Bible reading and prayer

I thought these two topics deserved a little more treatment here.  I was so screwed up by evangelical "quiet time" ideas that it literally took me years to undo the awful bondage of legalism that I lived under.  And, in a lot of ways, I still struggle with that stuff.

When I first started to get the sense that: "read your Bible pray every day and you'll grow, grow, grow" was that wrong way to go, I didn't know where to turn.  So, like a good evangelical, I turned to the final arbiter of truth to find my way: the Bible itself.  This may seem like horribly circular reasoning: studying the Bible to try to figure out if that Bible itself was telling me to read it.  It sounds pretty ridiculous now.  But what else are you supposed to do if you feel like you are in sin of some sort if you don't read your Bible every day?  Maybe the Bible could rescue me from itself.

Well, the first thing I learned was that prayer is about the most important thing you can do as a Christian.  Not in a sense of some sort of obligation or anything, but just from the simple fact that it's the primary way that we relate to God. There are more verses on prayer in the NT than any other spiritual practice that you can think of - and it's not even close.  That deconstructed the first part of the "quiet time" legalism - that Bible reading and prayer were the equal twin heads of the monster of how a believer relates to God.  Actually, prayer is primary above everything else.  Fortunately, I also learned that prayer doesn't have to simply involve me kneeling at the foot of my bed at night.  God is continuously speaking and relating with me in various ways; the question is more if I am paying attention to those, and then what my response to those is in prayer.  So, prayer can be spoken or unspoken, a thought, attitude or action.  It can be in private or with others, in solitude and contemplation, or in the midst of great noise and chaos.   It could be sung or listened to, written or spontaneous, or any number of other things.  Thank God he escaped the box I had him in!

So, when I turned to the Bible to learn about Bible reading, I discovered that there were a few different phrases in the NT that more or less related to my question: phrases like "scripture," "the word of God," and others I can't remember off the top of my head.  And, of course, there was nothing in there on some sort of requirement for reading that I had to meet, either in regular frequency or duration.  The best that I came to was the exhortation that seemed to ring true through both testaments to: "hear the word of the Lord."  A little bit of history was the next key to understanding what that meant for me.

The NT was written in a semi-oral culture (I forget the exact phrase, but it's something along those lines).  Basically, this meant that there were a few who knew how to read and write, and that people communicated that way, but that the vast majority of people lived without literacy.  Thus, for them, this hearing "the word of the Lord" took place with other believers in worship together, from hearing scripture read and preached.  Without getting bogged down in the details, this has been the case for the vast majority of Christians throughout history and around the world.  It has only been in the past few hundred years in some cultures that many Christians lived in literate cultures where regular, personal Bible reading could be expected of them.

So, in this journey out of legalism, I learned a few important things: 

1) What God really wants for people is to hear his word, whether it comes through personal scripture reading, corporate scripture reading, preaching, or whatever.  To denigrate what happens in corporate worship and claim that God requires something extra of believers is to ignore the realities of history, scripture, and what is happening in other cultures around the world.

2) Having scripture available in your own native language and being literate enough to read it is an incredible gift that should not be taken lightly.  It is a gift - and it comes with no requirements.  Gifts are meant to be gratefully enjoyed, and they lose their blessing when they end up becoming a law to be followed.

So, now I try to savor that gift.  Occasionally I feel the old legalism rising up within me, but when I do, I remember the gift and God's grace that comes with it.