The Vicar's Message

Holiday time is upon us once again! I hope that you will manage to have some time away to refresh you. For many people, a holiday is a good time to dive into a really good read. For me, the big problem was always which books to take? Between my wife and I, the suitcases could be bulging with the books we’d take… just in case. Now though, I have a Kindle. One of the best inventions ever, although I admit, it doesn’t replace curling up with an actual book! It does however, have the merit of being able to take literally hundreds of books with you, wherever you go.

For many people, including me, we find that we actually do more reading than ever because the devise is small enough to pop into a bag and take out for those spare minutes we find cropping up. It makes reading the Bible easier too. Once you’ve a Bible on your Kindle, reading it in a planned way becomes so easy. 

I know that I’ve written before about reading the Bible and I want to do so again here. I make no apology for returning to this topic because as I chat to folk, I see that there is a desperate need for personal bible study amongst Christians. I really do believe that a lot of Christians don’t know the bible because they’ve never really studied it personally. I imagine that most people only know what they’ve been told about the Bible by someone else. 

Unfortunately, this means that Christianity can then be simply viewed as a ticket to heaven or an insurance policy – instead of a daily relationship with Jesus. There are undoubtedly lots of reasons why Christians don’t actually study their bibles:-

·       we live in a society that wants instantaneous results…

·       surely, that’s the job of the clergy!

·       we think we already know what the bible says – so why

     bother?

and the list no doubt goes on…   

Never be in a hurry when you come to God’s Word.  Deuteronomy 6:6–7 reminds us: And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  In other words, if we consider ourselves a child of God, then we ought to have His Word running around in our mind all the time.  

Do you want to know a secret?

If you’re reading through the Old Testament, and if you were to read a book or a letter in the New Testament through thirty times in a row, then you’re going to have it running around in your mind.  It’s a hard thing to accept but meditation on the words we’re reading, is what it takes to begin to mold the words together into a cohesive understanding of what God is saying to us through His word.  

God also says in Deuteronomy 6:8–9:  Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.  God tells His children that He wants His Word everywhere.  But we live in a culture where we drive down the street, and our eyes are literally assaulted with rubbish - whiskey ads, beer ads, girlie shows, rotten movies—and the garbage just pours into our heads. God said that we should take His Word and let it be a signpost in front of our eyes, so that it will be the thing that fills our mind, our voice, wherever we go. That’s the way it ought to be.

May God bless you,

Your friend,

Vince Fenton.