Your promise gives me life! (thoughts on Scripture use)

Tonight I’ve been considering, once again, how absolutely necessary God’s words are to me. How much I need to hear from Him in order to have any meaning at all to my existence. And how, when I do really consider what He has said to me, my existence does have meaning, and life starts to make a lot of sense (even the suffering that I see in the world around me).

The incredible thing about the Bible is that it is actually the message of a Creator for His created ones, the information that we absolutely need in order to know who we are, why we are here, and most importantly of all, who He is.

So, tonight I was reading a great article by Wayne Dye (one of our professors at GIAL) about the “Conditions Necessary for Scriptures to be Used.” In this article, he talks about the seven most important factors that must be in place if people are to actually use the Scriptures that are being translated into their language.

The whole article was so great that it got all the gears in my brain moving—so many ideas about how the Scriptures could be used by the Gbaya-speaking people (not only the NT which has already been translated, but also the OT which is going to be translated in the future).

There is a big gap here in this culture between what the Bible says, and how people believe and practically live out their beliefs (isn’t it like that everywhere in the world, though? )

One specific area here in which I am starting to understand this gap between God’s truth and people’s lives is in the spiritual belief system. I have been learning about Gbaya spiritual beliefs, and am going to try to keep learning, since of course people’s beliefs about the spirit world are such a crucial component of their lives. I am learning that in people’s perception, spirits and spiritual forces are involved in nearly every aspect of life. The result of this is that much of people’s lives are wound up in trying to protect themselves from evil spiritual forces, trying to obtain good things from spiritual powers that can give good stuff, etc. Ultimately, people live in a great deal of fear, and their desire is to manipulate spirits in order to get good things and avoid calamities. But very few people are aware of what the Bible has to say about spirits and related issues – and it says so much about these things!

With all these things bouncing around in my head tonight – the amazingness of the truth God has offered us in the Bible, the need for Scripture to actually be used as it is translated into languages (Gbaya specifically), and the spiritual belief system in which people here live – I asked myself, “What can I practically do to help people here actually use their Bibles, and to help them realize that God in fact offers truth about Himself that will set them free from spiritual bondage and fears?”

The conclusion I’ve come to, or at least a preliminary one, is that the best thing I can do is to be into the Bible myself, and through God’s help to be living out the truth I find there. I often find myself wanting to exemplify something good to others (my kids, friends, people around me) and then realize that the point is not to be an example of the thing, but actually to be the thing myself.

So if I want to help people around me find all the answers to life in the Bible, then the best way to do that is to find answers to my own questions there. And of course that (going to the Bible for myself, rather than just getting others to go to it for the help they need) – is the point after all.

This year I am trying to read through the Bible, and as I am reading on this more purposeful accelerated reading plan, already I’m finding myself reminded of a lot of things about God and His workings in history that I had forgotten. I think that reading the Bible more is just a good cycle – God shows me so many things that in turn, I just want to read it and obey it more. Hopefully so that I will keep becoming more and more like that man who wrote Psalm 119, and who seemed to have a pretty good understanding of how vital God’s words are for our lives –

“Remember your word to your servant, in which you have made me hope.
This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life.” (Psalm 119:49-50)