For the past several years, I’ve followed some sort of
reading plan that takes me through the entire Bible each year. Whether
chronologically or with a mix of Old and New Testament passages, these plans
are wonderful at providing a game-plan to ingest the entire Bible in 365 days,
something that is beneficial in the life of discipleship. But after a few years
of Bible intake at this pace, I found myself growing tired of soaring across
the grand narrative of Scripture and began longing to nestle into passages at a
slower pace.
Don’t get me wrong—reading the Bible in its entirety is
something I think every Christian should do. It gives us a better understanding
of the big picture, helps us grow in wisdom, and gives us a fuller
understanding of who God is. So if you haven’t read every word of the Bible
yet, I highly encourage you to do so. Sometimes, though, it’s easy to get used
to breezing through large chunks of Scripture and to forget to really digest
what is written. That’s why this year I’m taking a different route in my daily
time in the Word.
After I trusted in Jesus for salvation when I was seven
years old, my parents encouraged me to start taking notes during the sermons in
church. So with my VeggieTales journal, colored ink pens, and
less-than-accurate spelling, I began to listen closely to my pastor as he
preached each Sunday, to learn how to follow a sermon’s structure, and to write
down the main points, references to Scripture, and other ideas that stood out
to me.
Now, almost twenty years later, I’m on my seventeenth
journal. My ink is generally black and my spelling has improved, but I still
use the skills that my parents cultivated in me to be able to follow the
conceptual progression of a sermon (something that, incidentally, also came in
handy in college classes) and to listen not only to the pastor but to the Holy
Spirit, recording those truths that God impresses on my heart through the
vehicle of a man’s exposition of His Word.
I still have my first journal; I have all of them, in fact,
and it is to them I have returned this year to guide my devotions. Starting
with that VeggieTales journal, I take one sermon each day and read the chapter
from which its passage was taken. Usually, I’ll make myself read it slowly,
oftentimes more than once. I don’t want to speed through and be done, which I
am so prone to do. Instead, I want to milk that chapter for all it’s worth and
to pick out a particular verse or phrase to think on throughout the day. After
I’ve gleaned truth from the Word itself, I’ll skim through my notes from the
sermon on that passage.
While I’ve been doing so, I’ve been reminded of the beauty
of a child’s faith. So many of the things that I find written in my seven- and
eight-year-old handwriting are things that seem so elementary to me now. But I
realized one day that these notes most likely reflect the moment that I first
encountered these truths. Truths such as, “The church should proclaim a message
about Jesus”; “We don’t know the needs of a lot of people, but God does”; “We
can sin by doing bad. We can sin by knowing to do right and not doing it also”;
“God is a God of justice”; “Holiness is defined by God”; and “The Lord’s
faithfulness never fails.”
As followers of Christ, it can become so easy to forget
where we’ve come from, to have our eyes glaze over at ideas that are “obvious”
to us years into our walk with Christ. But for each of us, there was a moment
when we first learned foundational concepts of the faith. And in that moment, those
concepts were fresh and exciting; they brought light-bulb moments invigorating
our relationship with our Creator and Savior.
In all honesty, there’s no reason these truths shouldn’t
still be exciting and encouraging, but too often we become stale in our faith.
We lose the child-like wonder we had at the moment of our rebirth and in the
early days of our growth. That’s one reason I have come to be thankful for the
practice of note-taking. As a young believer, I had no idea that what I was
writing down would one day encourage my soul and remind me of the certainty of
the Rock that is my foundation.
Perhaps you trusted Christ later in life, though, and do not
have journals from childhood. Remember that all of us believers were once
children in Christ, whether we were reborn at eight or eighty. In my case, my
spiritual childhood happened to coincide with my physical one, but for many the
season of needing “spiritual milk” (see 1 Peter 2:2, 1 Corinthians 3:2, and
Hebrews 5:12) comes in their physical 20s, 30s, 60s, or later.
Whenever your spiritual childhood occurred, I hope you have
some written record from that time, whether it be a prayer journal, sermon
notes, Bible study notes, or something else that you can revisit to remind
yourself of the precious foundational concepts on which God has built your
faith. And if you don’t have anything like that or if you are just now in your
spiritual childhood, let me challenge and encourage you to start taking sermon
notes, start writing down things that jump out at you from Scripture, start journaling
your journey of faith—because one day when you need a jump start in your walk
with Christ, God just might use what younger-you wrote down to refresh your
soul in Christ.
