Let's keep it simple.

This entry was sparked by a conversation I had with a friend today, so if your reading this I think it's awesome that God could use our conversation :-) My friend had a question from an outline they got at church that they didn't understand. So we just took a few minutes to discuss what we thought. You could tell that my friend was stressed because they didn't understand what the question meant. After a few minutes it was clear what my friend was doing, it was something I use to do a lot and I believe that many people do, my friend was just confusing themselves. My friend was trying to understand what this meant by our human mind but I believe that in order for us to understand the scriptures we need to let the person who helped write the Bible do all the teaching, The Holy Spirit. So many times we want to know the "deep theological" meanings of the scriptures. That's a good thing but I think by doing that we can get hung up on certain things which makes us lose sight of what God is trying to tell us. Searching the scriptures in a scolarly way is great, that's what I go to school for, but I do believe that if that's the only way we read the scriptures then we can miss out on a lot of things.
So how do we keep it simple for this new year? I want to share with you something a professor shared with me that I can say is the best thing I've been taught at Vanguard. He told us to "marinate" in the scriptures. What he means by that is taking the time to read a short portion or chapter of a book in the Bible and after just let the Holy Spirit speak to you. Ask God to tell you what he wants to speak to you about. That's what I told my friend today, that instead of reading the God's word with the mentality of "what's the deep theological meaning behind this" we should read it with the mentality of "what do you want to speak to me today Lord?" Remember this, we can do all the studying and research we want to find out about God and his word but we can only learn/know what He allows to.
So my prayer for us today is that instead of putting such a huge emphasis on what the Bible says, we would be more concerned with what God is trying to speak to us through His word. I pray for strength and faith for us to let God be God.