Bible reading. I love the Hebraic idea that when a person studies the lines of the Word of God, they are really studying the “lines” of the face of God. To the Jews, studying the Word was the highest form of worship a person could do because it required the person to “listen” to God through spiritual ears.
The second practical area of Bible reading is taking the time. We often bemoan the fact that “life gets in the way.” And, as soon as we say that, we realize that the Word of God is life. So, life is getting in the way of Life. It’s crazy, but it shows us how badly we have spiritual A.D.D. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever pursued that deep-rich-holy-quiet time with Christ only to receive numerous phone calls, remember 42 important things in the space of 10 minutes, and heard that little pop of another instant message coming from around the world right to your computer.
The distractions are killing us! And we think we can handle them because we’re all “multitaskers.” uh-huh.
So, the other day, I was reading through some helpful articles on multitasking that caught my attention in relation to reading the Word and prayer (you can read one of the articles here and there are links at the bottom that connect you to more helpful articles on the subject). And I thought this might help us in our communion with the Lord if we tend to be inconsistent or easily distracted.
The first thing about multitasking is don’t do it. We’re not designed to take on multiple tasks at once. In fact, the more we do it, the worse we become at multitasking. We can simply connect this to Bible reading by saying keep the Word in front of you and keep at it.
The second thing is that we might be shooting ourselves in the foot by checking out too early. Researchers who studied how distracted we become said that we need at least 15 uninterrupted, distraction-free minutes to get into the zone. The “zone” is where we are thinking and reflecting productively on what we’re reading. My guess is that a lot of sincere folks might be getting 15 minutes or less in the Bible on a daily basis. This would mean that many people are checking out, just when their own brains are ready to check-in. So, the simple inspiration is fight your world to press into the zone. You’ll probably start to be overwhelmed with the face of God the more you really start to see it.
- we like to call it an avenue of grace more than just a “spiritual discipline.” The reason is because the more that we practice it, the more we come to realize the grace of God within it. For example, walking in the avenue of grace of prayer helps me discover how grace-full the Lord is in communion with him. [↩]
This is so weird. About 2 hours ago I sat down with my cup of coffee and Hunter was happily content playing on the balcony. I had gotten about 10 minutes of quiet reflection time of writing in my journal when Hunter decided he needed my attention. I was explaining to him that we need to spend time with God each day when we can pray and read his word and I was doing that right than. So he was quiet for about 3 mins and than was asking for paint and than he spilled stuff all over the floor!!! I realized that hunter and I need more practice doing this, and he needs to be taught to spend quiet time with the Lord even if he can’t read yet. So here I was trying to multitask with my distractions!!! I just put 2 and 2 together how what you are trying to do with your disciple is help them have the desire to read the word as well as taking the time and making it a priority (it should be our greatest priority!!!) We do that with our children aswell!!! It all comes together, sorry I am slow!! Thanks for posting this!!