I am currently searching for ideas to make the most of the anniversary. I am considering a public reading of significant portions of Scripture from the KJV – perhaps by well known Christians in the community – as a public testimony to the value of the Bible. I am imagining the qualities of Scripture could form a good topic for next year’s church conference. Perhaps an opinion piece for the Mercury on the enduring significance of the Bible’s language and ideas in our world. But what ideas can you come up with to celebrate this key milestone?

In the mean time, here’s an extract from an interview with John Piper on reading your Bible!

Question: There’s an old saying, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” How do you keep your familiarity with the Bible from causing you to grow indifferent to it?

John Piper: I pray Psalm 119:18 each time I go to the Bible: “Open my eyes that I may behold wonders in your law.” I think the point of that prayer is that there are wonders everywhere in “the law,” in the Bible, the instruction of God. And the psalmist is aware that he doesn’t often feel or see wonderful things as wonderful. So he asks to see. I do as well…

How should we approach the Bible when reading it?

… Because of the history of the Bible, exerting power in the lives of people for good for over two thousand years, I think I would say… “Come to the Bible with a sense of expectation and openness that here you might find something vastly more wise and more penetrating and more world-shaping than any of the contemporary ideas you are presently dealing with.”

And after they come, I think they will discover that this is the very Word of God and, therefore, it should be approached with a sense of reverence. And it should be approached with … a sense of expectation that God has given us this Word in order to meet our needs, to convict us of sin, to bring us to the point of forgiveness, and then to give us hope. [From 2 Timothy 3:16…] There’s nothing God expects of us that He does not provide in this Word. He helps us understand what to do and gives us the motivation to do it. There’s a high-level expectation that I think people ought to have when they approach the Bible.

How can we make time for the Bible?

I don’t think it’s merely a function of time. It’s a function of earnestness and faith. A person must build into their life a regular encounter with God, personally and quietly meditating on His Word. I think the early morning is the best time, because it sets the tone for the whole day. If for some reason that time can’t work, then midday or evening.

Get the Bible, the time, and the place—make sure it’s planned—and then meditate on a portion of Scripture: a chapter, verses, or several chapters, depending on what you can do. Memorize some verse, or even phrases, that appear especially precious to you.

You don’t need hours and hours with God every day, but you do need to have time with God orienting your mind, taking something into your heart, letting your heart express itself to God in communion—taking faith’s renewal and walking with God through the day, reminding yourself of what you saw in the morning.

Warmly in Christ,
Sandy Grant

But I know not everyone feels the same way. Maybe you feel you’re not so good at singing. I’m sorry to say that as a teenager, I stirred my mum for singing with a sibilance. Only later did I realise how much I’d discouraged her from singing out at church. Or maybe the musical style at your service doesn’t appeal. Some blokes claim that singing is just not their thing.

But it worries me when I see congregation members or a service leader mumble their way through a song of praise to our great God with looks of complete indifference on their faces. In Ephesians 5:18-19, the word of God commands us to, “Be filled with the Spirit: speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making music to the Lord in your heart”! [hcsb] So hymn-singing is not really an optional extra for Christians.

For these reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of music in church lately. Perhaps the answer is better song selection, better leadership, better musicianship. There is certainly value in avoiding tunes that are too difficult or lyrics that are hard to comprehend.

In the Middle Ages, simple chants became more complex and ornate, making the words hard to understand and beyond the skills of the congregation, so that choirs came to dominate. Music also intruded all through the church service, often interrupting the flow of prayer and Bible reading. Moore College Old Testament lecturer, and accomplished musician, Andrew Shead comments that eventually this sophisticated style turned church “into an expensive musical theatre filled with music of stunning beauty and complete incomprehensibility”!

The great English Reformer, Thomas Cranmer, removed the dominance of the choir in his prayer books. Singing was returned to the congregation, with songs sung in English, not Latin, in simpler musical style, and open to the developing Lutheran traditions of hymns using popular tunes, which aimed to fix the word of God in people’s minds and hearts.

So I think the answer to better singing at church lies deeper than better songs played in the right style. I saw this more clearly from the early Church Father, Athanasius, in the 4^th century. Athanasius was known as a little suspicious of music’s emotional power. But he was a big fan of the Psalms. And he knew the Psalms were set to music!

You may think of singing as a means of expression – a way of drawing out what’s within us. But for Athanasius, the most important effect of singing is not ex-pression but im-pression. In singing the Scriptures, the truth is not drawn out of but into the depths of our being.

The way we say something is so important. We can say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I’m sorry’ in a way that merely enacts a social convention, or in a way that shows we really care about the other person and mean what we say. We are not just saying the words; we inhabit them. And Athanasius suggests that singing the Scriptures helps us inhabit their words.

Singing helps us not just hear the truth of the gospel of Jesus, but to enter into it, allowing it to inhabit us. So singing psalms and hymns becomes a spiritual discipline, rather than an exercise in entertainment or beauty, where we watch other perform. Of course, discipleship begins with self-denial rather than self-expression. We deny ourselves as we sing scriptural truth, even when we don’t feel like it, or enjoy the style. But as we surrender our own voice to the melody of another, we begin to find the gospel’s joy is what we end up expressing!

Warmly in Christ, Sandy Grant