Benefits to reading ‘Bible’ over and over
Delaware Gazette - May 31, 2025
As a child growing up in a Baptist church in Missouri, I was admonished continually to make reading the Bible a part of life’s everyday routine. There was a suggestion that having the Bible translated and widely published offered an opportunity to which generations previous to the printing press and publishing and higher literacy rates was not available. It was right to have been so encouraged. Even for those who are not Christian, the Bible is worthy reading, both for its religious and historical significance.
One of my sons is still able to quote lines from “Toy Story” as if he saw it only yesterday. For a time when he was very young he would request it everyday, “I want to see, “Tata Head,” which was his name for it, evidently a reference to Mr. Potato Head, one of its characters.
Growing up we were encouraged to read the Bible a little every day. Like old movies, there is some benefit to reading the Bible over and over again. It becomes familiar. Sometimes a new reading generates a new discovery of meaning.
Each time the Bible is read, something new is learned, one notices things that on previous readings went unnoticed.
The last time I wrote for the Gazette, it was about picking one of the gospels for wintertime reading. I have moved on to the epistles, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and saw something I had not seen before. In the 15th chapter, he writes: “I am convinced, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge, and competent to instruct one another.”
I am sure that it was my own failure to understand what I was being taught, but I emerged from my religious upbringing with a de facto suspicion of people who did not think as I did, believe as I believe. The lights came on for me when I noticed that Paul could write about something like universal sin, “All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory,” and still be convinced of the goodness of those to whom he wrote. Paul had never been to Rome, and though the 16th chapter is filled with the names of several people to whom he sent greetings, the best assumption is that he had never met most of the people in the church there, and they had never met him, except in both cases, by reputation.
One wonders if there might have been some conflict there, some division about which he had heard. Perhaps the congregation had become polarized, to use one of the words common in our time. There might have been people on one side thinking the people on the other side were bad people, and people on the other side returning the sentiment by thinking those on the one side were bad, maybe even evil, maybe not Christian at all.
It wouldn’t be the last time such a situation would arise among the faithful, or just among people generally. There have been notorious controversies all throughout the history of the church, such as the major split between the east and west over the use of images in worship, and later the Protestant Reformation, and several others. I do not need to mention any of the wars over the years.
After spending the better part of the first three chapters focused on universal sinfulness, it caught my attention that at the end of the letter he made an affirmation of their goodness, thought it would worthwhile to tell them all that he considered them to be full of goodness and knowledge and competence.
To accept the limitations of others, and our own, and still see goodness, is a grace to us, and is one of the foundations of our graciousness to each other. It was, after all, only when Buzz admitted that he was a toy that Woody could exclaim, “but you are a cool toy.”
The acknowledgment and confession of sin is not a humiliation, but a liberation that opens the eyes to each other’s goodness, and makes friendship possible, even between opponents. It is something to think about.
Your Pastor Speaks
Dr. Mark Allison