Christians know they should read the Bible. And they’re convinced that it would be good for them. But sometimes our motivation sags. Kristen Wetherell encourages us for those times when our hunger of God’s word dips down.

Resources:

• Kristen’s website
• Help for the Hungry Soul by Kristen Wetherell
• Kristen’s other books
• Bible Reading Plan
• How to Read the Bible Podcast

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter. This is a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman. At the C.S. Lewis Institute, we seek discipleship of the heart and mind and want to develop depth and a big part of that is reading God's word, reading the Bible. And my conversation partner today is Kristen Wetherell, who has written a very helpful book about digging into the Bible. And I want to tell our listeners, first of all, there are a lot of books that are how to study the Bible or how to read the Bible, and then of course there are a lot of books that support the Bible, showing us that it really is God's word, that it really is authoritative, historically accurate, and all that.

But, Kristen, you've written a different kind of book. You say in it, “This is a book about God's word, but it's not a how-to. There are lots of excellent books about Bible reading and study methods. Here, I want to write about the why, the heart behind opening our Bibles.” What need did you see that you said, “I've got to write about this?”

Oh, the need in my own heart. The need that I feel most mornings when I come down the stairs bleary eyed and take a few sips of coffee, and I'm just trying to pull my heart along, to desire to get into God's word. Or maybe I desire to get into the word, but to have that deep warmth and fervor in my heart as I read it. It's that need that I wanted to target. It's the motivation behind reading our Bibles. And I'm seeing it all the time in the women that I talk to at church. I’m part of a life group of moms of young kids, so we’re all in a very intense season of family life, a very good one but very intense. And I hear it all the time. “Oh, man! I know that I’m supposed to read my Bible, but I just don't want to. So help me, pray for me.” And so I’m hearing this from women, I'm hearing it from even my husband, who’s a pastor and has many conversations with people from our church, and many people are not in the word, simply because they don't want to be. So I wanted to look at the heart behind it, the motivation.

Well, I'm sorry to say that your book is very much needed.

Yeah.

This isn't just a struggle you have, and I'm not a very good host of podcasts. You’d think, after this time, I’d be better. I should have told people who you are. So, in addition to writing this great book called, Help for the Hungry Soul: Eight Encouragements to Grow your Appetite for God’s Word, Kristen has written several books, some books for children, some books for women. She’s a wife, a mother, a writer, a speaker, a pastor's wife. But I got the idea, looking at your book, this isn't just for women, and it's not just for mothers of small children. You're right, that's a pretty intense stage of life, mothers of small children, but your book has applicability far beyond that.

Yes.

But speak a little bit more. Why do we have periods of lack of motivation to dig into God's word?

Yes. Well, I'm thankful that you just said that about the book, because it isn't just for women. It’s for humans. And that's the problem with the human heart, is that we don't desire what we should. And that's what sin has done to our hearts. It's completely disordered and corrupted our affections. We were made by God to hunger for Him, to feed on His words, to listen to Him, to follow Him, and to have life to the full, and to do so for His glory through our lives. But you know, it's always helpful to go back to the very beginning, and what did Adam and Eve do? They scorned God's words in favor of the serpent's words. And that's our daily struggle, isn't it? It's what am I desiring every single day? Is it the word of God? Or is it these other things that I think will satisfy me, and perhaps they will for a time, but they won't satisfy me forever. They won't continue to. So this is a universal human struggle. And even for believers, those who've been united to Christ by faith, who are walking in relationship with God once again because of Christ, our hearts are not what they will be some day. They are not fully perfect and fully holy in that sense. So we're always going to struggle. And therefore this book is for every single one of us.

And there's something relieving or even liberating about hearing, “Oh. Other people have this struggle, too.” Or, “Yeah. There are times that all Christians,” or most Christians, “struggle with lack of desire to dig into God's word. Because I'm sure what a lot of people think is, “What’s wrong with me? This is God's word! I mean, I just read this 5,000 page book that told me all of the evidence and the archaeological discoveries and the historical prophecies.” By the way, I'm kind of joking. I can't even imagine a 5,000 page book. But that's what people are thinking. And then I think we get a lot of guilt motivation about it. I mean, “How could you not take just fifteen minutes out of your very busy day to spend time with God?” Well, right. Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't really help. It just makes you feel worse. “Yeah, I really am terrible.” So I think the very fact that you wrote this and acknowledged it is just a relief for people. That was one of the senses I got.

I'm so glad. Yeah. I mean, even just doing the study for it and the research and then writing it was so freeing, to realize that God is not prescriptive in His word about how I come to Him. He's not prescriptive about it. We have this—I'm sure we'll get into it, Randy, but we have this idea of a quiet time, where everything's perfectly quiet and the situation is ideal to spend time with the Lord. And let's be honest, life is just not ideal a lot of the time, and so I think when we realize that God's not prescriptive about this. God is calling us to love Him with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength and what that looks like for each one of us on any given day will be different, and that's a great thing, because it means that I can come to God as I am, with the time that I apportion to Him, and then I plead with Him to what only He can do through it. It’s a supernatural thing. I think that that frees us up from this burden of, “I have to do something,” which we are doing something. It is an action to sit here and open up the pages of my Bible and read. But the work behind the word of God is all of the Lord. And so I think that that really will free us up, too.

Yeah. Well said! Well, a theme in your book is sort of the parallel about hungering for food and hungering for God and hungering for His word. You make a distinction about…. Well, you sort of ask us to identify ourselves and different kinds of hunger. There's a starving hunger, there's a seeking hunger, and there's a satisfied hunger. What do you mean by those?

Well, different kinds of hunger will come to us dependent on whether or not we are actively walking with the Lord. So we can distinguish. On one side, you have this starving hunger and the other side you have the two other kinds. You have a seeking hunger and a satisfied hunger. So for a person who is not yet united to Christ. Maybe you're listening to this right now and you would affirm that nothing in this world has satisfied you. And no matter how far you look or where you look or what you do, you're perpetually empty. And apart from the Lord Jesus filling you with His life and His spirit, you will starve. Spiritually, you will starve. And so that's all of us. Apart from the grace of God coming to us and ministering to our hearts that Jesus has done for us what we could not do for ourselves. He's died for our sin, He’s resurrected to eternal life, and He’s given us hope. And so if He had not done that for us, we would all be starving. So there's a starving hunger.

But then when we've come to Christ, when we've walked with Him and placed our faith in Him, even the most genuine believer will walk through seasons of what I call in the book seeking hunger. These are seasons of spiritual dryness. Seasons where it seems to us like God is very far away. Perhaps seasons of doubt, where our faith is really being tested. The truths that we hold fast to are being tested. And the amazing thing is I can think of, I mean, several seasons of my life where I’ve walked through this. So you are not abnormal, Christian, if you are experiencing a season of spiritual dryness, where it seems like you are thirsting and panting for the Lord, but it's like He’s just out of your reach. This has been the experience of many Christians throughout the decades. And while we can't presume upon what exactly God is doing, He certainly wants to strengthen the faith of His people. And we know for sure that He never leaves or forsakes us. And that is a promise. I often like to think of it as the sun being covered up by a dense cloud cover. The sun never goes away. It’s always there. But it's covered by the clouds, and our perception of it is changed, and so that's the seeking hunger that we often feel.

And then there's the satisfied hunger. This is the satisfaction of a heart that is longing after God in a sense of wanting more and more of Him. And I think one of the greatest scriptural examples of this is Psalm 119, where we see a really realistic song being written from the heart of a person who knows his frame and knows that he's dust and knows that his heart wanders, and yet he calls upon God to keep him and calls upon God to stir up in his heart that fire and love for God and His word that he needs.

So we will never attain, like I mentioned before, perfection in this life. Our hearts will never be perfectly loving God as He calls us to. But can we grow? Yes! Can our love for Him deepen? Can we grow in this satisfied hunger? We absolutely can. And I think that that's a wonderful pursuit that we can ask God for.

Well, I love that illustration you used about the sun. Sometimes it's covered by clouds. In fact, sometimes there's a storm, and there's no hint of it even being there. And yet, you can go, “No, no. It’s there,” and there will be times when the clouds dissipate and they’re gone. And okay. And there's something, again, freeing about, “Well, there are probably going to be times when I'm reading portions of God's Word and it just doesn't seem to be exciting me, and then there’s other times where it seems like every word is a morsel to be enjoyed and savored.” So there's something very helpful about that. You know, I'm reminded…. Well, I'm always reminded of C.S. Lewis, and it's not just because this is a C.S. Lewis Institute podcast. But in The Screwtape Letters, he talks about undulations and that all Christians, humans, go through these ups and downs, these undulations, and it's affected by the weather, it's affected by our health, it's affected by a million things. And what he encourages the demon, Wormwood, to mess up the Christian is make him really miserable in those undulations and, “What’s wrong with me? What's wrong with me?” And don't let him remember that, “No. These ups and downs, this is what the reality is of being a human being in a fallen, broken world.”

So again, that's very, very helpful. So the subtitle of your book is “Eight Encouragements to Grow in your Appetite for God’s Word.” So give us a few of them. What are some of those encouragements to grow in appetite? Each of those words, I think, is packed.

Yes. Well, we just talked about these three kinds of hunger, and that's the opening chapter. The very first encouragement is to know your hungry heart. I often tell the story about my high school trip to Europe when my crazy professors trusted us enough to drop us into cities in Italy, and we were using paper maps, and they would say, “You have to find your way to such and such a city by 2 o’clock PM.” And so we’d have to navigate our way through the city to this other location, and I often say we wouldn't be able to figure out how to get to where we're going unless we knew exactly where we were on the map. So we had to locate ourselves first. And that's a scriptural principle as well. The psalmist prays, “Search me, O God,” in Psalm 139, “and know my heart and test my anxious thoughts.” We have to know ourselves in order to understand how we can grow. So we can ask God for that. And so that opening encouragement gives the reader some descriptions, as well as some hindrances to Bible reading that might be keeping them from opening God's Word.

Following on the heels of that is the second one, which is to plead with God for a holy hunger. I mentioned earlier that the work of God's word is a supernatural work, but it comes through something as daily and normal as a book with pages that I can touch and words that I can see, which is such a grace from God, that He would give me something in this walk of faith that my eyes can see and that my fingers can touch. You know, we’re such sensory people. And yet that's not the end. That’s the means. I'm coming to the word, and yet I have to cry out to the Holy Spirit of God to do what only He can do through the word, which imparting life.

Good, good.

Jesus says, in John's chapter 6, “God's word is spirit, and it's life.” That's not something that I can create on my own. That's a work of the Holy Spirit. So the encouragements go on from there, but we have to start from a place of deep humility and helplessness. And realizing that, as much as I'm the one physically opening this book, yes, even that good work is a gift of God’s grace, because why do I even want to come to any degree? Because God has saved me, because He has His hold on me. That encouragement is just all founded in the gospel. Jesus came to us, so that we can come to God, and that's just such good news.

What are some other common difficulties or obstacles or hindrances that we face? You've mentioned several. Just talk about a few more. What are some of the things pushing against our digging into God's word?

Yes. This box that I'm staring at right now called the screen, right? We’re so easily distracted in this age of technology. I think distraction is a major hindrance for people getting into the word. You come down the stairs in the morning with the intention to spend time with the Lord and to open your Bible, and then you go to fill up your cup of coffee, and the thought passes through your mind. “Did I add coffee beans to my grocery list?” So you go to your phone to add coffee beans to your list, just so you don't forget.

Oh, no! I don't like where this is going.

Yeah. And you're sucked in, and I think it's a really wise principle to say, “I'm going to put God's word before my phone or before my laptop every single day,” because we’re just so easily distracted. And not every distraction is bad. I’m even thinking about the discouragements of life. You mentioned these undulations that C.S. Lewis writes about. The discouragements of life that slow us down, trip us up, and can make it really hard to even get out of the bed in the morning. Whether it's physical pain or you're walking with a loved one through suffering or grief. Grief is just so, so sapping. Discouragement can be, I think, a big deterrent, but discouragement can also drive us to Christ and to His word. Is it Spurgeon who said, “I've learned to kiss the wave that slams me against the rock of ages.”

Oh!

And I think that’s so true. We can either choose, in times of discouragement, to let that hinder us from walking with the Lord or to press in. So those are two others that comes to mind.

Yeah. That’s helpful. And again, your book has eight of them. You know, I love having the Bible on my phone. I really do. And it means I always have a Bible with me, and there's plenty of times that I read it. But I find that, for whatever kind of daily or regular, maybe it's called a quiet time, whatever it is, for me, it's so much better if I'm using a paper Bible, because that's all it is is just the Bible. My phone is 18 billion other things. It's texts that come in. It’s emails. It’s news. And again, I'm grateful for my phone, but there's times that I have to put it away and do this very, very antiquated thing of open a book. There's something very helpful about it. And for me, also, there's something about, “Okay, I'm reading this particular page,” let's say in Isaiah. And I'm thinking, “Okay, this is pointing forward to Jesus. And I know that this verse is going to get quoted by Matthew.” Well, there's something about turning a whole bunch of pages and feeling the weight of the book shift in my hands or on my lap. I mean, I know that that's amazingly minute, but we are physical beings, and those kinds of physical things do make a difference.

I totally agree. Yes. I have often said to my husband, “I don't know how people read books on Kindle.” And this is personal preference, so if you love to read books on Kindle, all the power to you. That's great! But I don't know. There's something about, like you said, touching the pages, flipping the pages, going on this physical journey, that I really love.

Well, I read some things on my iPad, but most books I read hard copy, but they're very different experiences. And so I choose to read some things on my iPad if they're the kinds of things that I want to read quickly. I like reading fiction on that because it scrolls along and moves along very quickly, and that's what I want. But if it's something I really need to think deeply, stop, pause, highlight, write questions in the margin, for me that's got to be paper.

Let's talk a little bit about routines for getting into the Bible, because routines are really very helpful, but they can become an idol in themselves, and we can stop looking to the Lord, and we're only looking to our performance. I wish I knew nothing about this, but this is me. If I have X number of days in a row, it's like, “Look at me! I'm doing well with the Lord. Why? Because I haven't missed….” Like, “No! Wait. You missed the whole point.”

Right.

But there are great benefits of, “Okay, this is the time of day when it works best for me to read and pray and dig in.” You have a bunch of insights in your book about how to actually practice these disciplines.

Again, know yourself, right? So look at your schedule, look at the people who are depending on you, figure out when the best time of day would be to attempt to be alone with the Lord, even if it's just for a little while. I'm struck that Jesus, even the Son of God, went away to be with His Father at regular intervals. And so that's good, and we should pursue that. But if it's not the ideal quiet time situation, I think we're really quick to just toss it out, kind of tossing the baby out with the bathwater, and to not look for any and every way to be meditating on God’s word throughout the day. So I’ll give an example. One day last summer, we were packing up from a vacation, and I didn't have time that morning to sit down like I usually do, so I just decided, “I'm just going to turn on the audio Bible while I pack our bags,” because I was alone. I don't usually do that. I don't usually listen. I usually read. And it was wonderful. It was a very different sensory experience, having this auditory consumption of God's word and feeding on it in that way. Maybe for you it’s your commute. Maybe you're in the car for long enough that you could turn on on the audio Bible. For those of us who have children and who desire that our kids would be pointed to Christ and love his word, get in the word with your kids. It's probably going to be really loud and really disorganized. And it might last for five minutes, but-

Ooh! That’s long, actually.

It matters, it matters. And another encouragement in the book, Randy, that matters so very much, and I don't think that we stop to consider the value of it, is the worship service, which, when you think about it, is our main spiritual meal of the week. I think in Western cultures we tend to think of, “My Bible and me, Jesus and me,” as the primary focus of our week. Because we're with ourselves all the time, so shouldn't it be? But really, when we think about what the Bible actually is, it's God's words over-archingly directed to God's gathered people. God gives His word to Moses and to the prophets. Who were they for? They were for the gathered people of God. And the New Testament letters and the history of the church, the Gospels and Acts, it's for the church. It’s to build up the church, the faith of the church. So when you gather with your church family on a Saturday night or Sunday morning, or whenever you meet, you are being nourished with God's Word, and this matters for the growth of your soul. And I think sometimes it's like we separate it. We separate it and put that in a completely different category. But it is nourishment from the Word. So if your quiet time today didn't go the way that you had hoped it would, you get a meal on Sunday morning.

And that is not an excuse to throw your Bible up on the shelf and not pursue time with the Lord on your own. But it does give perspective. It makes me so thankful every time I think about it. Wow! What an amazing gift that I would be fed the word through the preaching of the word, that I would get to hear it read in the worship services, that I would get to sing the word in my praise and my worship, and that I would get to experience the word of Christ in the Gospel through coming to the Lord's table. It's amazing. It's just an amazing gift, and I think we take it for granted.

Are you growing in your faith? Do you think it's time perhaps for a spiritual checkup? Each year, many of us will go through a physical checkup or a performance review at a workplace or maybe even a financial checkup, checking in with the accountants to find out about how finances look, but how often do we take time to review our spiritual life? Those who are saved by grace are called to grow in grace. That’s what the 2 Peter 3:18 says. As disciples of Jesus, we are to live a life of love, love for God, love for our neighbor, in the power of the Holy Spirit, but too often, in the busyness of our day-to-day lives, we let other priorities crowd out the two highest priorities that we should have. So, at the C.S. Lewis Institute, we have an annual spiritual checkup, and I think it’s got some great questions and some great resources, so please take a look at it. It’s at cslewisinstitute.org/annual-spiritual-checkup, or you could just go to our website and search for annual spiritual checkup.

Yeah. Good, good. Those are good words. Yes. And you know, going back a little bit to what you said about listening to the audio, I find I catch things that I hear that I tend to miss when I'm looking reading and vice versa.

Yeah, absolutely.

So they're both helpful for me because they're so different, but in particular, if there are repeated refrains or repeated words, they seem to stand out more as I'm listening to them. And so then I go back and read, and I start seeing patterns that I hadn't seen before. So I really appreciate what you said about that big meal, the central meal each week in our worship service. That's a really good way to think about it.

I had another thought in this talking about routines. I find that, for me, whatever routine I land on, I'm going to have to change it after a while. I don't know why, but after a while… I don't want to say that it gets stale, but maybe that is. Maybe that's what I'm saying. So whatever it is, even if it's as little as, “Well, usually, I read the scriptures first, and then I pray, and then I try to spend a little bit of time meditating on one of the verses that I read.” Well, sometimes I mix it up of I read, then I meditate, then I pray. And there's other times I pray first. And sometimes it's read the scripture and also read some kind of a guide or a commentary. But again, whatever system I come up with, I know that after a certain period of time, it’s like, “Nope. I’m gonna have to tweak it.” And that's especially true when there's major changes in my life. So you've mentioned you’re mom of small children. Something tells me that whatever system you had, it changed when the first child came along, didn’t it?

Yeah. It certainly did. To a point, it stayed the same, in that I had already developed the habit of being in God's word every single day. So that, it couldn't change for me. I was thinking that that would be absurd at this point. I have to be in the word. But in terms of what that looked like, absolutely. That has shifted. And I, like you, am a very type A personality. I like checking my reading plan boxes off on my list. And I will never forget when I was stuck in a rut like you're talking about, and our senior pastor was teaching a class on growing in our spiritual walk, and he said, “You know, if you're getting bored with your Bible reading, please make a change.” And it felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders, like, “I have permission to do that? To do something different?” So that would absolutely be my encouragement to listeners. If you feel bored, if you feel stuck in a rut, perhaps do something different. Maybe your routine is to just read small portions of scripture at a time. A few verses. Maybe try reading… maybe choose a shorter book of the Bible and just try reading your way all the way through it. So speed up. If your habit is to read speedily and read multiple chapters on your reading plan, maybe slow down. Choose a small section of scripture and really take the time to meditate on it. Read with another person. There is so much value in one-to-one Bible reading. We gain insight from other saints and their minds and their hearts. We learn what God is teaching them about Himself, and that's a real encouragement, too. So, I totally commend that. Make a change if you feel stuck. That's wise.

And even if not stuck, again, I find, when there's a major change in my life—my wife and I just recently moved, a pretty significant, lengthy move, and I'd say for the first month in our new place, our new house, it was just chaos. It was, “Oh, time to unpack another box,” or try to now spend who knows how long trying to find something. And so regular time in the scriptures just became haphazard at best. And it was, “You know what? I need to come up with a different system. I need to come up with…. Okay, I’m obviously in a different place.” And as we get older, our bodies…. Sleep becomes a problem for some people. That is the case for me. So it's just being willing to shift those things around.

By the way, when you were saying about, sometimes… well, pick a short book and just read straight through. And other times it's dig down. I heard a speaker once say that, when it comes to good Bible reading, we need to be both good at water skiing and scuba diving. And I love that. Sometimes it's the quick pass over the whole entire book. Sometimes it's dig down and look at that word, maybe that phrase, and several different things in between. And again those are some really great built-in varieties to help make it more beneficial and more helpful.

I love that!

Yeah. I like that one. Well, we're running out of time, but I want to ask you something because, as I mentioned earlier, there's this theme running through your whole book of a parallel about physical hunger and hunger for food and hunger for God's Word. And of course you have to quote Jeremiah, who said, “Your words were found, and I ate them, and Your words became a joy and a delight of my heart.” I mean, that that sounds wonderful, and it's inspiring and it's motivating. But what does it really mean? What does it mean to eat God's word? Or to take in God's word in a way that's like eating?

Yeah. Well, when we think about eating what's good for us, often we don't really want to, especially if it's not a habit. Like I do not, on my own, want to eat my vegetables. And it's like forcing them down my kids’ mouths to eat their vegetables, you know? And yet, the more I eat well, the more I nourish my body with what it needs most, the more I start to crave my vegetables. The more I start to notice when I don't have a salad today and get all the nutrients that my body needs or when I'm protein deficient or I haven't put enough avocado in my smoothie or whatever it might be. You just feel it. Same with exercise. At the beginning, it is painful to start exercising. But the more you do it, the more you want to do it. And I find that there is a gracious cycle in God's word, that the more we are in it, the more we are eating His words, like Jeremiah says. They become to us a delight, and because they have become to us a delight, we want to eat them. And so there's this wonderful cycle. Meditation and feeding on God's word leads to delight, and it just keeps going, and that's so gracious of God that He would do that.

Now that doesn't mean, like we've talked about, that that cycle doesn't have bumps and get interrupted sometimes, because it does. And yet God's word is for pilgrims walking through the wilderness. Just like He supplied manna for His people as they walked through the wilderness. God's word is for us. And He's going to use His word to keep us in the faith and to exercise and strengthen our faith muscles as we put our hope in Christ. And He's going to use it to keep us until we're all the way home, and the word becomes sight, and it's going to be a beautiful day when that happens.

Hmm. Nicely said! I think that's a good place for us to bring this to a close. I love this idea of savoring God's word, in the way that… actually we don't do this often enough. Sometimes we just eat our food kind of mindlessly, but there are times to savor it and just allow… even to talk about it. Not with your mouth full, but to talk about the flavors and the spices and the textures. And so there are times to dig in and look at a word and savor it and think, “Now, why did God inspire it to say that word and not some other word?” And again, it's meditating on the tiniest morsels, the words, the individual thoughts. So any last thoughts you want to throw in here? I want to encourage people to get your book, to really dig into the scriptures and to savor it like it's a delicious meal.

Yeah. If you're listening and you would say, “Oh, man! This is just not my experience. I am not in the word. It’s been years.” Just know that it is never too late to start, and that might feel intimidating, but just start somewhere. The best way to start is simply to start. And you might want to email your pastor. You might want to grab a friend if you're a little intimidated to go at it alone and ask them for some guidance. But, God’s word is our life. His word is life and spirit. And so, how can we grow? How can we know him? How can we know the joy of being filled with his fullness if we’re not in his word? So that would be my encouragement. The best way to start is just to start.

Wonderful! And I love that word encouragement. It's in your subtitle. It's in what you just said. It comes through all the way in your book. We'll put a link to Kristen's book and other books that she's written, and we'll also put a couple of links for resources that we have at the C.S. Lewis Institute to help you dig into the scriptures and to enjoy it as a good meal. Like all that we do at the Institute, we hope this this podcast and all our resources help you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Thanks.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman