Having a two way conversation with God makes sense at a basic level, but there are many deeper questions. How often should we listen to God? What if we disagree or don’t like something we hear? Many other questions may come to mind as well. To make these answers more clear, we need a better understanding of the relationship we have with Jesus.
What type of relationship did we enter when we committed our lives to Jesus? Was it a casual friend, a master, a helper? This question guides us in how we interact with people around us, and it will do the same for Jesus. God’s desire is for that relationship to be a spiritual marriage between you and Jesus (Eph 5:32, Rev 21:2, others). This marriage concept helps guide us in how we should engage with the Bible.
Healthy Marriages show us the relationship that Jesus wants to have with us
How often should we read the Bible to hear God’s words to us?
At least as often as spouses talk in a healthy marriage. Strong couples speak to each other daily, but they are not always in deep conversation. When deep discussions are needed, I have found it is best to be in a one on one setting. This is true for talking to Jesus as well. Jesus gave us the example in Mark 1:35 of waking very early in the morning to pray by Himself with the Father. This shows that we need to have private time listening and speaking to Jesus. 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says “pray without ceasing.” Does that mean that we should be by ourselves to pray like Jesus did in Mark 1? In a good marriage, do spouses only speak in deep conversation? No to both. When we have a close intimate marriage-like relationship with Jesus, we want to talk to Him about all decisions that matter. This maintains an ongoing conversation with Jesus throughout our day and life. In this way John 10:27 reveals itself when Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”
When you invest time with your Creator to listen to Him, your life and this world will make much more sense.
God will help you accept the difficult things that are happening around you. You will realize that your life is not dependent on you, but on Him. And when we let God give us some of His perspective on life, we start to understand that God has a plan, and it is much bigger and better than ours (Isaiah 55:8).
How should we approach a disagreement with something that the Bible says?
As in any good marriage, you will not always initially agree with what you read in the Bible. That is ok. If you disagree with your spouse, you should search out the reason they are saying those things confident that they are not trying to be mean or hurt you. Then after talking, you would understand your spouse even better than you did before. With Jesus being our perfect spouse, we can have even greater confidence that God loves us and is just in what He says and did. In my life, I struggled with the Joshua 6 (Jericho wall) example. It took me years of continuing to listen as God revealed himself to make it clear why he did that. Briefly, He was giving us a physical example of what we must do in our spiritual lives. In order for us to live in the promised land (think John 10:10 – have spiritual life and have it fully) we must purge our old lives, even the parts that feel like they were the good part of our sin. As for the people inside of Jericho, God showed us that in certain ways, they had more trust in God’s power than the Israelites’ did (Joshua 2:9-11). Their spiritual eternities were much more important to God than their physical existence and God provided for them spiritually.
This is a hard concept that I still struggle with, but being in a close relationship allows me to trust in faith, even when the words do not always make sense.
What should I do now?
First, look at your relationship with Jesus in the light of a spiritual marriage. And then become newlyweds. Learn who God is by opening your heart when you listen to Him as He speaks. I personally set a guideline in my life to follow a One Year Bible plan. My goal is not to just develop discipline reading the Bible, but to ensure that, as a baseline, I get quality time each day listening to what God has to say to me. When I got married, I did not ask my spouse to tell me everything she was ever going to say in our marriage. In the same way don’t feel like you need to read the whole Bible right away once to get everything. If you have not yet read much of the Bible, get to know Jesus directly from His time on earth by reading the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. If you are needing practical daily advise from God, read each day from Proverbs. There is no magical format, but starting with one chapter each day from the Gospels and a chapter from Proverbs will be more than sufficient to ensure that the Holy Spirit can open up the words you need to hear at that time.
Once this life is done, Christians will be one with Jesus for all eternity and hear Him directly. My prayer is that you grow through this lifetime into a continually deepening personal relationship by listening to God’s words to you through the Bible.
