Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need of today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
- Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline
Modern Christians reading the Word have been drilled into practicing a daily “quiet time.” We expect we will “get something out of it”—daily. Each and every time we open the Bible, we must get some kernel of encouragement, or doctrine, or a glowing worship experience. That fruit—given in 15 minutes or less—is our proof that we have met God.
In reality this is problematic. Much of our “quiet time” leaves us grasping for a product: a verse that didn’t move us, but probably should have; a command we’re not sure how to apply, but seize upon; a story which may or may not have relevance for our situation, but we can force to prooftext a conclusion we had already made. Instant gratification, when applied to Scripture, is a wretched hermeneutic.
The pressing need, as Foster points out, is not for intelligent or gifted people who can swoop upon a text and grasp it at once, catching its full meaning and savoring its literary art. Bible reading is not wine tasting. The Scripture is not for connoisseurs.
What we need, instead, is to become deep, and by this I mean deeply rooted. We need to know the Word through familiarity: long, rooted familiarity. Picture old, crinkled lovers, liver-spotted hand in hand, who have through long seasons of joy and pain come, at last, to know one another.
The intelligent and gifted person can analyze the sentences of Scripture. The deep person can complete sentences of Scripture.
The only way to become the deep person is time. Lots, and lots, of time.
I first recognized this when a favorite pastor mentioned that he had been reading through the Bible every year for twenty-five years. I sat up in my seat like lightning. Twenty-five years? How rooted would you be in story after story, page after page? How much would that Book have shaped the way you see the world?
I will never know unless I do it myself. When I am 50, I will only know what that pastor knows if I actually read the Bible, year after year, starting now. There will be no shortcut and no catch-up. Just three or four pages a day, every day, for thousands of days.
Listen to Eugene Peterson describe Annie Dillard, a writer he and I both admire:
She has assimilated Scripture so thoroughly, is so saturated with its cadence and images, that it is simply at hand, unbidden, as context and metaphor for whatever she happens to be writing about. She does not, though, use Scripture to prove or document; it is not a truth she "uses" but one she lives.
Saturation counts for more than mastery. Or, rather, saturation is a kind of mastery. As Charles Spurgeon used to say of John Bunyan: “If you pricked him, he would bleed Bible.”
So let us read, day after day, not for the immediate fruit (though this will come along the way), but instead to become so saturated with the images, poems, and cadences of Scripture that they are simply at hand. Let us know the Word with a familiarity that unveils its mysteries before quick-eyed love, grown over decades of faithfulness.
