September 30- My Bible

September 30 - My Bible

"Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years." -- Charles H. Spurgeon

I still carry the flyleaf from the first Bible that really ever meant anything to me. In it I had written, "Found Christ. April 25-28!" That was in 1974. It had been an amazing weekend - they were called "Lay Witness Missions" and a group of people came from all over Iowa to spend the weekend in our church, witnessing to the power of God in their lives. Saturday evening was an altar call and I knew without a doubt, that I needed to be on my knees at that altar.

I had always been a Christian, but that weekend cemented for me the fact that I needed to be fully engaged in this relationship with Christ. It was personal now - between Him and me. I could no longer count on my parents to simply teach me about Jesus, I needed to figure it out on my own. I took responsibility that day for my eternal life.

My first Bible was a paraphrase -"The Living Bible." I had it so well underlined and highlighted, every single book in that Bible impacted my life in some way. A few years later, I realized it was time to grow up and away from the paraphrase. The New International Version was still pretty young and I was intrigued by the difference between it and my paraphrase and between it and the other common Bible of the time, the King James version. I had to have it. My first NIV Bible soon became just as well-marked and oft-read as my paraphrase.

Several years later, my mother gave me the Bible that I carry now. It's still NIV, but I love it - it's the Thompson Chain Reference Bible and it has given me more helps through the years than I can begin to enumerate. It has been well-marked and I've even had it re-bound. I would feel lost without it. When someone asks me a question regarding scripture, I know that I can find anything in 'my' Bible.

Part of that has to do with the fact that I have a bit of a photographic memory and things that I 'live in' for a long time tend to stay close to my memory. Part of it has to do with the fact that I can generally get close, but my marks in this Bible will take me directly to what I'm looking for. I've probably looked for it before.

My relationship with the Word of God was exciting and wild and passionate when I started using The Living Bible in the 70s. We could hardly wait for youth group and Sunday School class so that we could open our Bibles and learn. There were a bunch of us that shared that passion and it was fun doing it together. As I grew older, my depth of understanding of scripture also grew. The more I learned, the more I was able to understand what God wanted me to see in His Word.

By this point, I think that I finally get it. I will never be able to understand everything, but I will always be able to meet the Lord within these pages. Always. When He feels far from me because my life has gotten out of whack, I know where to find Him. I open up my Bible and begin to read and I realize that He has never left me.

The Bible grows with us as we grow in our understanding of it. Whether you are on your very first Bible, or have experimented through the years with different versions, or use a new one on a regular basis, the Word remains the same. If it's been awhile since you went looking for God in the pages of your Bible, open it up and begin to read.