Today’s reading: Jeremiah 36; Romans 12
If, as a Christian, the only time you are ever exposing yourself to God’s Word is once a week in church, that is certainly better than nothing, but it is really not enough.
In Jeremiah 36, God has Jeremiah and Baruch write down all the words that He had spoken to Jeremiah from the first day He spoke to him up to that day. So when Baruch takes the scroll and reads it before the people in the temple, it is not some new word from the Lord they are hearing, but they are re-hearing all that Jeremiah has already told them, just all at once rather than spread out over months and years, and how different was the impact?
When Micaiah hears what Baruch is reading, he runs to report it to the rest of the royal officials, and when they call for Baruch and have him read it, they immediately recognize the seriousness of it and take the scroll to the king. But we have to realize that none of this is new. These men know Jeremiah and have heard him declaring these things for years now, so why does it strike so differently this time? Because they are hearing it all together.
Think about it from their perspective. If Jeremiah is in the court, claiming he has a word from God, and saying that God is giving the city into the hands of the Chaldeans, that might give you pause, but then you get distracted by daily life and mostly forget to care. You are also, very likely, not tracking all the individual things God declared would happen through Jeremiah to validate his message. Like when God declared through Jeremiah that Hananiah would die within the year for his false prophesying (Jeremiah 28), are you necessarily going to remember that months later when Hananiah dies? Maybe, but maybe not.
But now it's different. Now they are hearing all of God's repeated and increasingly dire warnings for their refusal to listen back to back. Now they are being reminded of all those little things God predicted through Jeremiah to validate his message, and they know that all those things came to pass. Hearing, processing, and dealing with it all together is an entirely different experience than just hearing the little bits at a time like they have in the past from Jeremiah, and the officials rightly see the importance and severity of the bed they have made for themselves.
Too often, Christians live like the people of Jerusalem in Jeremiah's day. We go to church, hear the pastor teach about some passage or topic, maybe it strikes our heart a bit that week, maybe it doesn't, but either way, very likely, within a day or two, any conviction we felt has already ebbed away. This leaves us as people who are probably at least generally familiar with some of the important or popular stories in the bible, but who are otherwise largely untouched and unchanged by it.
But God has so much more for us than that!
When we intentionally steep ourselves in God's word, it helps protect us from having the experience that the royal officials had in Jeremiah 36. They had heard the teachings before, but hearing them together and being reminded of them all, they realized just how much they had failed to actually take any of it to heart and let it change anything. When we are regularly reading God's word, we give the Holy Spirit room and a voice in our hearts and minds to teach, remind, convict, and transform us. This is one of the reasons why it is so important that we develop a habit of regular time spent reading the Bible, and that that habit includes reading all of the Bible, not just opening to a random page and reading a verse or two, or just reading a Psalm each day, but never anything else.
Hearing the Word taught in church or in a bible study is good, helpful, and important, but it is not a substitute for personal investment in the Word, and without that personal investment, we are unlikely to see the kind of growth and transformation that God desires for us.
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