I am not a naturally skilled reader. I also don’t enjoy reading a whole lot. It’s taken a good deal of intentional habit-building to start developing any semblance of wholesome habitual reading in my life. Perhaps you could call this a character deficiency. At any rate, it has put me in a funny spot as a Christian because we are to be ‘people of the book.’
All of us experience different manifestations of inner turmoil and dissonance. ‘The things we don’t want to do we do, and the things we do we don’t want to do,’ to paraphrase Romans 7:19. We want desperately to be satisfied in the Lord, yet we’re discontent with the life circumstances God gives us. We want to belong to a community, but never want to be vulnerable with anyone. We want to commune with the divine, but always on our terms. We want to be holy to fit in with our Christian friends, but long to indulge in our base desires with our non-Christian friends.
And so it is that I long to bask in all the goodness of God’s word, but I don’t want to read…
This boxing match within me became rather pronounced as I read Psalm 119. Probably the first thing that you will conjure up in your mind regarding Psalm 119 is its length. It is long. Quite long. For someone who naturally finds reading rather tedious, the length of Psalm 119 is not just ‘long’ but also daunting. Yet how ironic it is to read this Psalm as it extols God’s word in every conceivable way!
God’s word achieves what God wants it to achieve. God’s word in Psalm 119 clearly wants to achieve the goal of making me fall in love with God’s word. But it doesn’t magically do that. It puts me in the boxing ring and gives me a good left-right-uppercut combo. God used his word to bolster my love for Scripture and continually conform my non-bookish ways into submission.
When it comes to change we are not at the whim of our inner dispositions needing some self-help books. Rather we are at the mercy of God’s Spirit in the work of sanctification. But it’s not 100% God doing everything while we do 0% waiting for him. Rather it’s 100% God doing everything and the means by which he does this in us, is through us.
In a strange way, I could tangibly see God at work as I read Psalm 119. God’s Spirit was doing a work in me through God’s word and he was doing that work by building in the better habit of reading.
In what ways have you seen God work in you, through you by His Spirit and word?
Bigvai and Shiphrah 
Yeah, I currently feel the same when reading 119.
When studying it in depth about 7 years ago at uni, it did make overwhelming change in how much I loved God’s world. But the current small encouragement that it now gives is still appreciated.
“it’s 100% God doing everything and the means by which he does this in us, is through us.” – could you expand/simplify/put in a few different ways?
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We may imagine that God is doing 50% of the work and is waiting for us to do the other 50% of the work. So we want God to change our lives expecting him to be actively involved in part of that endeavour, but we also understand that we must take responsibility for our own lives and that we must effect a change in ourselves.
What I am trying to draw out in this comment, is that God is just as involved in us changing our lives actively as he is involved in orchestrating a change “from the inside out” as it were.
So God is not 50% involved waiting for us to do the other 50%. Even when we are trying to change ourselves (say, to love and cherish the word of God more) he is also completely involved in us doing that. So it is that God is entirely involved in the process of sanctifying us.
So he is at work “in us” in ways that we are unaware, but he is also at work “through us”, in the ways that we are actively trying to change ourselves, he is using our active participation.
An example: say that I want to be more healthy so that I can be more effective for the Lord. We might say that God has given me the desire to be healthier and to work for him with all my strength. But for me to achieve this I must actively exercise. Is it a 50-50 split? 50% God giving me the desire and 50% me sticking to an exercise regime? No. God does both. He gives me both the desire and drive but he also is actively involved in my active participation towards this goal – the exercise regime.
Another example: say that I want to grow to love the word of God more. Is it 50% God giving me the desire to do that, but the other 50% I’ve got a workout myself, I gotta come up with the discipline of Bible reading and stick to it myself – that’s to say, God is not gonna help me do that part… No. God has given me the desire to grow in love of him and his word, and as I actively pursue that myself through disciplined Bible reading, God is using my discipline in Bible reading to help me love him more.
All this to say that God is actively involved in all of our sanctification, but I want to especially point out his involvement in our own active pursuit of sanctification. (In the case of this blog post, the desire to love and read his word more)
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More clear, thanks for the examples!
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