FollowBy Beth White
Right now, I’m reading a book about interacting with kids. It’s called When Children Love to Learn, and it’s a collection of thoughts shared by different people who have taught children in some capacity. My personal reason for reading the book is to gain inspiration as I try to homeschool and parent well. Going through it, though, I found something that I thought related to us as students of the Lord.
In one chapter, author Susan Schaeffer Macaulay explains that a well-meaning teacher will often ruin a lesson for their student. Worried that a story in itself is not enough, they will either provide their own interpretation or present the kids with a neat moral. She says, “We do all children a massive disservice when we ‘chew’ over the material and ‘spit the pulp’ out for them. People reject the secondhand results of someone else’s efforts. No . . . let the children remember because they took it in themselves. Let them think their own thoughts about it. Let them respond.”
Reading this, I thought about how we as adults are also constantly force-fed somebody else’s thoughts about the Bible. We listen to our favorite podcasts, we read a devotional crafted specifically for us by someone going through the same stage of life, or we do a Bible study. But do we ever just read the Bible?
It’s easier to read about the Bible than it is to read the Bible itself, but that is the one thing above all else that we need to be doing. Trust in your ability to hear from the Lord. He is not a tricky God, and He doesn’t make himself hard to find. In fact, what Jesus says is that “everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:8).
You don’t need somebody else to prechew the Lord’s words for you and pass along what they think is the main point. You, like a child, have a working mind and a heart capable of responding to the Holy Spirit’s touch. Get your nourishment directly from the source. If you are interested in learning from others, that’s great; there are some good teachers who have important things to say. But please don’t neglect the simple practice of reading through the actual Bible, with prayer. Allow God to surprise you as you seek His face directly and invite the Holy Spirit to be your teacher.
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