So what, then? How are we to approach reading? How are we to pick and choose when we walk the aisles of the bookstore? How are we to browse the pictures and icons of books on Amazon? How are we to pull a book from our personal bookshelf and say: I will spend time and energy reading this book?
The answer to this is that we are to learn to read redemptively. We are to find ourselves cultivating an entirely new way of reading: fiction, non-fiction, news, blogs, and more.
The answer to this is that we are to learn to read redemptively. We are to find ourselves cultivating an entirely new way of reading: fiction, non-fiction, news, blogs, and more.
Here are 5 ways to Learn to Read Redemptively:
1. KNOW GOD: Hold your relationship with God and your love for scripture higher than the other books you are reading. In Exodus 20 Moses reads the ten commandments, of which the first two are: 1) “You shall have no other gods before me," and 2) “You shall not make for yourself a carved image (an idol...something more important than God)." Books, ideas, and the people who espouse them can often become idols in our lives. We are to know our priorities between God and life as we crack open any material to digest it's contents.
2. PRAY TO HIM: Pray that God would lead, guide and protect you as you read. In a previous blog post "Fire and Cloud" I wrote about God representing himself to his people as they cross the red sea and travel through the wilderness. This is the same God who represents himself to us as we are lead by him. This same God who shows up as "fire and cloud" walks alongside us to lead, guide, and protect us as we read redemptively.
3. STRIVE TO CREATE: Take seriously our "creation mandate". In Genesis 1:28 God tells Adam his role, which becomes the role of every human being to come after Adam and follow God on this earth. He tells them to, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over (the world)." We are to understand that our task is to make, create, and entrepreneur new things all the time as we work out our image of God. Reading redemptively is a movement within God's creation mandate for our lives.
4. CULTIVATE INTENTIONALITY: Read with intention. Reading is not something we do just when we are on vacation, or with spare time. Reading is something we are to take seriously and execute with the intention of understanding the human race. Eugene Peterson once said that every pastor and leader should read in order to understand, have compassion, and care for people of the humanity. We read with the intentionality of being human. We read in order to live and care for people alongside our short existence on planet earth.
5. MAKE A DIFFERENCE: Read to make a change. We are to find our place in the world. Some of you are called to write. Many of you are called to lead. All of you are called to read. Through our presence in the world of ideas, characters we are constantly on a quest to find moments of truth. Whether we are the ones writing them down, reading them out loud, or passing them along, we are to read, always, with one eye on the text and the other eye on redemption.
Here's to your endeavor, as you learn to read redemptively.
AB.
