Has there ever been a time where you just didn’t want to open your Bible or do your devotions?
I know this can happen to us for a lot of reasons. Maybe you’re just tired. Maybe you’re so busy you just don’t feel like the time is there. But there’s another reason that comes up sometimes. I know I’ve experienced it. . .
You’re scared. What’s God going to say to me today? Maybe you’re scared of the way God might bring the law to bear on your actions. You know you’re doing something you shouldn’t and you just have a sense that if you open the Bible or do devotions God’s going to say something about it. Maybe there’s something you know you should be doing that you’re avoiding. And you just know that if you open the Bible you’re going to hear God encouraging you to just do it. Maybe you can’t even put your finger on what it is, but you know the Bible has prescriptions for your life and you just aren’t in the mood. I’ve definitely had those days.
I’ve been thinking some about the Scripture lately and I found this image when I was looking for something to put on a bulletin for a devotion I was leading for a group of pastors. We were talking about the text in Ezekiel 2-3 where God commissions Ezekiel. He tells him he has to go to the people of Israel and let them know that they’ve been rebelling against God. God tells Ezekiel straight up that the Israelites are rebellious and they’re not going to want to listen. And God gives Ezekiel this vision of a scroll coming out and when he looks at it, both front and back are covered with words of mourning and woe. “Who wants to go confront a rebellious hard hearted and vindictive people with the fact that God’s mad and they need to listen up?”
“Ooh me! Me! Me!”
Yeah right. More like, “Not me!” And yet God continues the vision and tells Ezekiel that he is to eat the scroll and when he does it tastes “sweet like honey”. Wow. How does speaking words of woe to a rebellious people taste like honey?
Well, when I was talking with the pastors I said there were two pieces to it. One, sometimes when you speak a hard word like that, you get to see the effect. People change, they repent, they listen up. And that is the sweetest thing in the world. And in the other times, and there are a lot of them, even when people don’t listen, you trust that God is doing something in his word that’s supernatural. You may not get to see the effect, but all of God’s words are honey, whether you can sense it or not. It becomes a matter of faith.
It;s the same for us on those days we don’t want to open our Bibles. When we don’t want to eat the words because we’re scared, we need to remind ourselves that all of God’s words are like honey. Whether God is going to tell us to do or not do something, whether we’ll feel like it’s honey that day or not, we need to trust that there’s nothing in the Bible that’s not good for us. And so we take up our fork and knife and we dig in.
Eat the Bible . Eat the scroll!
