who we are (part 1)

sand in the waves

I’m about to start reading the Bible through over the coming year.  I’m starting afresh with a few ladies at church and we’ll begin in Matthew through to Malachi by next summer.  As I aim to be reading up to thirty chapters or more a week as part of Re:Hope’s Bible Read Through initiative, it gets me thinking about religiosity versus heart-motivated actions in doing it.

Reading the Bible isn’t an order or a pre-requisit, so much as it is the breath and surface and source of life -how to live.  When I say it is ‘how to live’, I mean two specific, defining and unsearchable words and concepts. Compassion and Grace

The purpose in the Bible read through is to learn, love, listen to and live the word of God.  A Christian is one who hangs on the every iota of Jesus, and, compelled by love, is willingly hooked on the substance, Spirit, Truth and Wisdom of those words.  The purpose of reading so much of the Bible per week is to get a clearer overview of the big picture and narrative that it offers.

The Bible is poetic, like its reader, like its author.  The Bible is complex and historic, powerful…reading it ”is not homework”, but is reading about who we are, and how to live.  It can be a risk to read it… because once you see how to live, you can’t escape the call to act it out.  More than that this though… you can’t escape the message of ‘who we are’.

We are God’s.  God is love and is forgiving- he forgives more times than there is possibility to count and compare with the number of grains of sand that fill waves, breezes or sandwiches.  He forms us to insignificantly breath in air from day to day as much as he breathes the stars into magnificent shining.  We are made for loving and for making and creating.  But, we muck things up.  We get messy and dirty – the Bible shows it.  It talks about how God is pure and steadfast, and people are aiming for that, but fall a lot short- by more than an iota.

So, we know who we are- people that God wants to clean up.  Let’s get things straight… if God was unloving, wouldn’t he leave the dirt all over us and let the sand fill our eyes and sandwiches? (to be all quaint about it)

And this is my favourite thought of the day- God is beautiful and uniquely loving -aside from any other force of nature or thing that you may think is higher or truer than He.  Try imagining the Lord God who gets his hands dirty.  He comes in, putting his hand out and touching the dirt.

He reaches what is not good with His good and holy hand.  This is com-passion in that he came to suffer with us.

This is grace in that He loves and refines us into who we are made to be because he’s able to give what is undeserved.

So as I go to start reading Matthew I’m thinking about grace and compassion- I’m reading to trace out the journey of how God reacts and relates to his creation, His workmanship.  I want to read about who God is and about who we are… not necessarily what we do, or are expected to do, but more WHO we are meant to be.  Without the heart, the root, the spine, the core of the person being in love with God, the actions won’t ever catch up.  So, I read for who we are, I want to be changed so that along the line, my heart pours out in word and action and faith to display who we are in Christ.

All of this is only possible with knowing who He is.  I want to be affected by who God is to the extent that it continues to transform and reveal who I am, and kinda, only then, that it changes what I do.