Day 185: Bible Engaged

 DAY 185

Faith in the Midst of a Pandemic    

A series of daily reflections for people of faith

by Rev. Robert Bayley, Interim Pastor

Patuxent Presbyterian Church, California, Maryland

pastorrobert@paxpres.org

Week Twenty-seven    Tuesday 15 September 2020

Bible Engaged

“The number of American adults the American Bible Society considers ‘Bible engaged,’  based on how frequently they read scripture and its impact on their relationships and choices, has dropped from 28 percent to 22.7 percent …What we saw between January and June was that 13 million people in America who were previously really engaging meaningfully with scripture no longer were…The number of people who regularly use the Bible – at least once a week – had held fairly steady right up to COVID-19, and then COVID-19 has messed everybody up.”  From an article in the current issue of a Christian magazine

Odd – you would think, even assume, when times are difficult with the triple threats of a global pandemic, massive unemployment and economic insecurity compounded by natural disasters, that even people who normally don’t read the Bible at all would turn to ‘the Good Book’ for some peace, some solace, some hope. But the opposite seems to be happening as those who have been reading their Bible at least once a week are, since the onset of all these sources of stress, reading it less.

“’The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘when I will send a famine through the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the word of the Lord.’” Amos 8:11. We know what it is to be hungry for food and thirsty for water for our natural or physical person, but do we know what it is to be hungry and thirsty for God’s Word to sustain our inner person, our soul?  The absence of this hungering and thirsting results in malnourished Christian.

With all of their deprivation when it comes to food, the rural poor Christians of China secretly share dissected Bibles, a few pages here, a book of the Bible there, and they rotate these fragments so all pastors and people can be exposed to God’s Word,  so great is their hunger and thirst for it.  In his great temptation in the wilderness, Jesus made it clear that “’…man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Matthew 4:4.     

                                                 

Reflective question: Are you ‘Bible engaged?’

   

Reflective Scripture: Psalm 119:25 – “…renew my life according to your word.”

Reflective hymn:

“Break Thou the Bread of Life” – Mary Lathbury (1841-1913)

Break Thou the bread of life, O Lord, to me,

That hid within my heart Thy Word may be;

Mold Thou each inward thought, from self set free,

And let my steps be all controlled by Thee.