How the Spirit Renews our Love of Scripture

Ever open your Bible, corners worn from years of use, only to find the words lie flat? The Word is silent and no longer holds the mystery it once had. 

At first, you double down. You read more chapters each day. You create a habit structure because at least you can say you’ve raised your hand at roll call and been declared present. Maybe you research new Bible reading plans or sign up for more Bible study. Maybe if I understand more, you think and if I catch a glimpse of the Greek the words will flame off the page (and of course, this is not wrong. Bible study is essential. Learning the historical context as well as the place it fits within the larger arc of God’s redemption plan is crucial.

But so often we shut the book and stop there. We wonder if there’s anything more.

Scripture reading is primarily relational, a text given for God to reveal himself to his people, a story of ransom, and the rules of engagement.

So after Bible study, here’s the second step: Read scripture WITH God. Becauses here’s the thing, if you only read ABOUT your wife instead of inviting her for an evening walk after dinner to chat about your day while the sky glows fluorescent orange, you would miss the point.

What you were promised when you became a Christian was a relationship. But unfortunately, sometimes our life in Christ ends up feeling like a longer to-do list. 

And so, my friends, we are invited to look up from the to-do list and search for his eyes.

My sister illustrated this experience beautifully this morning as we chatted on the phone after she dropped my nephew off at preschool. She said that just that morning she had been in the middle of reading scripture when she realized she was just checking off a task, getting from A to B. So she looked up and shifted from a mindset of task to one of listening in relationship. And this is what happened: the text came alive as she read while awake to the Presence of the Author.

So today we’re going to do a little spiritual marriage counseling. When a husband and wife walks into my office for pastoral marital counseling my first question after seeing her drooped shoulders and his crossed arms is to reach back into their story. What made you fall in love in the first place? When did her laughter first capture you and you realized you wanted to hear it more often? When did you recognize the ideas he tossed around sounded like a life you wanted to be a part of? Tell me about your first date. Your second.

We go back to first things. We go back to remember. We go back to where desire was first kindled.

But in spiritual matchmaking there’s a different law at play, we cannot conjure up desire in our own strength. It also says that we can’t formula our way to relationship. We can’t perform our way to wonder and mystery. And that wisdom is not a currency to count before fellow church members nor is information the path to a deep rooted love. It can be a part of the path, learning the topography, learning the facts on the ground.

And sure, we can chase desire like a couple in marriage counseling positioning ourselves in the flow of first things, but we can’t perform our way into connection. We can’t tick off a to-do list and create communion. 

God is not a destination or a list of truths to dominate. God is a Person.

So, like my sister Stephanie, when we read scripture, we pick our head up and look around. We ask God to give us an awareness of His Presence, God with Us, the Immanuel. 

Second we ask for the Spirit to transform the ashes of performance into a word which can transform us. Because it’s the Spirit who is the Teacher.

Love. Desire. Wonder. Wisdom.  They are all a gift from the Holy Spirit. 

We can’t read, chase, demand, or develop tight recipes for this feast but we can be invited to the table.

And this is grace. This keeps us from believing we can dominate God. So we go back to the beginning: We can’t desire God without His help. 

We, the poor in spirit, begin with this one small ask, for the desire to desire God. And God loves to answer:

As it says in Luke: “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

So today we’ll talk about invitations, the Spirit’s power, and the burning bushes He uses to get our attention. 

Finally, we’ll talk about lectio divina, which is simply Latin for divine reading, or more specifically, reading WITH God. This ancient way of praying the scriptures may be one of our missing pieces, a bridge of sorts from Bible study to prayer. 

And just briefly, why does lectio divina belong here on a podcast about practicing the presence and rooting and establishing in God’s love? 

I have a lot to say about that, entire episodes which include conversations on slowing down to the pace of love, the gift of silence, the power of scripture to renew the mind, and the gentle invitation to rest in God’s love. But we’ll get to that. In the meantime, let’s start here:

Lectio divina creates space to hear the Voice of Love singing over us. 

It’s an invitation to sit down, take a deep breath, look into His eyes, and listen. 

But first thing’s first, we begin by asking. We begin by waiting. And we listen for an invitation. 

I was in the middle of a spiritual autobiography project for spiritual direction when I re-discovered a story with God which had fallen to the bottom of the pile of my conscious mind. It was a story which never seemed to fit neatly into the reciting of a  testimony. But the same summer we were tasked with writing our spiritual autobiography, my parents invited our family to spend a week in Maine where we hiked Acadia National Park and spent one lovely night at the cottage where we had vacationed when I was a child. 

And this memory came to the surface as lovely as a poem, fully formed. 

And here it is:

“The sun hits the eastern seaboard first on summer mornings. When I was eleven my family began going to the same cottage in Maine every summer high on the bluff of Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth. 

This was the same beach where for the last five summers we had toted wagons with igloos from the parking lot, ate frozen lemon Dannon yogurts for lunch and decorated sandcastles drizzling wet sand to make towers. That is to say, it was one of our home beaches for five years, until our move to Ohio last year when I was ten.

Eleven was the year my baby brother was born and mom had two kids in diapers. He had fat rolls around his thighs and a cap of blond hair. I adored him but I had inadvertently become an extra caregiver, the child who was always “okay,” the one who could take care of herself, and the one who spent more and more time in books and daydreams. 

At school I wished I could blend into the concrete walls. I was short, quiet, and overly nice which meant I was a perfect target for teasing. 

One year later I still felt disoriented like I was walking on the bottom of the pool looking up at normal.

And then early in the morning the whisper came with the sun through the upstairs skylights. COME to the beach. I’m waiting for you. My eyes blinked open in anticipation. 

I threw on jean shorts and a sweatshirt, shut the cottage door, and padded down the dew-wet wooden stairs barefoot to the sidewalk. The whisper invited me on. 

Walking along the bluff covered by seagrass, I glimpsed the lobster boats’ daily round puttering from trap to trap. I stopped for a moment and rubbed my hands in the lavender landscaping,  inhaling the clean, floral scent. I turned toward the beach and jumped the wooden stairs down two at a time taking off at a run on the long boardwalk, one foot hitting hollow wood after another. I flew past spicy goldenrod and early cattails, long brown hair fluttering behind me. And still I heard that Voice say, Come.

At the end of the boardwalk I carefully stepped around the rocks sticking out of the packed trail picnickers use and then fought my way up the tall sand dune covered with seagrass. Wild roses grew on either side of the path. I took a magenta petal between my fingers and released their oils and I knew, God was calling me from over that dune. 

And I wonder if in the pursuit of the easily digestible spiritual before and after story, you too may have forgotten a whisper, an invitation, a knock?

Lord, when have you issued an invitation for me to come closer?

Will You issue an invitation again? 

The 18th century theologian, John Wesley called this Prevenient grace – the profound truth that in the human soul, God is always the initiator. Aristotle and Aquinus called this the law of God as the Prime Mover. Whatever you call it, Revelations 3:20 reminds us that in the life of the soul, God is always present, always knocking, always wanting to come near. 

Paul didn’t believe he was responsible for conjuring up spiritual energy. Over and over he pointed outside of himself. But this concept is difficult for us to grasp.

Listen to Paul’s ministry motto spelled out in Colossians 1: 

“[my goal is to] present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.”

It wasn’t his own hustle Paul was relying on. It was the energy provided by Jesus.

Then listen as he prays for the Ephesians:

 “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.”

Did you hear that? The same power that raised Christ from the dead is a part of our inheritance!

He echoes those same words in Romans 8:
“And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.”

Then in Ephesians 6 he reiterates this theme:

 “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.”

It is the Spirit who blows fresh wind and here we are hoisting our sail and trying to catch speed by working our own tiny bellows.

And here’s the crux of it:

We don’t fall backward into the arms of God nearly enough. We’re self-help junkies with foot-long tattoos of self-reliance inked across our chest, even in our spiritual life. It’s the American way. We drank self-reliance with our milk and set off fireworks to celebrate it in our history texts. 

But self-reliance is the fruit Eve settled for as she asked for knowledge, thank you very much, but only on her own terms. We too often settle for self-made wisdom when He’s offering us so much more. He’s offering us His heartbeat. His breath. His hand. His pace. His Presence. 

Last November after a heavy season of writing and ministry, I found myself in a rut of sleeping late under my weighted blanket and crossing off to-do lists, even in my spiritual life. Daily office scripture reading? Check. Journal? Check. And yes, there are days to learn the rhythms of faithfulness and yes, obedience has a rhythm all its own. Mine, however, was accompanied by burn-out and fatigue. The scripture fell flat. For too long.

On the one hand rest is full of grace, self-awareness, and gentleness and on the other hand, eventually there’s a sort of falling asleep. An acedia. A spiritual boredom which tiptoes on the edge of depression. The line is often hard to discern.

And here’s what I’m offering: Instead of leaning into shame, we lean into a question, “Lord, what are you inviting me into?”

My life in Christ had become more habit and less of a relationship. I was performing, not listening. Reading scripture felt more like walking through a weedy pond, pushing. 

In fact, whenever I forget to listen for the invitation, my Christian life begins sounding a whole lot like formulas. If I do blank and blank, God will give me blank. My head is down. My pace is fast, my hustle faster. 

Even more concerning, I become convinced I know the path. 

Then I remembered the wake-up, the whisper, the invitation to the beach. I remembered the Christian life is first and foremost God’s initiation. It does not start with me. I can ask for the Holy Spirit’s power.

So in the middle of a late fall acedia, I started by praying short prayers tossed up in the dark, laying under the covers with my husband after he fell asleep: Give me desire for your word. It was a tiny kernel of a prayer planted each day, a prayer He loves to answer.

A few days later, I opened the ESV app to the daily office and began reading a few verses at a time, still moving through the words slogging ahead. 

But as I kept taking steps toward the Voice of God, anticipation was built.

And Day 5 came with a new whisper, a clear ring of a bell. The whisper came from inside the story of Moses and the burning bush and a line I didn’t remember ever hearing.

“And God waited to see if Moses would turn aside and look.”

The line poked at me. How often does God light a burning bush in my life and I have my eyes on instagram or my husband’s mood or my tightly scripted agenda.

And just as I’m writing this, a red-haired toddler passed me in the cafe of a Barnes and Noble and put his hand on a brass column divider flaming from the light streaming from the window behind me. His mother stood to the side, hand on hip, waiting patiently. He glanced his tiny finger over the reflected flare from the bottom to the top and patted it. Then he grasped the light and looked back at the window over and over. Looking. Testing. Learning wonder.

And I wonder if this little one is another type of burning bush? A burning bush for me?

How often do I turn aside and pause wondering at the light I’ve been given? 

Have I cultivated a lifestyle of attentiveness or am I addicted to a false flaming, one aha moment after another curated by someone’s else’s algorithm? Do I scroll through one dopamine hit after another instead of leaning into the whisper of God?

Lectio divina, this ancient practice of meditating on the word, slows our steps to watch for burning bushes. And we ask: where is the Spirit flaming? Where might the Spirit be trying to get our attention? 

We repeat the word slowly, out loud, listening to each word, giving the words white space, purposeful silence, time to awaken what is sleeping in us. 

Did my eleven year old self find Jesus on the other side of the dune?

He was there, not physically of course, but with a powerful sense of nearness. We ambled along the crescent-shaped beach from lobster boat harbor to barnacled rocks being quiet, just enjoying each other’s company. We were together with the background music of the thunder of the waves scraping the stones and shells back into itself. No hallelujah chorus played. No wisdom. No vision. No flame. Just companionship.

I picked up seaglass for the jar at home and felt the wind toss at my hair. Mostly, I just felt wanted. I also felt at home and somewhere during that walk the concepts of home and His Presence were inextricably woven together. 

And in the serious writing of the spiritual autobiography, in the middle of the tics of momentous occasions, this memory came to the surface whimsical like the green and blue seaglass I collected in my jean short pockets. 

And I remembered the Christian life is not first a fight, a wrestle, or a grand aha moment. Those come later.

No, the Christian life is first an invitation. A call and a welcome.

Lectio divina 

In Lectio divina we slow down the scriptures in order to hear it in a fresh way. We choose a short section, usually no more than 5 verses and then read them aloud, repeating them more than once, turning the words over in our mind with the Spirit like we might turn a prism. Pausing to listen deeper. Pausing for dissonance calling us to repent, to turn, to realign with the purposes of God. We pause for an invitation.  

At the heart of lectio divina is prayer. 

We’re attentive to the Spirit’s nudgings. We’re wondering aloud with God. We’re taking the scripture in hand like a piece of citrus we’re sharing. Going slow. Turning it over in our hand. Peeling off the verses one at a time. Biting into each until the juice comes sweet or bittersweet. Sharing the goodness, the acidity, the present moment with God. Meditating. Receiving. And then finally, resting with God.

Very simply: there are 4 r’s of lectio divina, this divine reading.

1. READ and repeat the word.
2. REFLECT on the word.
3. RESPOND to the Word-Giver in conversation and then
4. REST with the Word-giver.

Luke 10:38-42

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. 40 But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

41 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, 42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Jesus, would You give me an image of myself sitting at Your feet?

To find 100’s of lectio divina videos, click here for Rev Summer Joy Gross’ youtube page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc5v6JTZin8D3S_F10rAd7Q?view_as=subscriber

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