As Christians, we are supposed to delight in the Bible. What I mean is, reading the Bible should produce a sense of pleasure and joy in us – our delight should draw us into the text.
For some of you, however, that may not be the case right now. You may not delight in it. And because you don't delight in the Bible, you don’t read it. Maybe you feel bad about not reading it. Maybe you want to get to a place where you delight in it, you just don’t know how to make the switch. You might be asking: How can the Bible become something in which I delight?
How can the Bible become something in which I delight??
(1) Pray and ask God to help you delight in His Word.
One of the first things you should do when you sense your delight slipping is pray. Prayer is powerful. It has the ability to change our heart.
For most of us, we know this is true. We spend time praying for people's salvation, their broken families, and this broken world. We spend the time doing those things because we know prayer changes things. If we know that, why not pray for our own heart, that God would change it so that we delight in His Word?
(2) Read it anyway.
Besides prayer, I suggest you read God's Word anyway. God’s Word is powerful. Just like prayer, the Bible is able to change our hearts and minds. We know this is true.
The church where I serve as Pastor invites the Gideons to present once a year. When they come, we take up a love offering for their ministry so they can continue to distribute Bibles in our community and around the world. We give and they hand out copies of God's Word because we both know God's Word is powerful and is able to change the heart of man.
Like the Gideons, many of you have probably given a copy of God's Word to your children, another family member, a neighbor, or even a co-worker in the past. You spent your hard earned money on that Bible and asked them to read it, or even better, asked them to read it with you. You asked them to read it and even spent time reading it with them because you wanted to see their lives changed, and you know the Bible has the ability to produce that change.
You see, we know the Bible is powerful and able to change the heart of man; we just need to apply that knowledge to our own lives. So, even if you aren’t delighting in God’s Word right now, I encourage you to pick it up, read it, and see if your heart doesn’t change.
(3) You might need to evaluate your heart.
If you do the above – pray and read, and your heart never changes, I suggest you check your heart.
Christians should delight in God’s Word. They should be drawn to it and, when they read it, it should produce joy and pleasure in them. While you may go through a season where you don’t delight in God's Word, by and large, a delight should characterize your relationship with the Bible. However, if that delight never comes, even after praying and reading for a time, you might need to check your heart to see if you really are a follower of Jesus. Jesus delighted in the Scripture and so should His followers.
When the Bible is our delight, we won’t let it sit around collecting dust. Instead, we look forward to reading it each day and feel a keen sense that something's missing when we don't.