66 books… 1 story

The picture above is a visualization by Chris Harrison and Christoph Romhild.  The picture can be seen in much better detail on their website, and you can read about how it was developed there as well. The following is their explanation of the visualization:

The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.

This visualization demonstrates the connected nature of all of scripture, and it shows how the whole Bible is one interrelated story of God’s faithfulness: God continually brings sinful man back to himself through his son, Jesus Christ.

The picture fits nicely on the background of a laptop, and it is a great intro for sharing the Gospel when people comment on the strange looking graphic on your computer!

Thanks for reading!

Mickey

How’s your savings?

Saving money is tough. It is tough because even if I am able to save $100 a month, after 3 months I only have $300 saved up. After a year there will be $1,200, but if I’m saving for retirement or a substantial goal in the future, it’s feels like it will take forever to get anything significant built up.

The key to saving money is consistency, however (and wise management). If we invest these savings in a good growth mutual fund that earns 12%, after a year we still only have $1,277. But if we are able to continue saving only $100 a month and add it to our investment, in just over 40 years our meager savings will have grown to be over one million dollars – now that’s a chunk of change. While our hope is not in our savings accounts, we are responsible to God for what He gives us, and imagine the ministry opportunities that would be available if we saved even a small portion of our income. But that is not the point of this post…

Whether it be saving money for the future, preparing for a job by getting an education, or working out to eventually get in shape, we often have to look past what might appear to be minimal short term results in order to reap a bountiful harvest in the future. This is especially true in Bible study and our quiet times – there are many times when we receive immediate benefit, but even when we don’t we still have to maintain a tortoise mentality (as opposed to a hare) and strive to go the distance.

Let me step aside and let you read Mark Dever’s response to a recent interview question (this applies to us all, not just young Christians):

What’s one thing you’ve learned after years of reading the Bible about how to read the Bible well?

That’s it’s more important that I keep doing it than what I get out of it at any particular time.

A lot of young Christians will have an exciting quiet time on Monday and a really exciting one on Tuesday and an awesome one on Wednesday but then something happens on Thursday and they actually don’t even do it and Friday they do it and they feel guilty and it isn’t that good and Saturday they do it but it’s late and they were discouraged…and then they just get discouraged because they’re not always having a super experience. That’s where I would look at them and say, “Just keep going. Aim at obedience in a long direction set in a pattern for decades. If you just keep going you’ll gain so much by consistency and faithfulness that there’s no way you can gain just by sudden experience.”

The full interview is brief and well worth the read.

It is our job to make daily deposits of the Bible into our hearts, but the Holy Spirit controls the interest. If we can earn 1 million dollars by making minimal investments of money over time, how much greater is the reward that we can expect from storing the Bible in our hearts, both in this life and the next!

Isaiah 55 ¹⁰ For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, ¹¹ so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Another instance of quality over quantity

A great thought quoted by Tim Challies on his blog Challies.com:

Remember, it is not hasty reading, but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that make them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the bee’s touching of the flower that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest, and strongest Christian.

-from Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices by Thomas Brooks

Here’s the permalink to Tim’s post.

Do you own your Bible?

It’s taken a while for me to get this link up, but here is an interesting post on Challies.com from Mortimer Adler’s book How to Read a Book. I read this book last summer after hearing John Piper list it as one of the books that has had the greatest impact on his life, and I highly recommend it to the compulsive reader and the occasional skimmer alike!

Check out Tim’s post here: Beef and Beefsteaks

Do you own your Bible?

The Bible in the prayer and meditation of George Mueller

This is an excerpt from The Autobiography of George Mueller, and in it Mueller (1805-1898 ) gives his personal testimony of how the Bible came to be the foundation of his prayer and meditation. This section has been instrumental in the lives of many Christians, and I hope to reference Mueller’s wisdom soon and demonstrate how others have used Mueller’s approach to develop their own quiet time with God.

Don’t read through this excerpt too quickly; be sure to pick up on the struggle that Mueller experiences and the result of his breakthrough on his life as a whole. I find much comfort in the fact that spiritual giants like Mueller experienced the same frustrations that I do myself, and this blog exists because of the universality of this struggle.

George Mueller:

“While I was staying at Nailsworth, it pleased the Lord to teach me a truth, irrespective of human instrumentality, as far as I know, the benefit of which I have not lost, though now . . . more than forty years have since passed away.

The point is this: I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not, how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers, I might seek to relieve the distressed, I might in other ways seek to behave myself as it becomes a child of God in this world; and yet, not being happy in the Lord, and not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit.

Before this time my practice had been, at least for ten years previously, as an habitual thing, to give myself to prayer, after having dressed in the morning. Now I saw, that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that thus, whilst meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental, communion with the Lord. I began therefore, to meditate on the New Testament, from the beginning, early in the morning.

The first thing I did, after having asked in a few words the Lord’s blessing upon His precious Word, was to begin to meditate on the Word of God; searching, as it were, into every verse, to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word; not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The result I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer.

When thus I have been for awhile making confession, or intercession, or supplication, or have given thanks, I go on to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go on, into prayer for myself or others, as the Word may lead to it; but still continually keeping before me, that food for my own soul is the object of my meditation. The result of this is, that there is always a good deal of confession, thanksgiving, supplication, or intercession mingled with my meditation, and that my inner man almost invariably is even sensibly nourished and strengthened and that by breakfast time, with rare exceptions, I am in a peaceful if not happy state of heart. Thus also the Lord is pleased to communicate unto me that which, very soon after, I have found to become food for other believers, though it was not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word that I gave myself to meditation, but for the profit of my own inner man.

The difference between my former practice and my present one is this. Formerly, when I rose, I began to pray as soon as possible, and generally spent all my time till breakfast in prayer, or a,!most all the time. At a,l events I almost invariably began with prayer…. But what was the result? I often spent a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or even an hour on my knees, before being conscious to myself of having derived comfort, encouragement, humbling of soul, etc.; and often after having suffered much from wandering of mind for the first ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, or even half an hour, I only then began really to pray.

I scarcely ever suffer now in this way. For my heart being nourished by the truth, being brought into experimental fellowship with God, I speak to my Father, and to my Friend (vile though I am, and unworthy of it! ) about the things that He has brought before me in His precious Word.

It often now astonishes me that I did not sooner see this. In no book did I ever read about it. No public ministry ever brought the matter before me. No private intercourse with a brother stirred me up to this matter. And yet now, since God has taught me this point, it is as plain to me as anything, that the first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is to obtain food for his inner man.

As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time, except we take food, and as this is one of the first things we do in the morning, so it should be with the inner man. We should take food for that, as every one must allow. Now what is the food for the inner man: not prayer, but the Word of God: and here again not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts….

I dwell so particularly on this point because of the immense spiritual profit and refreshment I am conscious of having derived from it my self, and I affectionately and solemnly beseech all my fellow-believers to ponder this matter. By the blessing of God I ascribe to this mode the help and strength which I have had from God to pass in peace through deeper trials in various ways than I had ever had before; and after having now above forty years tried this way, I can most fully, in the fear of God, commend it. How different when the soul is refreshed and made happy early in the morning, from what it is when, without spiritual preparation, the service, the trials and the temptations of the day come upon one!”

Autobiography of George Mueller, compiled by Fred. Bergen, (London: J. Nisbet Co., 1906), pp. 152-54. (as referenced at http://www.desiringgod.org/dg/id107_b.htm#6)