My upbringing was in a Christian church environment, and I had a few encounters with God in my early teens.
However, my church was primarily evangelistic, so it had about 1,000 baby Christians because we didn’t get much teaching.
But when I was 21 we had a message preached that made me see that if I continued just pleasing myself, I would probably die young.
A huge difference, I read it early every morning. It lays out examples of how to live – there’s so much of human experience in the biblical stories.
Once you see the Bible as God’s story – and not just something from which we pick principles – it applies to so much.
Having favourite Bible verses is relevant, but also misleading, because it’s this whole story.
I’m doing a lot more reading and hearing the Bible at the same time – you get more out of it when you use two of your senses. Recently I focused on 1 John 1 – God is light and there’s no darkness at all. I went back and forth, and it captivated me. Prior to that, Hebrews gripped me like never before. Those are special parts – they reorientate me, and help me to reorientate others.
Reading the Scriptures daily, meditating on them, studying, reading big chunks – all help build foundations.
So when we go through periods of testing we can lean into the Scriptures that have become part of us. I often find that what stands out to me in my daily reading will become really relevant as circumstances unfold during a bad day, or week. God’s word becomes a source of strength.
Without the Scriptures, I don’t have the materials for a stable, godly life. I think of one of my granddaughters, who was in rebellion against Christianity. Despite that, she attended a YWAM training school, and the Holy Spirit met with her.
Lynn Green She was transformed.
But she got shaky after a few months – she’d say she didn’t have an understanding of the Bible, so her foundations were on sand.
We encouraged her to do some biblical training, and now she is thriving and stable.
We see deep foundations in her life, because she has the combination of an encounter with God through the Holy Spirit, and being grounded in Scripture and the historical reality of Jesus, which you can’t grasp without the Bible.
Loren Cunningham [founder of YWAM] did a lot of research on this, and concluded that there has never been a significant move of God without the Bible being available in the language spoken by the people.
You can have experiences with God, but you must have the foundation of the historical reality not just of Jesus but of his work, from Genesis to Revelation.
Loren had that sense that if we are expecting to see that harvest of every tribe, tongue, nation, and people worshipping before the throne, you have to get the Bible to everybody first.
God’s word needs to be available to people in their own language if we are going to see radical transformation in communities and nations. That’s the essence of what Loren Cunningham learnt from his research.
Right now, you can play your part in helping to make God’s word available by giving to our Christmas appeal, to support Bible translators like Donatus as they work to translate the Bible into their languages. Any donation you give up to 23 December will be doubled!*
Find out more about YWAM here.
*up to £1,000,000
