Full Meal or a Chicken-Nugget Snack?
As Jo and I quietly relaxed one evening alongside our Canela village house when suddenly, thirty young men and women surrounded us. “We want you to teach us our Father’s Word,” the spokesman said. Wow! That had never happened before.
Fifty Years Ago in Brazil
Jo and I were, of course, very happy to see this sudden major interest in learning God’s Word. “We have parts of His Word and are reading it,” the leader said. Young men crowded around us to show them what they were reading. One had a story from Luke, and another had some Psalms. I saw scraps of paper with a story from Genesis and bits of the letters of Paul. I knew where they got them from: our rubbish pit! They were all first drafts and early attempts at translation that we had discarded as trash after we had written better drafts.
Today in Canada
What reminded me of that event from fifty years ago was how some Christians tell me about what they know of God’s Word. They tend to mention bits and pieces of Scripture, all stating valuable, oft-quoted excerpts. But when I ask about the context of these quotes, they have no idea where they come from in the full story. In that way, they are no different from those long-ago Canelas, except that the villagers wanted to learn more. But these believers seem content to live on spiritual chicken nuggets.
The next time we were back among the Canela, we brought printouts of some Scripture in better drafts. We had village Bible classes several nights a week from then on. Several years later, the Brazilian government prohibited all missionaries in Brazil from living in the indigenous villages. When, after six years of sporadic contact, the prohibition was lifted, we returned to the village and again began Bible studies, this time from the whole book of Luke, in a near-final draft. Every student had their own copy of the book.
Full-Course Dinners
Graduates of 70 Consecutive Bible Classes
We ended up having Bible classes for two hours every night, seven nights a week, teaching through the entire book of Luke. The students came every night for seventy consecutive nights! No chicken nuggets for them. They enjoyed full meal deals: steak, brisket, pork chops, salmon, turkey, with all the sides, trimmings, and desserts.
What Christians today need is to read not just bits and pieces from our Daily Bread devotional booklets or YouVersion inspirational readings but chapter after chapter of full Bible books. We need to know the context. Just as a steady diet of chicken nuggets will leave us undernourished physically, reading and memorizing only our favourite verses will leave us undernourished spiritually. We need to feed our minds and souls with full-course dinners of God’s Word, reading chapters a day and going through the whole Bible, again and again. Let’s encourage each other to be serious readers of Scripture, nourishing ourselves with the Truth of God’s Word.