Why do you read your Bible?
For me, it was a religious thing. If I didn’t read 3 chapters a day in my Bible, I didn’t feel good about my relationship with God. I would lay in bed past my bedtime, and barely read the words on the page, not soaking up anything at all, but why should that matter? At least I got in my 3 chapters a day in! That is what we call religious performance. Some people memorize Bible verses, which is alright when done for the right reasons. Some people know the Bible upside down mentally, but have little or no real relationship with the Lord. This is all nonsense!
Why should we read the Bible? Because it’s where we learn the ways of God, and the laws of spirituality. We learn about healing ministry, deliverance, spiritual warfare, strongholds, and so forth.
I used to religiously read the Bible, then one day the Lord showed me this, so I stopped reading it all together (not exactly what God had in mind either). Believe it or not, I felt incredible spiritual freedom as I broke down that religious stronghold! However, after several days, I started feeling dry spiritually, and the then the Lord showed me how there is importance in reading the Word on a regular bases (daily).
What if you don’t feel like reading the Bible? Sometimes we need to force ourselves to sit down and read it every day. Force-feeding yourself the Word is one thing; religious performance is another. Force feeding is done with the intension of getting something out of it, while religious performance is basing your relationship with God upon your reading performance. We need to make time for God in our daily schedules, and that has nothing to do with religious performance! If we associate force-feeding the Word with dead religion, then we’ll most likely be spending no time with God eventually, and our relationships with Him will go downhill quickly.
It’s similar to washing the dishes. If you don’t wash them, they will eventually take over the kitchen and there will be no clean dishes left. However, religious performance is where you spend 5 minutes on each dish shining it onto perfection before putting it away. Rolling up your sleeves and washing the dishes is not performance, it is being responsible.
While it is very important to spend time daily in the Word, we need to check our motives. Are we doing it because we will feel terrible about our relationship with God if we don’t? That’s religious performance. Are we doing it to learn about the ways of God? That ought to always be our goal when reading the Word, regardless we want to or if we’re having to force-feed ourselves the Word.
Blessings in Christ,
Robert