Getting to Know God

Dannah Gresh: Has reading the Bible ever seemed boring? Kelly Needham says all parts of Scripture, even the boring ones, serve a purpose.

Kelly Needham: It’s in the long readings and in those boring things that we really have a chance to cultivate this long-term treasure hunt in the Scriptures.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, co-author of Seeking Him for August 1, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy, we’re in a series here at Revive Our Hearts where we’re inviting women to get into the Word. We often emphasize this topic during the month of January, since studying the Bible is a great way to start off the year! 

But we always need reminders to seek the Lord and be dependent on His Word, which is why we’ve been talking this week about getting to know God through Scripture and learning to trust Him more.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I’m so thankful, Dannah, for how you love the Word, how we have the privilege of sharing the Word with our listeners day after day. But you know that it’s not enough for people to listen to us teach the Word. 

The joy is getting into it for yourself and mining its riches and making it yours, and getting to know God through His Word! I’m so grateful for Kelly Needham, who has joined us on the program this week to talk about the love for God’s Word—how to get into it, how to get it into you. Kelly, thanks for joining us again here on Revive Our Hearts.

Kelly: It’s a pleasure!

Dannah: Kelly has been with us these past few days, helping us develop a love for God’s Word. She’s been on staff at two different churches serving in youth, college, and women’s ministry. And whether she’s speaking or writing, she loves helping people fall more deeply in love with Jesus, and she believes we get to know Him through the Bible.

Nancy: And I’ve just got to add here, she’s the wife of Jimmy Needham. You may know him as a singer and songwriter. So, you have little children; your days are very full! Your husband is on a church staff, you all are active in local church ministry.

We want to talk a little bit today about some of the hurdles to getting into the Word of God. I think there are some common things all of us experience and that we hear from others. One of those is, “I just don’t have time!” 

I don’t think there could be anybody who hasn’t had that thought at times. So talk to us about “I just don’t have time” as a hurdle to getting into God’s Word.

Kelly: I think that’s something we’re all going to feel in every season of life. So if you’re waiting to get to a new season where you don’t feel that, it’s not coming! There will be something new to replace the “busy” that you are facing now.

I think the more true statement than, “I don’t have time,” is, “I’m not making time.” We make time for what matters to us. We make time to grocery shop the way we want to. We make time to be on social media. 

 

If anything will convict you and convince you that you have time to be in the Word, just look at your screen time numbers. You know how our phones will tell us, “This is how many hours you’ve been on your phone over the past week.” We do have time, but we often squander it in other ways.

I think as a mom, something that I face—and I know a lot of my friends who have young kids at home face—is that we would prefer to read our Bibles in a certain environment that’s alone and quiet.

That’s something I really don’t have a lot of, if I’m being honest. Alone quiet time, I don’t have that. But that doesn’t mean I can’t read my Bible if I don’t have that type of time. A lot of my Bible reading these days is with little kids around me, and I do get interrupted.

Sometimes I have to tell them, “Mommy’s praying right now. I need you to give me some time alone.” And that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. But I think we do have the time. We might not have the type of time we want, and it might not be when and where we want it, but it is there. 

We just have to choose to take it and, in faith, choose to spend our time on what really matters, believing that, “This is important, even if it doesn’t feel important right now.” 

Dannah: So it’s all about what you prioritize. 

Kelly: Yes. 

Dannah: I was reading recently the number of hours it takes to really become an expert in something, and it’s somewhere about twenty hours a week to become an expert.

And then I looked at some of the things the average American spends twenty hours a week doing. And two of them I can recall right now; one was social media. That is the real average amount of time someone spends on social media each week. Twenty hours! Some as low as like ten or twelve, and some as high as forty, but twenty was average.

And the other thing that we spend twenty hours a week doing is thinking about, obsessing about, planning what we’re going to eat—looking at recipes, looking at menus . . .

And you think, Wow, if I could take just those two things, and take a little bit of them each day and make them time that I dive into God’s Word, what a difference it would make in my life!

Nancy: I’ve found that I can get the Word of God into my life in some creative ways while I’m doing some other things. Now, you need time where you’re just focusing on the Word. But I love my Dwell Bible app. There are others where I can listen to the Scripture. 

I can listen to it being read when I’m trying to fall asleep at night, when I can’t sleep in the middle of the night, when I’m doing my hair, when I’m doing my makeup. I don’t do this every day, but often I will just play the Scripture being read aloud. So I’m getting mega doses of God’s Word into my heart, even at times that maybe I don’t have to be using my brain for what I’m doing, and I can make use of that time.

Dannah: Well, Nancy, I listen to this podcast while I walk the dog most days—pretty faithfully! You know, it’s just another way, and I listen to some other podcasts, too. 

But I dovetail, I’m doing two things at once: the dog needs exercise—so does Dannah, as a matter of fact—and my heart needs exercise in terms of being in the Word of God. So I guess what we’re saying is, you need to make an intentional choice to make getting in God’s Word a priority in your life.

Nancy: Now, I think there are people who might do that more if they didn’t feel that the Word of God was just boring: “It's not interesting; it’s not as fun as social media.” We wouldn’t say that aloud, but don’t you think a lot of people may feel, “This isn’t as interesting, it’s not as scintillating, it’s not as . . .” What is it about the news and social media? 

Or, “Could I just read devotionals, because those make me feel good, more than just reading the Bible.” Help us out, Kelly.

Kelly: Yes, well I think you’re actually tackling two different hurdles that we face there. One of them is that the Bible is not new information. It is alive and active and relevant today, and speaks in fresh ways all the time, but it’s not brand new.

What social media and the news is, it’s new information, and it’s coming all the time. So we feel this sense of, “There’s unknown information and new information coming at me, and I need to get it all!” 

“This old information, why should I spend my time on that and miss out on this current thing?”

But the reality is, if we would dig into the timeless truths of God’s Word, it would give us so much more wisdom to understand and really digest the news in a way that would be healthy for us! 

You know, 2 Timothy 3:16 tells us that Scripture is not brand new but is breathed out by God and is given to us so that we may be complete, equipped for every good work. It’s actually equipping us for our life today in a really important way that we need. 

So that’s one hurdle that we’re talking about; that we have to believe what God says about His Word and then act on it by spending time there, even though it’s super-tempting to just jump on to the endless relay of information through all those different apps we have on our phone.

But the other hurdle that you’re mentioning, Nancy, is this one, “Why can’t I just read a devotional? Why do I need to dig into all these parts of the Bible that just feel obsolete?”--whether it’s those Old Testament laws that we know that Christ has fulfilled for us. “Why should I get to know the old covenant and the Old Testament laws? Why should I read the genealogies? Why can’t I just do the easy work?”

One of the things I would say to that is, reading the Bible for ourselves—reading all of God’s inspired Word—is a protection for us. It helps us to know it for ourselves. There are all sorts of devotionals out there taking God’s Word and applying it in inappropriate ways.

We see that Satan, when he tempted Jesus in the wilderness, used God’s Word at one point to try and lure him to disobey God. There are plenty of examples of that. So when we read the Scripture for ourselves, it’s a guard for us to make sure that we’re not led astray by false teaching. We become really familiar with the real thing, and we’re able to identify it.

But also, it’s in those long readings and in those boring things that we really have a chance to cultivate this long-term treasure hunt, as Dannah said a couple days ago, in the Scriptures! We read things that we might not be able to apply to our lives or see the meaning of it then, but then when we read something that Jesus does or says in the New Testament we go, “Wait a minute! That reminds me of what Jesus said about the law when he tells the leper to go show himself to the priest, and my Bible’s referencing it.”

“I faintly remember two years ago reading something about that! I’m going to go back and re-read that.” And there is such rich depth we get in those moments to see what God is doing in sending this leper back.

Not just to be a witness to the priest who’s there, but the ceremony for cleansing a leper that you read about in Leviticus, though it’s not applicable today, is just full of rich beautiful imagery to help this leper see, not just that he’s been healed and restored to his own community, but he’s been restored to God!

And those moments of connection, they require for us a very long-term, delayed-gratification way of reading the Scriptures. To say, “I believe it all matters! I’m going to pay attention now, even if I don’t see the fruit of this in two or three years, and believe that there is a treasure trove here that I want to be ready for.”

It takes some pushing back against instant gratification. Devotional reading is an instant gratification. I think that’s okay every now and then. I need that in my life, too, but I also need the delayed gratification of, “I’m going to read this Scripture for myself!”

And even if that means I close it and I don’t have a little nugget for my day, I’m going to believe God’s doing something in me, because He said His Word does not ever return void. It’s always accomplishing the purpose for which it was sent out to do (see Isaiah 55:11). 

Nancy: Well that verse you quoted just a moment ago, from 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable [all Scripture is profitable! ] for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, [so] that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

We want to get to the good work and the complete and the satisfied and the finished product, but God says, “No, there’s a process to get there, and you need all Scripture.” You need the genealogies, you need the Old Testament, you need Leviticus, you need the lists.

The first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles are all genealogies, just lists of “so-and-so had a son named so-and-so, who had a son named so-and-so who had a son named so-and-so . . .” You can kind of get stuck in that, or you can take God at His Word that there is something about all of Scripture, when you put it all together in that beautiful assembled puzzle, that is profitable. It is profitable! It’s for our good. It’s for our benefit, for our righteousness, for our Christ-likeness. So, it all has purpose.

Now, both of you were telling me in a conversation we had a little bit earlier that, especially as you’ve talked with some younger women, you’ve heard something expressed that, when they feel distant from God or they’re in a dry season or their heart feels hard, that they’ve actually found that reading the Bible makes them feel worse.

And I replied, “Do people really say that!?” And you both said in unison, “Yes they do.” Why do you think that is?

Kelly: I first want to say, even as I answer this, I want to be honest that I’ve had some of those moments myself. I think for me personally it was in context of a season of suffering and hardship related to some relational conflict, and we had been through several miscarriages. 

So reading truths and promises in God’s Word that I couldn’t make sense of, in my personal reality, in that moment, it inserted a level of tension in my relationship with God. If I can venture as far as to call it “conflict.”

It felt like, “My relationship with God is this place that I run to as a refuge, and now when I run there, it feels like there’s a tension there I don’t understand.” It didn’t have the same comfort feelings.

So I think some people, especially in seasons of really difficult suffering, trials that have lasted for years and years, and praying for things that it just doesn’t even seem like God’s answering, that He’s doing the opposite; that running to the Word can start to feel like it just inflames that hurt that they feel from the Lord.

They feel hurt or wounded by God, which God only does good, and He is good. That’s what it says in Psalm 119:68. But there’s a sense in which our reality feels like, “God, you’re working against me!” And the Bible can be a place where that wrestling is happening, so it doesn’t always feel like a relief. And I think that’s sometimes what’s happening.

Nancy: Let me just interrupt you here, Kelly, and say that as you’re sharing that, I’m thinking back to a season in my own life when the founder of our ministry died of a brain tumor after months of suffering and prayer and people pleading with God to spare his life. This man loved the Lord and had started this amazing ministry!

I would say for a year after his homegoing, it was really, really hard for me to read the Scripture, because I felt taunted almost by the promises of God’s Word about prayer, about faith, about obedience. It seemed unfair!

It wasn’t just that he died, it was that what had happened didn’t seem consistent with the Scripture. So I found myself running from rather than running to the Scripture at that point of time. Even as you’re sharing, I can say, “Yeah, I can relate to a season like that!”

Kelly: Right. Like you said, Nancy, it’s good to remember that we’ve all been there. We may all go through moments like that, but the answer is not to close the Bible! One of the pictures I’ve tried to give people as a way to interact with God in those hard seasons is to think of what a child does when their parent is doing something they don’t understand.

I remember when my children were very small, and Jimmy was traveling a lot. He would often have moments where he would tell the kids on the phone, “I’ll see you tonight!” Then I would get a text from him later that, “My flight was delayed. Something went wrong.” And I would have to tell my children, “He’s not coming home tonight.”

So, one parent, whom they know to be trustworthy, has said, “I’ll see you tonight.” Then they get a different message, “Never mind, I will not.” And so they have a tension: “This was said, this is happening.” And what do children do in that moment? 

They draw near to you in the only way they know how, which is through questions. They bring questions. “Why?” “I don’t understand.” “What happened?” And I’m explaining things that they have no concept of. They don’t understand air traffic and weather and how that all interacts.

They don't understand why Daddy can’t be home. And so at some point, they just have to take me at my word, that their dad is a truth-teller and so am I, and there’s some mystery. “We love you, and just trust us.”

But for me, the only way I knew how to draw near to God in that difficult season was with my questions: “God, Your Word says this, but in my life it is this, and I don’t know what to do! So, I’m going to come near to You, and the only way I know how is, I’m going to bring all my questions!”

Bringing questions to God is a form of drawing near. There’s a way to do that, that’s accusatory, and we should not be that way with God. We should have a reverence for Him that is not pointing the finger at Him and saying, “You did this!” 

But instead, we say, “I don’t understand!” And we come to Him like a child. Our psalms are full with those types of questions. I think that’s the way that we draw close in those seasons, where the Word might not feel like a comfort to us, but might feel a little bit prickly and hard. We draw near with questions.

Nancy: You know, if all we want the Word for is to make us feel good, there are going to be times when we’re going to be disappointed. What was that passage in 2 Timothy 3? The Word is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction . . .” Ouch! Like, you’re going the wrong direction, or you’ve done something wrong, or you’re displeasing the Lord. ”. . . and for training in righteousness.” 

Training makes me think of a gym, working with a trainer, and that can be really hard work! That can be painful! And so, if we just want our interaction with the Word to make us feel better, it’s not always going to do that immediately.

Dannah: Right. But in the long run, it’s good. Going to your idea of working out, if you’re doing it wrong, you could hurt yourself. My husband has a long-term injury from working out incorrectly, lifting some things incorrectly. 

You want someone to come alongside you and say, “That’s not the right way. Let me correct this; let me fix this.” It’s not fun to be told you can do that better, it’s never fun! But in the long run it really does help if we can settle into the discomfort of the Scriptures correcting us.

Honestly, I think sometimes when I have felt uncomfortable with the Bible it’s because I’m feeling convicted! The Lord’s saying, “You need to confess something.” And my pride will rise up against it, and I won’t want to do it. 

That’s not the time to back away from the Word of God. That’s the time to press in. You’re about to have a breakthrough when you feel that.

Nancy: Yeah. So let’s go back to, “What’s the purpose?” If it’s not just to make us feel better in the short run, why go to the Word? Why study the Word? Why read the Word? Like, what’s the ultimate goal?

I love doing jigsaw puzzles. When you first pour out all the pieces onto the table, it’s a total jumbled mess. You could never assemble it if you didn’t have the picture on the box to say, “This is what we’re aiming for. This is the end result. This is what you’re looking toward. This is the goal. This picture.”

So, what’s the picture we’re aiming toward? What’s the goal? Kelly, help us out. Help us dive into God’s Word, reading it, making a habit of that—not just for thirty days but all of this year and for the rest of our lives.

Kelly: Yes. We read the Scripture primarily to cultivate a friendship with God. We have the opportunity to know the Lord of the universe, the Creator of heaven and earth, the One our souls were made for! We dig into the Word to get to know Him!

Many of us have been raised or trained with a view of the Bible that would mainly say, “This is a book about us and what we should do.” It does speak to us, and it does give us things to do. But I would say, primarily, it is a book about God and what God has done. So we read it to get to know Him.

Our love for any person begins with facts, information.That’s what we do when we first start dating our spouses. If you look back, it’s: “Where did you grow up? How old are you? What’s your favorite color? What do you love to study? What do you like and don’t like?” Those little facts are putting together for us a picture of someone’s character that we come to love! 

And so, we’re reading the Bible to learn all these facts about God—who He’s revealed Himself to be, what He’s done in the past, what He’s going to do, what He loves, what He doesn’t love.

As we pay attention, not just for, “How do I become a better Christian?” but “Who is God? I want to know Him!” Over and over again, I’m blown away by who He is! I mean, it’s just jaw-droppingly beautiful to see the character of God in the Scriptures! 

That’s what is the most transforming. Jesus makes it clear that’s what the purpose of the Scriptures are to do, to point to Him. The passage of John 5:39 in the New Testament, when Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees, the religious leaders of His day, He says:

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” (John 5:39–40)

So Jesus makes it clear: life is not found in the Bible, the Bible does not have life, but it points to Jesus who does have life. 

And we have to take that step, to get to know Him in the Word, and then go to Him in prayer and build a friendship with Him, communing with Him and fellowshipping with Him based on what we learned to know about Him in the Scriptures.

So the goal is not just to become scholars of God’s Word—that’s a sweet thing! It’s a wonderful thing to have. But those Bible scholars, those Old Testament scholars of Jesus’ day knew the Bible, but they didn’t know Jesus. They didn’t recognize Him when He came as being the fulfillment of what they’d spent their lives studying.

What a tragedy it was then, and what a tragedy it is for us today if we become experts . . . We can argue, we can debate, we can post on social media about this passage or that, or this biblical thing or that, but we don’t have the fruit of the Spirit. We don’t love God. We don’t love others. We don’t really know Jesus!

So the point of it is not an academic exercise. It’s to know God and to reflect the beauty and the glory and the grace of God in our world. It will bless you, and it will strengthen you, and it will encourage you, and it will instruct you, and it will change you. But maybe the best thing of all is, it’s going to help you grow in a love relationship with Jesus!

You start out by saying, “Lord I want to know You; I want to see you. Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in Your law (see Psalm 119:18). Give me understanding, and I will keep Your law and obey it with all my heart” (see Psalm 119:34). “Show me Your ways, O Lord, teach me Your path, guide me in Your truth and teach me, for You are God my Savior and in You is my hope all day long” (see Psalm 25:4). 

Those are some verses from Scripture that I have prayed many, many times—hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times—over the years as I open God’s Word at the start of the day. 

I say, “Lord, I want to know You. I want You to know me! Search my heart, show me what You see that I can’t see, but mostly open my eyes and show me Yourself!” Thank you, Kelly, for joining us today and thank you for your love for God’s Word. Thank you for inspiring and encouraging us to know Him, to love Him.

Dannah: Well, I know I’m feeling inspired, and our hope is that you can’t wait to pick up your Bible and get to know God better! Whether you’re hungry for God’s Word or you want to increase your appetite for it, don’t miss our brand-new online event: Loving and Living God’s Word. It’s the second event in our Biblical Help for Real Life series.

Not only are you going to learn to grow in your love for God’s Word, but you’ll discover more about how to apply it to your everyday life. You’ll hear from Kelly Needham along with Katie McCoy, Kay Arthur and our host, Erin Davis.

I hope you’ll make plans to join us Tuesday, September 10, 2024 from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m., or you can watch it at a later date at your own convenience. Sign up today for $29.00 or bundle and save on the whole four-event series. Find out more at ReviveOurHearts.com/help.

If you’re looking for some practical tools to take you deeper in your study of God’s Word, Revive Our Hearts has many resources to offer from numerous articles and podcasts to books, Bible studies and more! Take some time and browse our website, ReviveOurHearts.com.

All of those resources and our different outreaches, they’re made possible through friends like you. When you give to the ministry of Revive Our Hearts, you’re part of helping women experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

And this month when you make a donation to help women thrive in Christ as they live out God’s design, we want to send you a copy of A Biblical Portrait of Womanhood: Discovering and Living Out God’s Plan for Our Lives by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. 

It’s our thanks to you for supporting this ministry, or with your gift of $50.00 or more, you can get the True WomanBundle including A Biblical Portrait of Womanhood by Nancy, TheTrue Woman by Susan Hunt, and The Marks of a True Woman Card. Request your resources when you call us at 1-800-569-5959 or visit ReviveOurHearts.com.

Are you a leader? I’ll give you a hint: Yes, you are! Tomorrow we’ll be joined by Karen Hodge and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth talking about the challenges that come with leadership and how to overcome those challenges with the Lord’s help! Please be back tomorrow for Revive Our Hearts.

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