2024 | Further Up & Further In
New Testament in a Year 2024
“I know I’m meant to read the Bible; I just don’t understand it when I do.”
We were sitting by a camp fire at a weekend away for our church community, in a retreat centre outside of Birmingham, UK. I’d given a teaching the week before on the Bible. My message was essentially: ‘we should read the Bible.’
It wasn’t my best.
I was chatting to a student in our community—deeply spiritual and very astute. She voiced something in her response that I knew caught something in the heart of a generation. She named at once a deep desire for spiritual growth—proximity to Jesus, and to inhabit His Way and His values in the midst of a world that feels disoriented and lost—and yet also confusion with the Bible, unsure of how to apply it, stuck on difficult passages, and struggling to find a rhythm that would enable the Bible to bring form to her life.
I need this.
On one level, the Bible is very much readable by pretty much anyone. It wasn’t written by academics or a detached spiritual elite. The early Church did away with ideas of a secret knowledge being hoarded by a few as heresy. Rather, it was written by shepherds, doctors, fishermen, warriors, philosophers, tax collectors, princes and paupers—real people, in real, human, language, metaphors, with ideas that reach into the gritty and normal and connect them to the heavenly and visionary. Dallas Willard put it this way:
“The Bible is…God’s gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading—that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy—is what it requires to direct us into life in God’s kingdom. Any other approach the Bible … conflicts with the picture of the God that, all agree, emerges from Jesus and his tradition.”1
But on another level, the Bible was written within cultures, and cultures that are far removed from our experience. These cultures held different ways of communicating to those we are familiar with—including numerical codes, poetic structures, different ways of showing emphases, assumed familiarity with other parts of the Scriptures, or cultural norms of the day—all of which can feel alienating to the contemporary reader. So many people begin, and then hit such areas, and feel quickly lost. In the ensuing discouragement good intentions fade into dusty Bibles and malnourished believers, rather than the weathered pages and texture of soul that is so sorely needed.
This devotional is a response to this need.
I’ve written it for a generation that is seeking a deep and vibrant spirituality that is practical, applicable, and a visionary alternative in the midst of our disoriented age.
I’ve written it for those who often find their honest questions from Bible passages are ignored, in favour of selective preaching on the ‘easy bits’, but who desire to know that their faith is robust and aren’t actually afraid of the sticky questions.
I’ve written it for those who’ve often started and always got stuck.
I’ve written it for those who’ve read it many times, but feel tired of well worn clichés that have become an obstacle to seeing the words afresh.
And I’ve written it in hope that this will play a part in building pilgrim apprentices of the Master, who learn to see as He sees, and value what He values, and go where He goes, in extraordinary power and radical humility unto the bringing of His reign into every corner of the earth.
Practically…
Practically, the devotional covers the whole New Testament. Reading each passage will take you around 3 minutes, followed by around 3 minutes of reflective material and 3 minutes or reflection and prayer. It runs six days a week, although will also give you a framing prayer to help you inhabit a day of Sabbath rest in the fullness of joy for which God purposed it.
Nine minutes.
You can spare them.
I guarantee you will grow.
You will see the words of the Scriptures begin to provide framing for you day and insight into your relationships, your money, your stuff, your career, your very sense of identity and of purpose. It will position you to be changed from the inside out by the Spirit of God Himself you lives in you and testifies to your very soul to the things of truth.
Join us. Sign up, and you’ll get a daily email giving you today’s passage, with a question for reflection and a prayer.
No charge. Unsubscribe any time. This is there as one contribution among many to help the beautification of the Church of Jesus.
And finally, and this is the most essential thing. Any good devotional does not primarily lead you to increased knowledge (although it will do that), to a sense of achievement (although reading the whole New Testament in the year is a significant achievement), or improved wellbeing (although it is my experience that few things have improved my wellbeing more). Rather, a good devotional primarily leads you to deeper devotion. It leads you to the real, alive, fiery-eyed Rabbi, Friend, Visionary, Lord and King, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The journey is towards Him, learning the freedom of surrendering every part of our lives that we anxiously cling to along the way, that our lives and ways may become increasingly, beautifully, and unendingly more His.
Further up and further in.2
Bless you guys. See you on 1st January.
Photo by Benjamin DeYoung on Unsplash
Dallas Willard: The Divine Conspiracy, p.5
C.S. Lewis: The Last Battle, Chapter 16