Good morning and welcome to Wednesday’s podcast. My name is Alan and today in Chapter 6 verses 8-15 of Acts, we see Stephan, a man chosen to distribute food among the growing Christian community in Jerusalem, arrested on false charges. Verse 10 reads,

But they could not stand up against the wisdom the Spirit gave him as he [Stephen] spoke.

I wonder, how often do we read our Bibles?

REFLECTION:

I remember, years ago, I heard a leader from Nepal speak about the missionary work that he was involved in back home. How they were going out into the mountains and villages, preaching the gospel and how they trained up new Christians to go out and preach the gospel. It was inspiring. They were seeing thousands coming to faith. New converts were quickly trained and deployed into God’s mission field. This leader went on to share how for many of these church planters the only book they have ever read was the Bible. Missionaries taught them to read using the Bible and since then they had read and re-read the Bible over and over again. Many of them would read the whole Bible – even Leviticus – 4, maybe, 5 times every year. That’s the whole… 1251 pages (the number of pages in the Bible on my desk – although other Bibles are available!) 1251 pages of the Bible every 2 – 3 months.

A recent house guest of ours took up the challenge and read the whole Bible in one month… that works out at about 35 chapters a day. Fair play to her: she just about made it, running just a couple of days over I think.

“But it’s not about quantity Alan, it’s about quality,” I hear you say. Well maybe, but the point is that we need to dedicate ourselves to reading God’s word. We need to get God’s words in to our heads, into our hearts and begin to allow God’s words to change us.

…they could not stand up against the wisdom the Spirit gave [Stephen] as he spoke.

Surely the Spirit was dictating to Stephen his every word and sure enough, when I find myself falsely accused, I am sure that God will come up trumps. He will give me the download that I need in that moment!

Or could it be that Stephen was a man who had immersed himself in the word of God? And in this moment of confrontation, the Holy Spirit took hold of all that Stephen had taken in and brought it to life?

At the end of Ephesians 6 where Paul describes putting on the full armour of God, it says: “Take… the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

The Bible is not some 1st century light-sabre – although that would be seriously cool – but it is the sword of the Spirit. As we immerse ourselves in the Bible, as we pore over the word of God, we arm the Spirit in our lives. We give him ammunition to confront our fears and our insecurities, we learn about who we are and hear the promises God has made to us. As we allow the Spirit to get to work we are slowly changed by the renewing of our minds. And…. when we are confronted in the court of popular opinion, when the topic of conversation turns to Christianity and the church, we are ready… the Spirit is armed… He can bring out of us all that has been invested into us.

It is true that as we read the Bible the words can jump off the page and take on real relevance in a particular moment, for a particular reason.

When our kids were tiny I took my turn in looking after them during the week. With a little extra time on my hands, during nap time, I took to trying to learn some of the smaller books in the New Testament off by heart. I would write a few verses out and take them with me during the day, often checking up to see if what I was remembering bore any resemblance to the verses I was trying to learn. One day, I bumped into someone I knew from church. She started telling me of some of the struggles she and her husband were encountering. I simply reached into my pocket and gave her the scribbled Bible verses that I had written out that morning.