Key Bible Verse: For the word of God is full of living power. … It exposes us for what we really are (Hebrews 4:12). Bonus Reading: 2 Chronicles 34:14-21

A couple of generations of undertaker-scholars had assigned the Bible to academic mothballs when Europe was plunged into World War I. But then Karl Barth, a young pastor in a small, out-of-the-way Swiss village, discovered the Bible as if for the first time. His commentaries convinced many that the Bible was giving a truer account of what was going on in their unraveling world than what politicians and journalists were saying.

Barth insisted that we don't read this book to find out how to get God to participate in our lives. No. We open this book and find that page after page this book takes us off guard, surprises us, with the incredible vigor and energy radiating from its sentences and stories. It draws us into its reality, pulls us in to participate with God on His terms.

Barth determined to recover the capacity of Christians to read the book in its transformative character, aware of how different it is from books that can be "handled"—dissected and analyzed for our own purposes. This "different" kind of writing—revelatory and intimate instead of informational and impersonal—he asserted, must be met by a different kind of reading—receptive and unhurried instead of standoffish and efficient.

—Eugene Peterson in Eat This Book

My Response: Am I, too, discovering what Barth called "the strange new world" within the Bible?

Adapted from Eat This Book (Eerdmans, 2006) by permission.

Prayer for the Week

Help me feel the living intensity of Your Word; make me responsive to its radical demands.

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