In my previous post on the Daily Texts I promised to explain my reasoning.
I have a running nickname with a friend … it’s “Old School Awesomeness”. He even claims that I’m so freakishly old school at times that I wasn’t even born in the 1900’s! I’ll sometimes whip out an archaic term like “All Hallows Eve” for Halloween just to inject some – I’m not sure what the term is – into the conversation.
So adopting a 290 year old tool could be seen as just another display of my tendency towards ornery anachronism at work. Oops, I guess it is.
Modern folk have the tendency to think we know everything. What goes along with that sense of omniscience is a corollary fault… the need to reinvent the wheel all the time.
I’m definitely guilty of that… how about you?
In our quest for the lastest, greatest, best, most cutting edge ministry approach… we needlessly mystify the relatively simple in the name of making a name for ourselves. We want to say “this is a discipleship tool, course, or book ” I created. We talk as if there is something we could do that would be fundamentally different or better than has gone on in the last 2000 years… better than Jesus Himself might have done. At least that is the implication.
In reality our difficulties in obedience ourselves not to mention in making disciples come not from the lack of tools available, but from the gravitational pull of Hell itself attached to our Adamic natures. It’s sin – not the intrinsic difficulty of the act – that keeps us from prayer, Bible reading, meditation, witness, service, or mission.
It’s also sin and the false aspiration for perfection that causes me – us? – to continually “recreate the wheel”. We don’t constantly need new discipleship tools… we need new disciples.
So God help me stop trying to innovate.
I and those I would mentor or influence simply need to read the word and meditate on it daily. It’s much easier to waste hours dreaming up “tools” than to actually read the Word, meditate on it, and teach someone else to do that too!
The Daily Texts let us read the Bible at an easy pace. We read the Psalms annually, the rest of the Bible in two years on Monday through Saturday and read a selection of scriptures each Lord’s Day with the wider church. At the same time,each day we are given one Old Testament and one New Testament text to meditate upon.
This is a good basic reading plan. The more ambitious can read more daily… much more. But everyone can at least read and mediate on this very reasonable amount and have time left over for reflection. One can even meditate on the individual texts throughout the day.
As a pastor this saves me hours of thinking, planning, making reading calendars, never being quite happy, RE-doing the calendar, and then never being happy anyway and starting all over again. Each year. Several times per year. Forever.
Instead, this method is a simple way to get people into the Word of God and teach them to meditate and pray through scripture. That way we can all be “on the same page” in a church or discipleship group and be linked with many other Christians across the world at the same time.
So the first reason for adopting this 290 year old tool called the “Daily Texts” is because it saves me from the curse of having to reinvent the wheel each each year (or more often depending on how feverish my brain is!).
Perhaps it will save you too!
More to come!
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