Wednesday, June 18, 2008

You CAN be free through and through (cont)

8:15 PM by Christi Bowman

I left off last night with God telling me to read my Bible.

Ugh...I thought...what a chore. I TRIED to do it a couple of times. One time I asked Kevin what book he would suggest IF I were to start reading the Bible. He said John. I TRIED to read John, but just couldn't take anything from it. It was like words on a page...same as always. I kept hearing a voice in my head "read the Bible". I was frustrated...I had tried. One night Kev was reading in James to the kids. It sounded interesting, and James is what Kevin uses whenever he talks about serving anyone. I thought I would go lay on our bed and try James. Nothing. I kept having to re focus and re read. I was SO frustrated! It just confirmed everything I had ever felt about the Bible. It wasn't for me. I couldn't get anything out of it.

Then one night in March, out of the blue, our kids asked Kevin and I to take them to Promise Land. The kid service at Willow Creek Community Church. We had not taken them in at least a year. It was a strange request, but we enjoyed going to Willow Creek, so we honored it. We got them settled in their perspective classes, and we went into the main auditorium. Willow Creek had brought in a Pastor from Hawaii, Wayne Cordeiro, and they had brought him in to teach his methodology on Bible reading. My first inclination was to be offended, and refuse to listen. He was a good speaker though, and he eventually won me over. I listened. Pastor Cordeiro introduced his Life Journal and explained the process. At the end Pastor Cordeiro gave away free life journals and I was HAPPY to take one.

One of my biggest problems with the Bible is that it seemed like it had A LOT of information clumped together, and if all of it was good, where on earth do you start? The Life Journal fixed this problem for me...it had a guide in the beginning. God has since taken me off of the guide, and is leading me through the Bible Himself, but He did use Pastor Wayne Cordeiro's Life Journal and study guide to jump start me, and show me a thing or two about my misconceptions.

The first thing God did when I started reading the Bible was confirm His love for me, and He did this via a verse in Genesis. On my first night of committed Bible reading I read Genesis 1:2b and got teary eyed.

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

This is EXACTLY what I mean when I say the Bible is alive. This verse might not do a thing for you...and that is o.k., but that night, to me, to notice that God hovered over the earth, before He created it...was absolutely amazing. I have always struggled with deism. I have always had this nagging opinion that God got bored one day, created all of this, and now sits up in heaven and laughs at us as we try and make sense of it. I wouldn't have said that out loud to anyone...but at my worst I believed it. Genesis 1:2 changed my whole outlook. I can't explain it. I don't expect others to get all emotional over the word hover, but God spoke something into my spirit that night about how seriously He took His creation...I was deeply in love with Him after that...just one verse.

I believe He showed me how much He loved His creation (me) the first night to get me to trust Him, and to prepare my heart for what He would tell me the second night.

(Cont. tomorrow)

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