I have mentioned before that I sometimes have “writer’s block;” I find it difficult to come up with something to write about for this weekly pondering (along with the weekly message for Sunday morning). As I look back on the past eight years of doing this, that’s 416 weeks of Sunday sermons and another 416 weekly ponderings. If we add in the additional things I have written for special services during the week, the overall total probably nears one thousand. One thousand different things I have written about God and God’s Word.
This week, as I was thumbing through my Bible in search for what else may be said, it dawned on me – A LOT! You see, each time I utilize a Bible passage for a message, I highlight the text and put a date next to it, so that I know what I have used, and what I have not. You know what? There is much more not highlighted than there are passages covered in yellow, orange, and blue markings. Even after eight years and one thousand messages, there is still so much more of God’s Word to uncover!
This made me ponder – what makes us ever think we can totally know the Word of God? No matter how much time we spend reading, studying, and allowing the Spirit to reveal the Truth to us, there is still more to explore. Even when we think we’ve got it all figured out, there is still more to be revealed to us.
Think about it this way – consider the closest relationship you currently have, and preferably the longest one. It might be a spouse or significant other, or perhaps a parent. After all this time, you probably think you know them pretty well, have them all figured out, and perhaps can even predict how they will respond in any given situation, don’t you? Yet, then there are those occasions where they surprise you, where you learn something knew about them even after all this time. I’ve been married for nearly 27 years and our son is over 25 years old. Yet, not a month goes by that I still learn something new about my wife or son. Even after two and a half decades, some piece of their history, or some aspect of their personality that I didn’t quite pick up on before, is revealed to me.
So it is in our relationship with God – we will never know everything, but we can continue to gain a bit more knowledge, a bit more understanding. We can grow closer to one another by continuing to invest in the relationship, by studying one another’s characteristics and really getting to understand one another better. We may think that we’ve been down that road a thousand times, but I promise there is still more to see, more to experience, more to be revealed to us all. If we don’t know everything about the person in life closest to us, what makes us think that we will ever know everything about God or God’s Word contained within The Bible?
