Why and How do I read my Bible?

Introduction

I didn’t grow up a Christian. The first time I ever went to church was when I was about 13 years old. I started hearing about Jesus, and I was so fascinated by him, by what he taught. I remember going home asking my parents if I could have a Bible. My dad, he said, “It’s a good thing that you’re asking questions about God and about life, but I do not think you’re going to find God in the four walls of a church.” He was convinced the Bible was this book that had been put together by the Romans to try and control people, and so he said, “Be very, very careful, ask lots of questions as you read it.”

That was the beginning of my journey to ask questions about the Bible and to study it, although I think my dad’s advice did the opposite of what he expected. My questions began to grow, and I started to ask, can I trust it? Did this really happen, or has someone just made this whole thing up? These questions were why I wanted to study the Bible and go to university, and why I’m still studying the Bible today and doing my PhD in the New Testament.

I was amazed at the evidence there is for the historical reliability and textual credibility of the New Testament text. Scholars have been able to see that the biblical texts haven’t been significantly tampered with or changed. The reason we have the Bible today is because for hundreds of years people have seen these texts as being so important and so relevant that they are worth sharing, copying, and preserving, and even dying for.

One of the reasons I trust the Bible as a historical text is that in the New Testament, the four gospels go back to eyewitness accounts of Jesus and were written within living memory of the stories they recall. This is something that gives me great confidence in the Bible because these accounts of Jesus could have been rejected if they were seen as false. Instead, we find them being immediately recognized as important and being shared and copied and spreading throughout the whole known world way before any one person or power had the chance to manipulate or control it.

The Bible is quite an incredible document, quite an incredible book. It is the most popular book in the world of all time. When they talk about bestsellers, the Bible is so much the bestseller every year that they don’t even include it on bestseller lists because it would just be at the top every year, and it’s not very exciting for the bookstore to just kind of have, hey, number one this year, the Bible once again, but it’s true every year, all years, the Bible is the bestseller. It’s sold more copies than any other bestseller. If we take Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings combined, the Bible is higher than them combined. It is significantly. It’s a popular book, it’s a powerful book. It has changed societies, it has changed civilizations, it has changed lives, and it’s a precious book. In fact, sometimes I think we have it so readily available to us, we forget just how precious the Bible is, and people have given their life throughout history to protect, preserve, and keep the Bible true to what it is and to share the Bible with people.

Let me tell you a story about Mariam and Mazia. They are Iranian. They were Muslims. They converted to Christianity, and they found the Bible so precious that they wanted to share it with people in their home country despite the danger. They asked a pastor to send them copies of the Bible, and he sent thousands of copies to them, and they started distributing them. Every night they would take 140 copies in their backpack. They would walk all night, sometimes up to 9 hours, and they would put them in people’s letter boxes.

One day Marzia got a phone call, and it was the police. They told her to come down to the station, and this is Mariam’s memory of that day. Suddenly, I heard the sound of her with a few others behind the door. Well, I saw her standing there with three guards, and I was so shocked when they ransacked everywhere, and they took both of us with all our belongings, like Bibles, Jesus movies, to the security police. We had long hours of interrogation. I believe it was in the first day that he threatened us to physical torture in that dark cell in the basement. We just hugged each other. We said goodbye because we thought it was our last day on earth, and we were so scared. I remember the only thing that we could do in that dark cell in those moments was just praying for each other.

We spent almost 9 months in prison, and 14 days we were separated. We were staying in solitary confinement, and I can say during those nine months we had almost about 10 trials, 10 courts, and in each court the judges and our interrogators would threaten us to execution by hanging, and they wanted to put pressure on us to deny our faith in Jesus. We didn’t have a Bible with us, but we learned how to live with the verses of the Bible, and every day we were praying and asking God to give us this power to live those verses and to show him through those, through our behaviors to prisoners. It was almost at the 9 months that we heard that we had many supports from different parts of the world, and because of all these supports, the government had to release us.

Mariam and Maza were released. Many years later, they traveled the world telling their story. They came to Australia many years later, and a couple came up to them after they told their story, and they were crying, and they said, “We received your Bible in our letter box, and the only reason we know Jesus today is because of your commitment to the Bible.”

The Bible is considered by many a precious book because it’s a transforming book, because we believe it to be God’s word. We believe that God has spoken through it, and we believe he continues to speak, and so what we’re going to do this morning is Miles and I are going to speak to those two things. I will spend some time speaking about how God has spoken through the Bible, and then Miles is going to come up and talk a little bit about how God continues to speak through the Bible.

God has Spoken Through the Bible

The Bible is such an incredible book, and in one sense because it’s not a book, it’s more like a library of books. It’s 66 books, although not all of them really are books. There’s a whole range of different material. There’s history books, there’s law books, there’s poetry, there’s letters, so it’s a whole collection of 66 books, an incredible document written over we estimate at least 1,600 years by 40 different authors, and as you analyze that and see how much all this has been put together and weaves together, we see an incredible way that God has inspired scripture. In fact, that’s one of the things we would understand about the Bible, that it is 40 plus authors, 100% written by humans, and we see their humanity come out in the writings, and yet at the same time it is 100% inspired by God. This is what Paul writes in the Bible in one of his letters to Timothy, he says, “All scripture is inspired by God.”

Now how’s that possible? 100% written by human authors, 100% inspired by God. I like to tell my kids that’s what we call God math, 100% plus 100% equals 100%. My daughter Olive said that’s not possible. I was like, “Well, he’s God, anything’s possible.” How is that possible that 100% human and 100% inspired by God? It’s hard actually for us to fully understand it. If I use an example, no example is perfect in this, but an example like the Harry Potter movies, JK Rowling is the inspiration behind it, but actually the scripts for the movies weren’t written by her. There were separate script writers for the movies. There were directors. There were people reinterpreting what they read in the books into different elements, but we can kind of see that picture that JK Rowling was the inspiration under it all, although it’s not, it’s even stronger than that. It’s not like they read, the writers of the Bible read another document and then kind of interpreted it. It seems more like God is inspiring them as it happens.

Maybe another helpful and not complete illustration is something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe written by a lot of different people, questionable who is the main inspiration. Usually Kevin Feige gets the credit for being the mastermind, although not really quite the same because it seems like they were making it up as they went. What’s clear with the Bible is God wasn’t making it up as he went. In fact, one of the incredible things about the inspiration of scripture is right from the first chapters in the Bible written and undisputably written long before Jesus was born point directly to Jesus, so it is an incredible book that pulls all that together, 100% human, 100% inspired by God, which answers the question people might ask, if God is who he says he is, why doesn’t he reveal himself? The answer is he has.

God has Revealed Himself Through Creation

First of all, he’s revealed himself through creation. This is one of the poems in the Bible, Psalm 19. We’ll look at this again a little bit later in the sermon, but that opening verse, the heavens proclaim the glory of God, the skies display his craftsmanship, and so God has revealed himself. The Bible itself says there’s other ways that we see God in this world. The fact that we’re even here is a testament to God. The finetuning of the world is a testament to God. A lot of atheists and skeptics would say this is one of the strongest arguments. Guys like Christopher Hitchens would say this. Alex Okconor as a young guy out doing some atheistic kind of thinking at the moment, they would both say the finetuning of the world is one of the best arguments for a God because it only would take gravity to be off by a small amount and the world as we know it would not exist. There would not be a capacity for life to form if those measurements were just slightly off, and so the world itself God has revealed himself.

God has Revealed Himself in Jesus

But supremely God revealed himself in Jesus. The idea that God himself became human in order to reach and connect with humanity is the most greatest revelation of God revealing himself. Today the best way we know and understand Jesus is through the Bible. That’s how we see God through Jesus. We see Jesus through the Bible, and the whole of scripture when we put it through the lens of Jesus, it becomes really clear that the whole of the Bible is the story of Jesus from beginning to end. It’s all about Jesus. It’s all about God revealing himself. God has spoken to us through the Bible.

Difficulties in the Bible

That isn’t to say that the Bible isn’t without some difficulties as we come to read it. There are a lot of tricky passages and verses and stories in the Bible. There’s moral difficulties as we think of things in the past that happened. There’s technical difficulties. There’s historical difficulties as we try to wrestle with our picture of what happened in the world and what our we find in archaeology, which is a tricky space to try to analyze the past through degrading deteriorating discoveries. Those are tricky. There’s apparent contradictions that we find as we come to the Bible, so it’s not without its difficulties, but it’s a bit like I think putting a jigsaw puzzle together.

Our family has done a couple of jigsaw puzzles recently. We’re not huge into them, and so our strategy for jigsaw puzzles has been put all the pieces out on the dining room table and just leave them there until someone’s intrigued enough to do something about it. That’s kind of the goal, and so you know how to do a jigsaw puzzle. You do things like you find the edge pieces, you start off simple, and you start piecing that together. We did a Batman one as a family recently, and when we first put those pieces out, every piece was black. That was it was just a field of black pieces, and you’re like, “This is impossible.” But as you go, you start to notice this shade of black is different to this shade of black, and this shade of black has this element in it, and as the piece comes together and you take the easier ones first and you put them together, eventually a picture starts to form. There’s something very similar as we approach the Bible that at first we may find parts that we think how could that possibly fit, how could that possibly go, but the more we dig, and this has been my experience of the Bible, the more we dig, the more a picture starts to form. In fact, one of the amazing things you find with a jigsaw puzzle is the satisfaction you feel when you see pieces come together, especially when you’ve been working on this lump over here and you realize it connects with this bit here.

I was doing a little thing with my son J. I was kind of putting pieces together and putting them nearby so he would have that moment where he goes, “Hey, I solved it, it goes together, you’re brilliant buddy, you figured that out.” There’s some great satisfaction with that, and we find something very similar in the Bible. Now here’s the struggle. If we approach the Bible with the assumption that the pieces are missing, that the pieces will never fit, and we just leave them scattered on the table, we will never have that satisfaction. We will never have that joy. We will never see the picture starting to come together, and this is the reality for many who approach the Bible that way, who just disregard it before they’ve given a chance, and they miss out on seeing any parts of that picture.

Science and the Bible

There are difficulties with the Bible, and some of those difficulties we find even as we wrestle with the modern world that we’re in. We think about moral difficulties as we see kind of the whole history through a modern lens. We see scientific difficulties, and in recent history one of you know in the modern world one of the greatest conflicts has been the conflict between Bible and science, and it’s difficult because I don’t think there should be a conflict between Bible and science because the Bible and science are actually seeking to answer different questions. We’ll look at a video in a moment with John Lennox, but I love John Lennox. He’s a Christian mathematician scientist, brilliant mind. Anytime you find a John Lennox video worth watching. I saw one recently of him and Alex O’Connor, and together a skeptic and a Christian both agree that in recent history there’s been a huge media bias that has concluded that science has conclusively disproved the Bible and disproved Christianity, and that’s just not true. The Bible, the science has not conclusively disproved Christianity. It’s not just because Christians refuse to accept facts. There are times where I think we are too closed off to wrestle with things in a true and genuine way. That is the reality. Sometimes we’re so defensive of our faith, we won’t even attempt to wrestle with a reality that we’ve come to find and figure out how that puzzle piece fits with the Bible, but the other thing is also true that sometimes there’s claims about science that suggest that totally disproved the Bible, and I think that is yet to be the case, and there are brilliant minds around the world through history and even today who have critically analyzed the Bible, critically analyze science, and can have the two live comfortably together, and John Lennox is one of those guys.

Here’s a video of John Lennox. There’s a widespread impression in the public that science and God don’t mix, and that’s curious because if you think of the rise of science in the 16th and 17th centuries, all its pioneers believed in God. In fact, they were Christian in some sense or other. You talk about Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and so on. Kepler famously said, “We’re thinking God’s thoughts after him.” So far from their belief in God hindering their science, it was the very motive that drove it because they believed in a creator, a rational spirit behind the universe, they thought that science was worth doing, and so they did it, so I’m not remotely embarrassed at saying I’m both a scientist and a Christian because arguably Christianity gave me my subject. We study God’s revelation both in the natural world and in scripture with the minds that God has given us, and I believe there’s no conflict ultimately between those two sides properly understood.

It’s clear from the gospels that Jesus viewed the scripture in the Old Testament as inspired by God. For him what the scriptures said God said, and this is a view held almost universally by the world by church through the ages that the Bible is inspired. It’s our authority on how to live. St Paul says, “The Bible is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.” The Bible is full of practical wisdom and principles for relationships, how to love and forgive others, and advice on healthy living, working, bringing up children, taking care of the elderly relatives, and that kind of thing. It gives us boundaries and guidelines to help us get the most out of life, and you might think well that just sounds like a rule book. It’ll take away all my freedom, but actually we all need boundaries. Imagine if sports had no boundaries or guidelines, they’d be impossible to play and they’d be quite confusing to watch.

God Still Speaks

Yeah, so we know that children who grow up without boundaries are insecure, they’re unhappy, and it’s the same with us actually. The boundaries are given out of love. God didn’t say, “You shall not murder because he wanted to ruin our fun.” He didn’t say, “Don’t commit adultery because he’s a spoil sport.” He doesn’t want people to get hurt. He loves you. Some of you might have noticed that just earlier Dan misspoke and he said that there was 166 books in the Bible. That’s not because we have a special Riverston version, you know, with the book of Miles that says, “Thou shalt not grow coriander or anything like that.” Our Bible has 66 books. We’ve seen that God has spoken. He has spoken through creation, and ultimately he’s spoken through Jesus, and the way that we find out about Jesus is through the Bible, but also God still speaks. He still speaks to us today.

At this point in the alpha video, the host talks about how the Bible is kind of like a love letter, and when you get a letter from someone that you love, you treasure that letter not because of the paper or the ink, it’s worth nothing. You treasure it because of the person that wrote it, the feelings of the person behind it. The thing that makes that letter precious is not the paper, it’s not the ink, it’s the author behind it. Now I need to admit that that example maybe doesn’t quite resonate with me. I don’t think I’ve ever handwritten a love letter to my wife Morgan, and I don’t think she’s written one to me either, so we’re even, but we do often send each other Instagram reels, and so that’s basically the same thing, I think. We haven’t done love letters, but what we actually have done, I’ve done it my whole life, and then when Morgan and I got married, he took it on as well. We always hand write cards to each other for birthdays and anniversaries and so on, and you know I put a lot of effort into my cards. Usually it’s like a two panel comic. When Morgan and I got engaged, I made her a card, and I worked really hard at this card, and I spent a lot of time drawing a picture on the front. The picture on the front was a toilet cubicle that was locked because we were engaged, and she still married me. That’s good stuff. I and of course inside the card was my best handwriting, you know, trying to say how much I loved Morgan, how excited I was to marry her. Of course, the reason that card is valuable is not because of the paper and ink, it’s definitely not because of the picture on the front, it’s because I wrote it to Morgan, and that’s what the Bible’s like. The book itself’s worth a few dollars of paper and ink, but it’s valuable because the person behind it, the author wants to be in a relationship with you. He wants to speak with you. He wants to speak with you today.

You know, Jesus teaches this exact same thing in John chapter 5. He’s just healed a man who can’t walk, and the religious leaders are all questioning him, and here’s what Jesus says. It’s on the screen, John chapter 5:39-40. You search the scriptures because you think they will give you eternal life, but the scriptures point to me, yet you refuse to come to me and receive eternal life. Jesus is saying you’re looking for salvation, eternal life in the wrong place. You’re looking towards the parchment and the ink. You’re looking towards knowing and memorizing and understanding all the words, but you’re refusing the author. You’re refusing a relationship with the author, and that’s the whole point. That’s the whole point of the scriptures of the Bible. That’s why they’re valuable, and then right at the end of John’s gospel, John tells us why he spent all this time writing down everything that he saw. He’s an eyewitness who saw and lived with Jesus, and on the screen verse 31, this is what he says. These things are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, and that by believing in him you will have life by the power of his name. John’s saying, “I wrote all this down so that you can know God, that you can believe in Jesus and find eternal life with God, connected to God, forgiven by God, adopted by God, cherished, protected, loved by God. John became an author so that we could get to know the true author.”

In the alpha videos, Nikki Gumble the host tells a story of his friend Earl Smith, and I’m going to retell you his story with the help of a video, and so here it is. This is Earl Smith. He is very rich. His whole family is rich, way too much money, and so he doesn’t have a job. Instead, he actually gets into drugs, and he starts taking such hard drugs that by the age of 30 he winds up in hospital, and while he’s there, someone comes and visits him and gives him a copy of the New Testament, and he is thrilled because he realizes he can use the pages and make joints out of all of them, and so he smokes his way through Matthew and Mark and Luke, and then he gets to John, and then he finally starts reading, and he sits there and he’s reading, and he believes in Jesus, and then his whole life changes. Everything is different. All of his relationships are different. He’s meeting with his psychologist and kind of telling her about this, and she’s like, “I don’t understand. I have this great life, this great job, all this money, friends and family, and yet inside I’m feeling pretty empty, and then look at you, your life’s a train wreck, and yet you have just this like smug piece about you,” and then Earl explains to a psychologist that he met Jesus in the Bible, and eventually the psychologist becomes a follower of Jesus as well. Now that is a true story about Earl, and the reason that Nikki Gumble the host knows Earl is because they went to Bible college together. I’m pretty sure the end of that story is actually that Earl and the psychologist get married, which it’s a bit of a red flag. I’m not sure you’re supposed to marry a patient if you’re a psychologist, but that’s a true story about how the Bible really does transform his life and how it can transform yours as well.

The Bible is God’s way of speaking to you. God wants to be in relationship with you. He loves you. He wants to know you. He wants to speak to you. He’s drawing you toward himself through the Bible. He wants to tell you how much he loves you. He wants to tell you what he thinks is best for your life, and so then it makes sense for me and for you to spend time reading the Bible, doesn’t it? Of course it does, and it makes sense for us to read with the expectation that God is actually speaking to us when it’s read out and when it’s explained, and it makes sense to read it with others like we’re doing at church and like we do every week at church. Makes sense to do it with others when we meet in our connect groups or when we meet up for coffee one-to-one, whatever it is, and it also makes sense for us to spend some time reading it on our own, and so I’m going to invite Susie up. She’s going to tell us a little bit more about what that might or might not look like.

Start Small and Combine it With Something You Love

Hi, I’m Susie. If I haven’t met you before, I’m Susie Warsley, so I’m married to Dan. I’ve been a Christian for 30 years this year. So I love Jesus. He’s my best friend. He’s my Lord, and he’s my Savior. The Bible for me is like a map. It guides me and shows me how to live in this crazy life. When I have to make decisions or I have questions or I need comfort and assurance, the Bible provides all of these things for me, but I don’t read my Bible every day. I don’t like reading books. I find them boring and hard generally, so sitting and reading the Bible every day is hard for me and boring. It’s true, but I love Jesus. I love him so much, and maybe you do too, and maybe you want to read the Bible more, but it’s tricky for you, so here are some of my thoughts and some ways that I have found really helpful to keep reading God’s word, the Bible. Something I’d like to start with is saying start small and combine it with something you love, so if you love gardening or working on your car or gaming or cooking or exercising, bring the Bible into that, and even one verse is still God’s word. It’s alive and active and powerful.

Use the Audio Bible

The greatest invention has been the audio Bible, so I don’t have to read it, I can listen to it, so you can get the Uver Holy Bible app on your phone and listen to it. A great translation is the NLT, that’s what we use here at church. If you change the narrator to street lights is so fun. It’s like really fresh listening to the Bible. I highly recommend Street Lights narrator on the Bible app, so pop the Bible on. Don’t listen to music. Don’t watch something maybe for the first 10 minutes of your exercise, or maybe you’re commuting to work on the metro or you’re driving, maybe you’re doing school drop off or you’re taxing a lot of people, pop the Bible on for the first 10 minutes or the whole time, and that’s a way you can stay in God’s word.

Coffee With Jesus

Something I’ve done has also been coffee with Jesus. It sounds silly, but it really helped me. I make a hot drink, and I have to spend time with God while I’m drinking. I’m not allowed to leave my time with God until my hot drink is done. I might have undiagnosed ADHD, but when I open the Bible, I suddenly have all these things I want to do, and having my hot drink is actually an achievable time for me to spend time with God, and it keeps me grounded and focused.

Another thing I’ve found is reading a psalm that matches the date of the day. Sometimes I don’t know what to read, so today is June the 22nd, so I would open up Psalm 22 and just read Psalm 22, and that’s what I’d read today. I am a believer in nice stationary, so buy yourself some really nice pens, some nice paper mates or Sharpies, and when you read the Bible in church, in your connect group on your own, and a verse stands out to you, write it down with your very nice pen, and you can keep that in your journal or blu-tack it up on your dashboard in your car or post-it note it on the mirror or somewhere around your house so that you keep seeing and being reminded of the powerful truth in God’s word. Set a reminder or a timer on your phone to open verse of the day, the Bible app. It can’t get much easier than that. You open up the Bible app and it has verse of the day, and that is God’s word that is going to make an impact in your life, so if you’re at work and your the reminder goes off, open it up, read the verse. I find it very powerful reading it out loud, so if I’m with other people, I might whisper it to myself, but saying the verse out loud is quite powerful, not just reading it. I have lots more ideas, but I’m going to stop there, so chat to me after if ideas that has worked for you or if you want to talk more. The more you spend in God’s word time in God’s word the more you learn grow and understand but the smallest amount of time you spend in God’s word is still worth it even one verse is alive and active and powerful.

I just want to add two small reflections on top of that. Dan said before that reading the Bible is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle and you put it together, and I think that image really resonates with me as I read the Bible. Morgan and I quite like doing cryptic crosswords. We’re still not very good at them, but we’re still getting better at them, and reading the Bible is just like that. You come across this clue, this passage, it’s like what is going on, and so the thing to do isn’t to stop and to give up. The thing is to go and find something another clue that might be a bit easier that you’ve seen before that you’ve heard before you understood a bit better and to fill that in, and as you do that in different places some some letters will appear in that really hard word that really hard passage, and when you come back to it you might have a better idea of what’s going on, and the second thing just to say is I also really resonate with Susie about I also find reading quite challenging. I was just saying at 8 a.m the other day I sat down to read my Bible and I turn I opened it up and then the postman knocked on the door and so my dog smiths just went ballistic and burst out and I had to go rescue everyone and then and then I forgot what I was doing and I went and did something else i didn’t read my Bible that day that’s a very normal thing for me and so for me whenever my Bible reading is going well it’s usually because I have reasonable expectations i’m just doing a very short reflection on a few verses and so what I want to do to finish is just to kind of give you a very simple example of what I sometimes do when I read the Bible and maybe this kind of thing could work for you. On the screen there’s going to be some four verses from Psalm 19 and what I’m going to do is I’m going to pray read notice something reflect and then pray again that’s what I like to do and so first I’m going to pray and just say something like “God thanks for the Bible as I read it would you help me to understand it and help me to listen to you amen.”

And then I’ll read it the instructions of the Lord are perfect reviving the soul the decrees of the Lord are trustworthy making wise the simple the commandments of the Lord are right bringing joy to the heart the commands of the Lord are clear giving insight for living reverence for the Lord is pure lasting forever the laws of the Lord are true each one is fair they are more desirable than gold even the finest gold they’re sweeter than honey even honey dripping from the comb and so then third I’ll just like notice something and as I read this you might have noticed it as well it it seems strange that God’s laws God’s rules are more desirable than gold and sweeter than honey like I I should want boundaries more than I want gold and I should want restrictions they’re sweeter than honey but actually that does make sense because God’s laws God’s rules are for my good remember what the lady said in the alpha video earlier on god doesn’t command us to not murder or not commit adultery cuz he’s a party pooper and you know it’s like 10 p.m lights out go to bed he does it because he loves us and he wants us to live a satisfying life and so then fourth I’ll just reflect on it and and bring it into my own life and my own circumstances and you know if I’m honest with myself I actually quite think my own rules are pretty good pretty valuable pretty sweet and often if I’m honest with myself when God’s rules clash with mine I tend to want mine to win and yet Psalm 19 says that God’s rules are not only right they’re not only good but they are desirable and they are sweet and so then fifth I’ll pray here’s the kind of prayer that you might pray if you already follow Jesus you might say “God thank you for your laws and your rules and that you want me to live a full and satisfying life and I’m really sorry for the times where I get distracted and where I think that my own rules are better because they’re not and so help me to remember that and give me strength when I’m tired and when I’m weak to follow you.” Amen you might say that or if you’re not yet a follower of Jesus here’s the kind of prayer you might pray if you finish reading the Bible you might say “God thanks to the Bible I’m still not convinced that your laws and your rules are more desirable than gold or more sweeter than honey but I’m here and I’m trying to listen to you please would you help me and show me and would you please speak to me?” Amen something like that and so as you go this week and you sit down and you try to read the Bible maybe that’s something for you to try to pray to read just to notice something to reflect on it and then pray again it’s been a real joy doing Alpha alongside so many of you uh we’re going to finish by giving Nikki Gumble the last word on the video over the last 40 years that I’ve been a Christian I’ve read the Bible practically every day not because I feel I have to it’s because I love it it’s like why do I eat breakfast every day because I like it to me not reading the Bible it’s like skipping a meal because the Bible to me is spiritual food and I I want to encourage you to develop a regular pattern of reading the Bible each day and praying that