More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you enjoy Jesus more than life (Matt. 10:38), you will live with a radical abandon for Jesus that will make the world wonder. Enjoyment of Jesus is not like icing on the cake; it’s like powder in the shell.
Spiritual is the biblical word to describe what has been brought about by the Holy Spirit. “Spiritual” does not mean religious, or mystical, or new-age-like. It means: caused and shaped by God’s Spirit.
He makes a covenant with us and says, “I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezek. 36:27). He causes what he commands. Enjoying Jesus is not optional. It is a duty. But it is also a gift—spiritual and gracious.
The Bible does not say, “God is at work in you to bring about his good purposes, therefore stay in bed.” It says, “Work out your salvation, because God is at work in you” (see Phil. 2:12–13). God’s work does not make our work unnecessary; it makes it possible. “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10). Grace does not just pardon our failures; it empowers our successes—like successfully enjoying Jesus more than life.
When I Don’t Desire God is the place to find his most concentrated practical teaching on Bible intake and prayer, but gold nuggets on the means of grace, and his own habits, are scattered throughout
Timothy Keller’s Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God.
help you understand the matrix of grace for living the Christian life and create practical pathways (your own habits) that are realistic and life-giving in your unique season of life.
“lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet” (Heb. 12:12–13) and “keep yourselves in the love of God” (Jude 21).
Grace sanctifies. It is too wild to let us stay in love with unrighteousness. Too free to leave us in slavery to sin. Too untamed to let our lusts go unconquered. Grace’s power is too uninhibited to not unleash us for the happiness of true holiness.
Even the most mature among us have only begun to taste the grace of God.
“Train yourself for godliness” (1 Tim. 4:7). Discipline yourself for growth. Take regular action to get more of God in your mind and your heart, and echo his ways in your life—which will make you increasingly like him (“godliness”).
God’s grace didn’t make Paul passive but supplied the energy for discipline and effort, and every ounce of energy expended was all of grace.
The way to receive the gift of God’s empowering our actions is to do the actions. If he gives the gift of effort, we receive that gift by expending the effort. When he gives the grace of growing in holiness, we don’t receive that gift apart from becoming more holy. When he gives us the desire to get more of him in the Scriptures, or in prayer, or among his people, we don’t receive that gift without experiencing the desire and living out the pursuits that flow from it.
“Think of the Spiritual Disciplines,” says Donald S. Whitney, “as ways we can place ourselves in the path of God’s grace and seek him as Bartimaeus and Zacchaeus placed themselves in Jesus’s path and sought him.”8 Or as Jonathan Edwards put it, you can “endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement.”
The great end of the means is knowing and enjoying him. The final joy in any truly Christian discipline or practice or rhythm of life is, in the words of the apostle, “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8).
Hosea 6:3: “Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord.” Knowing and enjoying Jesus is the final end of hearing his voice, having his ear, and belonging to his body.
For more than a generation now, we have seen a renewal of interest among Christians in the spiritual disciplines. There has been much good in this renewal. But too many have emphasized technique and skill, with the unfortunate diminishing, or neglect, of God’s role as supplier and provider. Too often the stress has been on the individual’s initiative and effort, with little said about the place of the church and the corporate nature of God’s plan. Much has been said in terms of duty, and too little said about joy.
“Means of grace,” according to D. A. Carson, is “a lovely expression less susceptible to misinterpretation than spiritual disciplines.” Carson, “Spiritual Disciplines,” in Themelios, 36, no. 3 (November 2011).
J. C. Ryle shows a similar system of categorization when he writes, “The ‘means of grace’ are such as Bible reading, private prayer, and regularly worshiping God in Church, wherein one hears the Word taught and participates in the Lord’s Supper. I lay it down as a simple matter of fact that no one who is careless about such things must ever expect to make much progress in sanctification. I can find no record of any eminent saint who ever neglected them. They are appointed channels through which the Holy Spirit conveys fresh supplies of grace to the soul and strengthens the work which He has
...more
And so, in the Christian fight for joy, John Piper writes, “The central strategy is to preach the gospel to yourself. . . . Hearing the word of the cross, and preaching it to ourselves, is the central strategy for sinners in the fight for joy.”2
Without the Bible, we will soon lose the genuine gospel and the real Jesus and the true God.
For now, if we are to saturate our lives with the words of life, we must be people of the Book.
Fashion rhythms of life that help you revolve around having God’s incarnate Word, by God’s gospel word, through God’s written word.
countless creative routines may follow, whether it’s reading through the Bible in a year, or memorizing passages or whole books, or meditating on single verses or paragraphs, or aggressively identifying and pursuing applications, or listening to sermon podcasts, or reading biblically rich content online, or taking Bible classes, or consuming Christian books, and on and on—and changing it up from time to time.
The battleground is between our ears. What is it that is capturing your idle thoughts? What fear or frustration is filling your spare moments? Will you just listen to yourself, or will you start talking? No, preaching—not letting your concerns shape you, but forming your concerns by the power of the gospel. Preaching the gospel to ourselves is a habit of grace that is both proactive and reactive.
There is a difference between merely reminding ourselves of truth and preaching to ourselves the truth of the gospel. It’s true that two plus two equals four. But it does very little to feed our souls. What we need is not just truth, but the truth, the message of the gospel. What preaching the gospel to ourselves requires is pausing, rehearsing some expression of the Father’s and Son’s love and provision of goodness and rescue and joy for us, and consciously seeking to have that truth shape and permeate our reality.
At the end of the day, there is simply no replacement for finding a regular time and place, blocking out distractions, putting your nose in the text, and letting your mind and heart be led and captured and thrilled by God himself communicating to us in his objective written words.
As much as we want a quick fix, some fast lesson that makes us near-experts in just a few short minutes, the best of Bible reading isn’t learned overnight or even after a semester of lectures, but day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, imbibing the Bible, having God’s words inform our minds, inspire our hearts, instruct our lives. It is then that we slowly see the lights going on everywhere as we walk through life, and keep walking through the texts.
Think of your Bible reading as a regular surveying of the biblical landscape to find a spot to settle down for a few moments to meditate, which is the high point and richest moment of Bible intake
It is a remarkable thing that we have Bibles we can read personally, whenever we want. For most of church history, and still today in many places in the world, Christians have not had their own personal copies of the Bible.
observes Donald S. Whitney. “In other words, if most people would exchange their TV time for Scripture reading, they’d finish reading the entire Bible in four weeks or less.
Some of my favorite Bible reading plans over the years have been M’Cheyne and The Kingdom, along with my most beloved from Discipleship Journal.3
There’s a place for reading whole Bible books in one sitting and a place for going deep in half a verse. It takes both an increasing sense of the big picture of Jesus’s rescue of sinners as well as a growing depth in the little pieces that make up that big picture for us to stay fresh in applying the gospel to our lives.
The Kingdom, developed by Jason DeRouchie, at http://cdn.desiringgod.org/pdf/blog/3325_FINAL.DeRouchie.pdf; and Discipleship Journal’s, by the Navigators, at https://www.navigators.org/www_navigators_org/media/navigators/tools/Resources/Discipleship-Journal-Bible-Reading-Plan-9781617479083.pdf.
We were made to meditate. God designed us with the capacity to pause and ponder. He means for us to not just hear him, not only to read quickly over what he says, but to reflect on what he says and knead it into our hearts.
For the Christian, meditation means having “the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col. 3:16). It is not, like secular meditation,
it is feeding our minds on the words of God and digesting them slowly, savoring the texture, enjoying the juices, cherishing the flavor of such rich fare. Meditation that is truly Christian is guided by the gospel, shaped by the Scriptures, reliant upon the Holy Spirit, and exercised in faith. Man does not live by bread alone, and meditation is slowly relishing the meal.
“This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night” (Josh. 1:8). God means not for Joshua to be merely familiar with the Book, or that he read through sections of it quickly in the morning, or even just that he go deep in it in study, but that he be captivated by it and build his life on its truths. His spare thoughts should go there, his idle mind gravitate there. God’s words of instruction are to saturate his life, give him direction, shape his mind, form his patterns, fuel his affections, and inspire his actions.
“Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (v. 97). If God’s old-covenant instruction could be so precious to the psalmist, how much more should the new-covenant gospel captivate our meditation.
“Begin with reading or hearing. Go on with meditation; end in prayer.” (William Bridge, “The Work and the Way of Meditation”) “The word feedeth meditation, and meditation feedeth prayer. . . . Meditation must follow hearing and precede prayer. . . . What we take in by the word we digest by meditation and let out by prayer.” (Thomas Manton, Complete Works, vol. 17) “The reason we come away so cold from reading the word is, because we do not warm ourselves at the fire of meditation.” (Thomas Watson, “How We May Read the Scriptures with Most Spiritual Profit,” dir. 8) “The great reason why our
...more
meditation bridges the gap between hearing from God and speaking to him.
As Matthew Henry says, “As meditation is the best preparation for prayer, so prayer is the best issue of meditation.”3
We should make good on Puritan preacher Thomas Watson’s counsel when we open the Book, Take every word as spoken to yourselves. When the word thunders against sin, think thus: “God means my sins;” when it presseth any duty, “God intends me in this.” Many put off Scripture from themselves, as if it only concerned those who lived in the time when it was written; but if you intend to profit by the word, bring it home to yourselves: a medicine will do no good, unless it be applied.1
As we’re freshly captivated by the grandeur of our God and his gospel, we become what we behold: “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).
Meditating on God’s words shapes our soul.
The Bible is gloriously for us, but it is not mainly about us. We come most deeply because of whom we will see, not for what we must do. “Become a kind of person,” counsels Piper, “don’t amass a long list.”
What if Scripture memory really is about today? At least for a minute, forget decades from now; throw aside the litany of daily reviews of previously memorized texts; abandon the mentality of building the store and stocking the pile, at least as the driving motivation. Instead, focus on the present. Scripture memory, at its best, is about feeding your soul today and mapping your life and mind onto the very life and mind of God.
When we learn the Scriptures by heart, we’re not just memorizing ancient, enduringly relevant texts, but we’re listening to and learning the voice of our Creator and Redeemer himself. When we memorize lines from the Bible, we are shaping our minds in the moment to mimic the structure and mind-set of the mind of God.
memorized Scripture molds our minds, with as much specificity as is humanly possible, to mimic the folds and creases in the mind of God.
And so Bible memory not only prepares us for the someday-maybes when we might use a memorized verse in counseling or witnessing or fighting sin, but it contributes powerfully in the present to making us the kind of person who walks in the Spirit today. It contributes right now to your being “renewed in the spirit of your minds” (Eph. 4:23) and being “transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2).
