"The most important work needed in our day is to look for legitimate applications that do not go beyond what God has revealed in the principles in the Word. To press texts into our own personal service and to answer some immediate questions that we may have is to use the Bible much like the Greeks used various oracles in their day. It is to play with the Bible as one would play with a tennis ball, lobbing it back and forth at will in the service of our own games." (Walter Kaiser)
I am currently preparing a little talk for some women next week. I contemplated what to write, and I have to admit it was so tempting to want to pick a text of Scripture that seemed to fit my topic. But once again, I was convicted that if I try to squeeze a biblical story into my agenda I am misusing God's Word for my own glory and purposes. Everything I have learned this and that God has taught me would be in vain.
I did the hard thing. I prayed, I waited, I read and read and read passages. I chose a passage not based on my agenda but on what God and the author had communicated through the text. I began to study and digest, using all the tools I have been cultivating over the last few months and an amazing thing happened. My agenda changed and my focus changed. God's Word began to transform my heart and thoughts and will. God began to show me who He was and how I was to change in view of that relationship.
So I leave you with one last thought as you study God's Word, growing closer to Him as He transforms your life.
"The Bible is not just a book about people in the past, or even a book written to us; it is a book in which we must become identified in a very personal way with the story in all its parts and with the line of its commands and promises. In doing so, however, we must be constantly on the lookout for the single truth-intention of the human author, who claimed to have stood in the council of God, and thereby must distinctly hear God's own voice for all generations to come." (WK)
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