How to Read the Bible Like a Mystic: 6 Steps | Getting Started in Christian Mysticism, Part 2

today we're going to talk about the bible and how to read the bible like a mystic and i know that there's lots of baggage that goes along with the bible for a lot of us based on how it was used when we were growing up and the way that we see other people use the bible but today we're going to talk about reading it like a mystic this is not like yo davina lectio davina is a mystical meditation practice that will save for another video that uses the bible to meditate this is more of an approach to the bible and how the ancient mystics saw the bible and how they used it and how we can use it for spiritual and for mystical reasons of seeking a deeper union with god so how do we read the bible for a lot of christians it's kind of fashionable to say the bible is the word of god and i just read it and i do what it says but if you've actually read the bible then you know that the bible is not as simple as that all of my higher education my undergraduate education and my graduate education has been in the field of biblical studies and i've learned to read the bible in the original hebrew and in the original greek and i've learned all the contextual stuff about each book in the bible and the background and the farther i go with biblical studies the more i realize the bible is a very complicated book and there are multiple levels of meaning in each passage and it was written artistically and stylistically to do that to take your soul on a journey of growth and so yeah there is a level where there are things in the bible that we can just read and apply to our lives and obey and it's good advice i guess if you want to build that kind of a life but there's a lot in the bible that doesn't work like that and so an early church teacher origen who i disagree with on a lot of things but i found this particular point to be really helpful origin compares our growing understanding of the bible to the three books of the bible that are attributed to king solomon the first book is the book of proverbs and in the book of proverbs you have very clear kind of black and white advice do this don't do that if you do this your life will go this way if you do this your life will go this way make a wise choice and it's very sort of basic instructions for life in the book of proverbs and that's good for a lot of people at a certain level of spiritual understanding and growth but there's a point where it starts to break down if you're a kid and you grow up in a christian household and you know people tell you that if you just obey god then your life will work out and then as you get older and you start to face difficulty or confusion or things don't work out the way that you were told they were supposed to work out then you start to question things and that's a very natural part of spiritual growth that time of deconstruction and that time of deconstruction is what origin compared to the book of ecclesiastes because in ecclesiastes what the writer does is he kind of goes through a lot of the principles from the book of proverbs and he asks the question does proverbs keep its promises if you live a righteous life and a wise life does your life actually turn out better than it would if you did it and the writer of ecclesiastes basically says there's no evidence to prove that wise and righteous people are always successful and that evil and unwise people are always unsuccessful in fact a lot of wise people are unsuccessful and a lot of evil people are successful and that's one of the great problems of human life and so with solomon we start with the book of proverbs really basic advice for living your life and that's how most of us start with the bible and then we start to break it down we get to ecclesiastes and ask questions and have doubts and that's where a lot of us end up if we study the bible deeper and deeper we start to go this isn't saying exactly what i thought it was saying all along this is saying something else or maybe my life experience doesn't line up with what i always thought the bible said and we start to have doubts and questions but then what origen said is that there's a third stage of our understanding of the bible and that's the song of songs and in the song of songs solomon writes this big romantic poem that has been traditionally interpreted by the mystical community as a metaphor for the soul's union with god so basically you've got proverbs which says everything makes sense and if you make wise decisions everything will go well for you you've got ecclesiastes that says haha no it doesn't and then you've got song of songs which says even though life doesn't make sense and even though i have these doubts even though i'm not sure um that all of my effort to be good actually produces the results that i want in the long run i still love god and god still loves me and so that relationship that spiritual relationship and connection with god kind of transcends the practical results of obeying the bible and we end up connected with god in a way that is much more like a romantic relationship than it is sort of like this instructions to follow and then we get what we want so yeah the bible is the word of god and we should do what it says but we also need to move to that ecclesiastes stage and we need to understand the bible is very complicated and it says things that are very hard to put into practice or things that aren't very obviously good or easy to understand and we need to understand that that stage of deconstruction is very healthy part of the spiritual process of growth but that there's also a stage beyond that and the stage beyond that is the stage where our souls connect to god and god speaks more directly to us even through scripture and that our hearts and minds and souls and spirits are so aligned with the presence of god and the spirit of god and the teachings of christ that we actually know how to get from scripture the things that will help us at that level of spiritual experience and so the question is how do i engage with the bible at a deeper level so that i can move through those second two stages of growth what do i need to do in order to engage scripture in a way where it's not just telling me what to do or telling me the history of the world how do i engage with it so that i'm using it to think more deeply about myself and about life and about the universe and about god and how can i relate to it in a way where it actually brings my soul to life this is a book called spirituality forms foundations and methods it's written by a dutch carmelite named keys watchman and he really tried to give us an entire complete front to back phenomenology of spirituality and this book is thick going but it is very good and in this book is a chapter that i think is just pure gold and that's where watchmen gives us his six steps to spiritual reading like how spiritual and mystical people approach a spiritual text so that they get the most out of it spiritually and that kind of reading is very different than just sort of the normal reading of like a newspaper or a novel it's a very specific practice it's a mindset and i found it very helpful in my approach to reading scripture so that i can get the most out of scripture and so that it can point me to those higher levels of spiritual understanding um wajman's first step is that before i even open the bible i confess what i'm bringing with me to the text if you think about reading scripture as kind of like a conversation if you go into a conversation with somebody already expecting them to say certain things and already expecting them to be a certain way it's going to be really hard for you to actually hear them if they say something different than what you expected and the same thing is true with scripture it is hard for people to hear what the bible has to say in new and fresh ways when we approach the bible expecting to be told something that we already know um or expecting to be offended by the bible or even expecting to be encouraged by the bible if there's something in here that doesn't fit with what we're bringing with ourselves to the text then it kind of slips right by us and we and we sort of ignore it and that keeps us from actually hearing the voice of god in the word and so the first thing that we have to do is we have to confess those unconscious biases we have to think about ourselves for a minute and ask ourselves what am i bringing with me to the text what am i expecting the bible to say what do i need it to say to me today why am i opening it in the first place what am i looking to get out of this experience and if we lay those things out on the table it's very helpful because we are conscious and aware of the things that are keeping us from hearing the bible in its own voice the second step that watchman gives us is to actually read the text and listen this was written by people for an audience and the act of you opening this book makes you part of their audience so the words written by the people who wrote the bible and the spirit that the spirit of god inspired them to communicate it's all pointed at you you are the receiver of this ancient communication and it's hard especially with our unconscious biases and the things that we confess from step one but we have to actually spend some time with the text reading carefully and reading quietly and letting the words jump off the page and sort of implant themselves on our mind and our heart without us fussing with them as they come in um and this can be really hard for people who study the bible regularly like i do because a lot of times like in my case i'm studying the bible because i have something that i have to teach coming up and to not let yourself do that like to actually sit down and hear what the bible has to say in its own words on its own terms is sometimes difficult because we all know what we want it to say and when it doesn't say that or if it says something else it can be hard to sort of open the gates of your mind to let those ideas in but part of spiritual reading is being patient and being quiet in our souls uh for long enough to let the bible actually have the first word now the third step is that i learn what i don't know the books of the bible were written so long ago in a time and a place and a culture that doesn't exist anymore in languages that aren't even really spoken the way that they were spoken when the bible was written and so there's this big interpretive gap between the world of the text and our world today and i can't just open this and assume that everything about their lives is exactly like everything about my life and that i'll understand immediately what they're talking about so i have some work to do i have some work to do to humble myself enough to actually learn what the world was like for the people who wrote the bible and sit next to their campfire and hear what they have to say in their terms and not everything that they have to say is something that i'm necessarily going to agree with for my context but i also need to understand why what they were saying made sense in their context and in their time and place and so i like to think of it as like um if somebody from another culture invites you over for dinner and you go to their house and maybe part of their custom is that you take off your shoes and you sit on the floor and there's this ritual that you go through before you eat and so if you're a guest at someone's house you're going to go through their rituals in order to eat the meal that they've prepared for you and to receive it with the intention that they had for you when they prepared it and you're going to go along with it you're going to be you're going to enjoy yourself and you're going to be part of that moment because you're a guest and that doesn't mean that after one meal at their house you're gonna go home and you're gonna implement all of their culture into meal time for you and your family it just means that you know how to be a good guest and you know how to how to visit somebody and to adapt yourself to the world that they live in so that you can get the most out of your relationship with them and the same is true of the bible we don't have to baptize everything that these bronze age people did in their relationship with each other and the way they structure their society but we can go back and sit next to their campfire like guests and listen to what they have to say and understand their rituals and their traditions and their understanding of the world to get the most out of what they have to share with us so that we can take that lesson home with us and not necessarily recreate their entire world in our household to really do that you need to study the context of the bible i've gotten a lot out of studying the context that jesus lived in like the world of ancient palestine 2000 years ago because what he says and what people were expecting and the way that the gospel writers wrote about his life it makes a lot more sense if you actually know a little bit about the world that they lived in and if you've got a pastor in your life went to bible school he or she would probably be happy to talk to you about the bible's context because we learn all that stuff in school but we don't usually get to share it with a lot of people and you can go to the library and you can read books about the people who wrote scripture and you can find some good resources or if you have a seminary in your town you can go check out their library or maybe talk to a seminary professor and get some books to read about the context of scripture but understanding context is really important to understanding the bible and why it was written the way that it was written and i find that a lot of people really struggle with the bible because they don't understand the world of the biblical writers and they don't understand how these people were moving things forward for their time and place and we live in the world that comes after them and so if we just recreated everything that they were doing it'd be a step backward but what they were doing was moving things forward and we can actually use um their insight and their vision as resources for moving things forward today and that brings us to wajman's step four which is as i read this if i'm actually going to deal with it as a spiritual person i have to face the text challenges that it makes for my life the expectation of the biblical writers wasn't that i was going to read this book and then leave it and be exactly the same person that i was before i read it john the evangelist in john chapter 20 actually says i wrote this book this way so that you would believe in the lord jesus christ he's expecting to share his spiritual experience with the people who read his book and so that comes with all kinds of challenges john is asking me to change he's asking me to change the way that i see the world the way that i understand myself the way that i understand god based on reading about his spiritual experiences of jesus christ and having those experiences for myself through the text and so i can't actually read scripture without being challenged to change otherwise there's no point i'm just accumulating information and maybe i'm learning about the bible's context but this is a spiritual text and spiritual people read spiritual texts with the disposition that we're going to actually change some things based on what we read now some of the challenges that we face in the text are positive and some are negative an example of a negative challenge would be as i read the psalms and i read about david asking god to squash his enemies i have a hard time reconciling that with the positive challenges from jesus christ to love my neighbor as myself and to love my enemies and to pray for those who persecute me and so the question isn't was david right or was jesus right the question for me as a spiritual person is oh why am i bothered by the way that david said what he said and the answer is because i follow jesus christ and he's asked me to approach the world differently and so right there without judging david i've actually learned something about what spirit is saying to my spirit and i've learned that for myself i'm not comfortable with calling down vengeance and the anger of god and the wrath of god on my enemies because i am actually trying to live by a higher standard than that the standard that jesus christ taught me and so that is spiritual reading i'm kind of playing three-dimensional chess there it's not just black or white it's uh oh what is this saying to me in my life at this moment and why is it saying that and what's going on in my soul and that's how i face the spirit's challenges for my life and you can do that with a lot of passages in the bible that make you uncomfortable ask yourself why is it making me uncomfortable what is this what is the challenge that i'm facing here what is the bible asking me to really do and what is the spirit asking me to do through the text because obedience to the bible is not the point of the bible a conversation with god that makes you obedient to christ and helps you become the image of god that you were always created to be that's the point of the bible and so when we face the challenges of the bible it's perfectly all right to see the bible as a jumping off point for your conversations with god but again that's those higher levels of biblical understanding now lodgement step five of spiritual reading is to wait for the mystery to be revealed and this is the way that a lot of people in the bible actually meditated on scripture they would repeat a phrase or an idea to themselves over and over again throughout the day and chew on it and meditate on it and they were waiting for god to tell them something new through their engagement with god's work and if you're going to read the bible seriously and you're going to read it mystically there's going to be things in the text that you're not going to understand and it's important for us to chew on them because you know let's say i read a verse and it says something to me right now and it makes perfect sense to my life in a very practical way that might not be all that god wants to say to me today and it might not be all that god wants to say to me through that verse and so it's important for me not to just jump to the first conclusion that i get from reading the bible i need to also spend some time with it and wait for the mystery of god to be revealed in the text and that might take weeks as i think about one verse over and over again and how it applies to my life and how it changes the way that i see the world and what god is actually trying to say to me through that verse and so we need to go slower we need to chew we need to be meditative as we read scripture and as we wait for god to breathe life into the words of scripture that can change our lives and then step six for keys watchmen for a spiritual reading is to live in the new world that comes after you face the text challenges and after you've waited for the mystery to be revealed and that means that if scripture really does its job and it reshapes my soul and it reshapes the way that i understand everything about the world and about god then after that mystical experience i'm living in a new world and things are not the same and so that comes with responsibility and sometimes it comes with loneliness because sometimes the bible will speak things to you that other people have not seen yet and you'll try to explain it to them and they will not get it and then you will have to live with the responsibility of what you have seen all by yourself and that's just one of the steps of spiritual reading because it's all part of the process so just to kind of recap the six steps are i confess what i'm bringing with me to the text i listen quietly to the text and let scripture speak to me for itself i learn what i don't understand especially the context of the ancient people who wrote the bible i face their challenges and the challenges of the spirit for my life whatever that is i wait for the mystery of god to be revealed in the text that i've read and i live in the new world that's created by my new understanding and the spirit's work in my life now we can't do a video about reading the bible without reading the bible so let's read second timothy chapter 3 verse 16. all scripture is inspired by god and is useful for teaching for reproof for correction and for training in righteousness so that everyone who belongs to god may be proficient equipped for every good work so right there paul is saying that scripture has a purpose and the purpose is not just a deeper understanding of god not just a true understanding of the history of the world but that the purpose of scripture is to actually reshape me so that i can live a more holy and righteous and spirit-filled life and so if you're wondering if you're reading the bible correctly that's a great test is the way that i'm reading scripture helping me become equipped for every good work proficient at every good work righteous holy true true to myself true to god is it bringing me to life if it's not bringing you to life then i understand it's a complicated book but i hope that the six steps that we just went through uh will help you out because remember reading this book has a purpose and the purpose is god's work in you as a spiritual creature so we'll see you next time until christ has formed in us

Channel: Discover Christian Mysticism with Jon Adams

Views: 15,704

Keywords: Christian, mysticism, spirituality, prayer, christianity, Bible, God, spiritual awakening

Id: 8rGYHSV-oZw

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020