Reading the Bible for personal application. (4)

This is the last devotion about the personal application of what we read in the Bible. In the first three devotions we concluded that:
1. The Bible was written to others—but speaks to you too.
2. And, the Bible is about God—but draws you in. We have to look for what the passage says about God and recognise why it is straightforward to you that this passage has relevance for you personally, today.
3. When you recognise an unknown passage as a straightforward passage, it will generalize or summarize in a way that it invites personal application and relevance. Think, for example, about promises of God for all believers, especially those that we came to know as the Gospel promises – about salvation, redemption, forgiveness and reconciliation with God in Jesus.

But now, how to work out the implications for me, of less-direct Passages?
Lets consider two examples to help us understand that every passage holds a message for us. An extreme challenge to personal application is a genealogy or census. These are directly spoken, irrelevant to your life. Your name is not on the list. The reasons for the list disappeared long ago. You gain nothing by knowing that “Koz fathered Anub, Zobebah, and the clans of Aharhel” (1 Chron. 4: 8). But when you learn to listen with an open heart and mind you may find good things taught, even here, for example:
• The Lord writes down names in his book of life – even mine.
• Families and communities matter to him.
• God remains faithful to his promises through long history.
• He enlists individuals, like me, for his saving grace.
• These genealogies form part of the history and background of Jesus. If you are in Jesus, his family becomes your family and God’s promises to them become very personal promises to you!

The second example is Psalm 21: 1. “O Lord, in your strength the king rejoices”? The psalm is not talking about you. You are not a king in the way that David was. But it does connect with you.
David lived and wrote these words, but Jesus Christ most fully lived, is now living, and now fulfils this entire psalm. He is the greatest King, singing this song of deliverance; and he is also the almighty divine Lord. We know from the perspective of the NT that this psalm is explicitly about Jesus. And you, who are in Christ, share in the triumph of your King.
Having made the psalm your own, in Christ, you may now make it your experience too. You could adapt it into the first person, inserting “I/me/my” in place of “the king” and “he/him/his.”

Learning to wisely apply the harder, less obvious passages has a surprising benefit. Your whole Bible now “applies personally.” This Lord spoken about in the Bible, is your God – get to know him better from him dealing with believers that lived ages ago; this history in the Bible, is also your history; these people became your people; this Saviour has made you one of his own, to participate in who he is and be blessed by what he does. Venture out into the remotest regions of Scripture, seeking to know, love and trust God more.

The Bible, as holy Scripture, is the only certain source of God’s words. Paul’s statement that “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Tim3:16) means that all the words of the Bible are God’s words to us. Therefore if we want to hear our Creator and Lord speaking to us, we must continually give attention to all the passages of the Bible, asking what it says to you, today.

Jesus, after defeating Satan with three quotations from Deuteronomy, declared, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt 4: 4.)
The Scriptures were food to Jesus. Jesus’ dependence on the sufficiency and potency of God’s Word shows us that every word God shares with us, has meaning and application in our lives. What applies to Jesus implies meaning to me who has been saved by and in Jesus Christ.

(For this 4 part series I relied heavily on articles by David Powlison on this topic!)