Originally published at Horizons Resources
For most of my life I have viewed a wide reading of Scripture as the best way to engage the Word of God. Whether that view was intentionally held or not, I failed many Bible-In-A-Year plans trying to attain the extra holiness in store for people who take in a lot of the Bible every day.
Around this time last year, I was introduced to a new-to-me way of engaging with Scripture called Lectio Divina. Latin for “divine reading,” Lectio Divina is a series of movements to help the reader engage a passage in a deeper way. This is a practice of slow, meaningful reading and re-reading of a very small portion of Scripture, usually only a few verses. It’s asking questions and silently listening for their answers. It’s allowing the Spirit time and space to move in our hearts.
While there’s certainly nothing wrong with reading large passages of Scripture each day or reading the Bible in a year (many people I love dearly, including my husband, do this and really benefit from it), Lectio Divina is something I’ve found to be another tool in my arsenal, another spiritual exercise if you will, something to be used to increase my enjoyment of God as I read his word. In the same way our bodies become stronger as we exercise them in different ways, so can our hearts and minds as we engage scripture in different ways.
Building muscles - both physical and spiritual - is complementary in ways we often aren’t even aware of. For example, a person who does only bicep curls will soon plateau unless he also exercises other parts of the body. By adding other exercises to his routine - planks, squats, cardio - he can begin to improve again. The strength gained in his core by doing planks can help him lift heavier weights with his arms because his body is more stabilized.
The same is true of our spiritual muscles. After practicing Lectio Divina, my day-to-day readings of larger passages of scripture take on a new depth, and I’m more apt to take note of words or phrases the Holy Spirit brings to mind as I’m reading. In the same way, reading more broadly gives my practice of Lectio Divina a fuller shape as I understand the context of a passage better and how that passage fits into the larger narrative of the Bible as a whole. Each spiritual “exercise” benefits the other. (Continue reading at horizonsresources.net…)
