Walking Through the Word

[HKHaugan]

Walking Through the Word

       On one of my conference trips to the UK, one in Yorkshire, I was encouraged to do what many Brits do and that is walk.  One group I was with had been walking the path in ten-mile sections along a path from Wales to the North Sea near Whitby.  I was there when they were preparing to finish the last fifteen miles.  Not wanting it be seen as the typical non-walking American I agreed to go.  (Thank you Lord, for having been a jogger so it wasn’t bad at all.)  Along the way was that sturdy shin-high plant called heather.  I’m glad they told me to wear long pants.  While beautiful, when you look across those fields, heather can really be rough on your legs.  It was an up and down trail and semi-challenging.  When we finished there was a small town cliffside with a steep road to the water.  

       For many people Scripture may seem like a long walk through fields of heather, up and down and challenging.  But it is the attitude with which it is approached that makes the difference.  If you see the landscape as beautiful and joining a group of those who see it similarly, it is a journey with all kinds of relational experiences and a view at the end of each session that makes you a continual path-taker.

       As we walk through Scripture, we must always keep in mind that Jesus the person, Jesus the Son of God, Jesus, God in the flesh, knows the path.  It is well traveled, and many have used it over the centuries.  It is not only a path, it comes with a leader who knows the way.  Jesus is the funnel, the tunnel, the ‘Chunnel (if you have ever ridden through it),’ the narrowed middle of the hourglass, through which and through whom every word, phrase, paragraph and chapter is filtered. 

       If we approach the Word with the need to grasp and understand it so that we can say ‘My mind has control of it,’ we have missed its purpose.  It was not amassed to give us control but to open us up to the faith it offers.  Every part of the Bible is an invitation to faith if we let the Holy Spirit take us into every next moment in faith, in faith that the Lord is in control of our life revealing Himself and our growth in every next moment.  There is always something new awaiting as if let Him influence who we are as His images.

       Jesus is the context for thinking.  If we attempt to separate a passage, a word, a theme or even a book from the whole and interpret it apart from Jesus and the Holy Spirit it becomes a cold, somber and restrictive religious document.  That’s right. It is no longer about a personal relationship with God but a religion, a denomination, a cult, another furtive effort to control God and others.  This is the result of the wandering away from God’s Word in Genesis 3 when the devil asked Eve, “Did God really say…?” and sin replaced the Spirit in mankind.  The devil distracted us and continues to distract us from God our Creator through sin. 

       The temptation exists for us to actually believe apart from God we can take what is “pleasing to the eye, good for food and desirable for gaining wisdom (Gen.3:6)” and be our own god.  We think and act like we are gods and so we assume His place in mind and heart.  We dabble in imagination feasting on the fake food of fleeting fantasies and devise complicated philosophies, complex astrological fascination, superstition and ‘twilight- zonic’ spirituality.  All of that is sin.  We insert our own indulgence and rationalization feeding on what gives us pleasure and believe we gain wisdom by analysis and reason apart from God and ‘sin the more that grace may abound?  God forbid (Rom.6:1)!

       But Jesus comes and penetrates the eggshell of our self-absorption.  He tells parables to scratch the itch in the mind and penetrate the heart’s anxieties.  He heals bodies, walks on water, challenges frightened leaders, breaks religious barbed wire and teaches about God in a way that confronts the self-assumed deity we have become.  We either reject Him, avoid Him, or finally come to the conclusion that God is the One from whom Jesus is sent.  He is the King of the Kingdom He proclaims and that He, His Father, and the Spirit are in fact One.  And it is all there in His Word, the Word that brings life, real life, eternal life.

       Therefore, grace reigned and still reigns to override the hearts torn from the Lord’s presence by giving every person the opportunity to see, accept and return to the Lord in person through the Holy Spirit.

       It is by grace through faith that the invisible expanse of thought, principle, ethic, choice, decision, and person is a reality that supercedes the limited physical universe holding us in a singular time and a singular place.  It is that into which God chose to limit Himself to be the hope, the anticipation, the reckoning center for each mind and heart.  It was His severe self-restriction, self-imposed, self-chosen way, to bring His very nature into the fomenting magma of man’s confusing and isolated personal wilderness.  That nature, His love, deemed it necessary to enter the emptiness, that lonely death embracing wilderness of self-consciousness that searches for meaning and purpose, to bring the alienated images of Himself back to Him. 

       Conceived by His Spirit, fleshly born, Jesus came among us.  It is here that God demonstrated something new for His forlorn Creation---living by faith, desiring to place all things in the hands of His Father, to serve Him, to please Him and to die for Him, to give us a new life, a spiritual lifestyle in a perfect and perfecting relationship.  Thus, the broken fragments of what it meant to be an image of God, family, friendship, labor, the intellect, emotionality, the inner spirit, community, world, universe and every aspect of existence, fall back into place. 

       Real life is no longer temporary, the space between birth and death, the searching and unresolved questions, the battle for personal supremacy and mastery over mind, heart, and spirit.  Real life is seen, felt, touched, and caught within as we allow Jesus to break down the barriers of pride, fear and self-protection covering our mind and heart.  That allowance is faith in Him, His Presence and His Spirit.  Faith comes through His Word as the master key (The Master’s Key) to the Kingdom, His Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven.