Category Archives: 5x5x5 Reading Plan

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Love of Scripture Without Love of God

5×5×5 Bible Plan

Read: John 5
Meditation: John 39-40

“You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.”

Shift Your Focus… I can think of no simpler yet more powerful practice for greater spiritual growth and intimacy with God than daily Bible study. The truth is, if you don’t have a regular quiet time with God—which would include not only reading, but meditation and prayer as well—you will fail to thrive spiritually. It is a simple as that.

Yet Bible reading, journaling and Scripture memory alone aren’t enough. In fact, there is a very real danger lurking in the practice of daily quiet time that will lead to even greater distance from God than not reading at all: Love of Scripture without love of God.

That is what we might call bibliolatry. Bibliolatry occurs when we acquire biblical knowledge without spiritual discernment; when our study of the Word is not commensurate to our obedience of the Word; when our love for Scripture exceeds our love for God, and correspondingly, love for our fellow man; when pride in our practice of Bible reading leads to a false sense of righteousness; when the spiritual discipline of quiet time becomes a work of law rather than an offering of grace.

When that occurs, in effect, we are worshiping the Bible rather than the God of the Bible.

There are far too many “Christians” who read the Bible little, if at all. That is an unfortunate blight on the modern church. Yet there is another segment of believers, much smaller, but in deeper spiritual danger, who have been lulled into a sort of spiritual smugness because they fancy themselves as “people of the Word” or because the church they attend really “teaches” the Word.

Knowing the Bible isn’t enough. Satan knows the Bible as well as anyone. He can quote it at will. Daily reading and Scripture memory aren’t enough. Nicodemus (see John 3) had that down pat. Going to a church that teaches the Word verse-by-verse isn’t enough. There are people in those churches who are lost and don’t even know it.

Hearing, reading, and believing the Bible aren’t enough. Believing in Jesus is. Jesus said, “Whoever believes the Son has eternal life.” (John 3:36)

The goal of Bible study is not to grain greater knowledge of Scripture, or to grow spiritually, or to simply be able to check off that item on your daily list of things to do. It is to know God and his Son, Jesus Christ. By “knowing”, I am not referring to an intellectual event, but the act of an intimate exchange of one’s life with the Almighty whereby one’s love is deepened, where obedience is practiced, and where faith is expanded.

That is when searching the Scripture leads to eternal life.

“Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New Testament, valuable as they are; it is not in certain words which Jesus spoke, vast as is their preciousness; it is in the Word, which Jesus is, that the great manifestation of God is made.” ~Phillips Brooks

Prayer… Lord, may my study of your Word always lead me to greater intimacy, obedience and love. May I not simply grow more knowledgeable of the Bible—may I grow more knowledgeable of you.

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Worship—On Our Terms Or God’s?

5×5×5 Bible Plan

Read: John 4
Meditation: John 4:21-24

“Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.’”

Shift Your Focus… This Samaritan woman Jesus encountered at the well of Sychar was suffering from what I call “designer deity syndrome”. This was a fairly common syndrome among worshipers not only in Jesus’ day, but in ours as well. It occurs when we attempt to come to God on our terms rather than his; when we make worship more about us, and what we like, than about God, and what he likes; when, in effect, we recreate God in our image rather than approaching him as beings created in his image.

That was the problem with the worship of the Samaritans. They had corrupted worship to fit their own needs to the point Jesus said, “You don’t even know what you’re worshipping.” (v.22) They had become Burger King worshipers.

Do you remember the old Burger King advertisement? “Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us. Have it your way.” That little jingle is fitting for what we modern day “Samaritans” are doing with our experience of worship.

We love a customized church experience. We expect worship services to be tailor-made just for us. We expect the praise, programs and preaching to satisfy our preferences. We want church designed to meet our needs, music tuned to our exact tastes, preachers crafted to our specifications, messages that mesmerize, and a made to order God—a “Burger King God” who says, “Have it your way”.

Some time ago, Los Angeles Magazine ran an article called “God For Sale”. The author said, “It is no surprise that when today’s affluent young professionals return to church they want to do it only on their own terms. But what is amazing is how far the churches are going to oblige them.” Newsweek Magazine added, “They’ve developed a pick and choose Christianity in which individuals take what they want and pass over what does not fit their spiritual goals…” That’s “designer god syndrome”.

Nothing can be further from the “spirit and truth” worshiper of verse 24 that Jesus said God the Father is seeking. When it comes to God, and the way you worship him, why don’t you say to him, “Have it your way”!

If you will learn what it means to do that, you will drink water from an altogether different kind of well–and you will never thirst again!

“Worship changes the worshiper into the image of the One worshiped” ~Jack Hayford

Prayer… Father, free me from designer deity syndrome. Forgive me for making worship more about me than about what pleases you. Teach me to truly worship you in Spirit and in Truth.

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Rebirth Required

5×5×5 Bible Plan

Read: John 3
Meditation: John 3:3

“Jesus answered and said to Nicodemus, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’”

Shift Your Focus… Nicodemus was a very bright man.  He had given himself to much study and he’d grown quite famous as a teacher, but he had little wisdom as to how to be in right standing with God. He knew a lot about God, but he didn’t know God.

Nicodemus was rich.  Tradition tells us that he was one of the three richest men in Jerusalem.  But how much a person has does not change who they are!  You can have plenty of money, lots of fame, an enviable place in life, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still a sinner in need of a Savior!

Nicodemus was not only rich; he was respectable.  He was a member of the Sanhedrin, the prestigious ruling spiritual body of Israel.  He was a rabbi.  Jesus refers to him in verse 10 as “Israel’s teacher”, which suggests that he had attained celebrity as a master communicator.  However, what we’ve achieved doesn’t change who we are before God.  The truth is, hell will be populated with a lot of respected people, because admiration, though not necessarily a bad thing, does not equal salvation!

Nicodemus was rich, respectable, and he was religious. He was a Pharisee!  He kept the Mosaic Law to the smallest detail.  He was morally pure to a degree that you and I can’t imagine!  But religion doesn’t redeem the heart; religious ritual is not the same as right relationship with God. Titus 3:5 reminds us, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us….”

Nicodemus was a person who did all the right spiritual things, knew all the right spiritual language, had gained everyone’s spiritual admiration, but was still empty on the inside because he was still spiritually lost!

That’s why Jesus said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.” He is simply saying that human beings must have two birthdays to get to heaven.  We must have a physical birthday, and we must have a spiritual birthday.

Jesus uses the picture of physical birth to point out the need for spiritual birth because of the obvious comparisons.  To begin with physical birth provides life.   All babies have life because they are born!   Likewise, spiritual life cannot begin until spiritual birth occurs.

Not only that, physical birth means a brand new start.  No baby is born with a past!  They only have a future!  So it is with the spiritual birth.  When you get saved, you get a brand new start.  Your past is wiped away and the future begins!  That’s why Paul writes in II Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”

And finally, physical birth takes place because of the suffering of another.  A mother literally, through the pain of childbirth, comes close to death in order to bring life into this world.  Jesus didn’t come close to death—he experienced death so that you and I might be born again.  Spiritual birth rests squarely upon the pain and suffering of another!

So what does that mean?  It means that salvation requires a new beginning.  Not just a reformation of your flesh, but a rebirth from death to life. It means that someone else had to die so that you could be reborn.  That’s why you can’t do it on your own.  It only comes through depending on the complete and adequate supply of God’s saving love through Christ’s suffering for your salvation. It means because of Christ’s adequacy, you can have a brand new beginning and an unending future with God.

Have you been born again?  If you haven’t, I would suggest that you pray the prayer below. If you will pray it from your heart, you will be born again!

“A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.” ~C.S. Lewis

Prayer… Lord Jesus, I confess that I am a sinner.  Please forgive me.  I believe that you died on the cross for my sins, and rose again from the tomb to give me eternal life.  Come into my life and be my Savior and Lord.  And with your help, from this day forward, I will live for you.

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Divine House Cleaning

5×5×5 Bible Plan

Read: John 2
Meditation: John 2:17

“His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”

Shift Your Focus… I have always enjoyed this story of Jesus cleansing the temple. I love the robust image it paints of him.  It stands in stark contrast to most of the historical paintings as well as the more recent images we get from the portrayal of Jesus by filmmakers.  For some reason, artists from the Renaissance on up to this very day have given us a feminized Jesus—soft, tender, doe-eyed, almost porcelain-like.

That is not the Jesus of John 2:13-16,

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the moneychangers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!”

Jesus doesn’t appear all that soft in this encounter, does he?  As a matter of fact, he opened up a can of comeuppance on these merchants of religion, and no one dared stop him.  Go down to your local Saturday Market and do that, and see what happens.  People typically don’t take too kindly to having their economic systems so abruptly disrupted.

Jesus was different.  He was right—and people knew it. His anger was one of righteous indignation and holy zeal for the House of the Lord.  This kind of house cleaning was long overdue, and if they didn’t overtly cheer him on, inside the worshippers were secretly applauding.

Now as much as we enjoy this story, it really is incomplete if we don’t fast-forward to our time and ask how Jesus would respond if he walked into our church today.  How much more zeal would Jesus have for his body, the temple of the Holy Spirit—that is, the church?  How much more holy fire and righteous indignation would he display for that which he suffered and died to redeem?

You see, in the new economy of the Kingdom of God, the church has replaced the temple as the dwelling place of God in the earth.  Of course, that refers more to a people than a place—and yet both are the church.  What would Jesus see in your church—in you, in your brothers and sisters in the local community of Christ, and in the activities that take place in your church building?

I have a sense that each of us, both people of worship and places of worship—are due for a little divine house cleaning.  How about we get started before the Lord of the church has to show up and do it for us!

“Learn to break your own will. Be zealous against yourself.” ~Thomas A` Kempis

Prayer… Lord, fill my belly with zeal for your house.  Let it consume me as it did you.  Zeal not only for the physical house in which your people gather, but also in this house made up of body, soul and spirit, in which your Spirit dwells.

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Perfectly Merging Grace and Truth

5×5×5 Bible Plan

Read: John 1
Meditation: John 1:14

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Shift Your Focus… In our efforts to share the Good News with a lost world, how do we bridge that gap between a loving God and the repulsiveness of the sinner’s sin?  By perfectly merging grace and truth, that is how!

That is what Jesus did. He embodied grace and truth, perfectly merged within one man. Take, for instance, his interaction with the adulterous woman in John 8. Picture the scene:  This sinful woman is standing in the center of a circle, surrounded by self-righteous religious leaders who want her stoned.  Imagine her humiliation, caught in the very act of adultery—a private act now a very public sin. Nothing can hide her shame—and make no mistake, sexual sin is shameful, degrading to the people involved, destructive to innocent families it affects and odious to God.

This woman is standing before Jesus, exposed, humiliated, tears dripping to the sand. She has been used by men all of her life, and now she will pay for it with her life.  She sees the stones; she knows her guilt. Now, all eyes are on Jesus—what will he do?

After some time, Jesus speaks and says to those who want her executed, “Ok, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” And with that bombshell, one-by-one, from oldest to youngest, they walked away, leaving only Jesus and this sinful woman face-to-face. What now?  Would Jesus give her a good moral tongue lashing.   No, he just gently asks, “Where are your accusers?  Has no one judged you guilty?”

She replied, “No one, Sir.”

At that, Jesus offered these grace-truth words that would utterly right this sinner’s upside-down life:  “Then I don’t either. Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Behind this amazing display of grace and truth, as Walter Trobisch said, what we find is that Jesus “accepts us as we are but when he accepts us, we cannot remain as we are.”  Jesus brings our sin to the surface, and when we acknowledge it by confession and repentance, totally, graciously and forever forgives it.  The adulteress went away forgiven, with a new clean heart and a brand new chance at life.  Only grace and truth can do that for sinners.

Perhaps that is why prostitutes, publicans, and other sinners responded to Jesus so readily.  At some level, they recognized their sin. That was why forgiveness was so appealing to them…and still is!

What does the world need more than anything right now?  What does your sinful next door neighbor so desperately need?  The same thing you need: A whole lot of truth and a big dose of grace!

“Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God; the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.”  ~C.S. Lewis

Prayer… God, help me to model grace and truth as Jesus did!

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Constant Casting

5×5×5 Bible Plan

Read: I Peter 5
Meditation: I Peter 5:7

“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”

Shift Your Focus… Someone has said that “worry is a thin stream of fear which, if encouraged, becomes a wide channel into which all other thoughts flow.”  English apologist C.S. Lewis wrote, “Anxiety is not only a pain which we must ask God to assuage but also a weakness we must ask Him to pardon—for He’s told us to take no care for the morrow.”

So rather than holding onto those worries, allowing them to become a river of fear, our Christian call is to cast them onto God. That’s what Peter says. Cast your worries, fears and anxieties on God.  All of them!  Big ones, for sure.  And even the little ones.  He will take them all, because he cares that much for you!

That means you will need to practice the art of constant casting. You will not simply be able to cast your cares onto God once and be done with them for good.  You’ll need to cast them continually because you will never be far from problems.  And those problems will continually be feeding that tributary of worry, and that tributary will be continually flowing into that river of fear that threatens to sweep you under.  That’s just the reality of your life.  Mine, too.

So the next time you find yourself worrying—which will probably be within minutes after reading this post—just cast it back to God and say, “Lord, this one is too big for me.  Here, you handle it.”

Sounds simple, I know, but just try it.  Try it for a week.  Take every single one of your anxieties, worries and fear in the next seven days—all of them—and consciously cast them onto God, and just see what happens.

If you will, God’s promise—not mine, but God’s—is that you will find yourself in his care (I Peter 5:7) and experiencing his peace (Philippians 3:6-7).

“The branch of the vine does not worry, and toil, and rush here to seek for sunshine, and there to find rain. No; it rests in union and communion with the vine; and at the right time, and in the right way, is the right fruit found on it. Let us so abide in the Lord Jesus.” ~Hudson Taylor

Prayer… Lord, here they are—all of my problems.  They are too big for me.  I refuse to stay up late worrying over them one more night.  Since you’re up anyway, why don’t you worry about them?  So I give them to you, and in exchange, by faith, I will rest in your care and receive your peace.

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The Tyranny Of The Holy

5×5×5 Bible Plan

Read: I Peter4
Meditation: I Peter 4:1-2

“Since Jesus went through everything you’re going through and more, learn to think like him. Think of your sufferings as a weaning from that old sinful habit of always expecting to get your own way. Then you’ll be able to live out your days free to pursue what God wants instead of being tyrannized by what you want.” (The Message)

Shift Your Focus… I am going to step out on the limb of vulnerability here and assume that you struggle with sin as much as I do.  And like me, you probably read the last line of verse two and said, “Yes!  That’s exactly it!  I’ve been tyrannized by the selfish, sinful things that I want.  I’d rather be ‘tyrannized’ by the things that God wants.”

Of course, the word “tyranny” carries a negative connotation.  Yet is it’s meaning really that far off from what you want from God as it relates to rulership in your life?  Check out this definition:

Tyranny:  A government in which a single ruler is vested with absolute power. The office, authority, or jurisdiction of an absolute ruler. Absolute power.

I don’t know about you, but that’s what I want in my life. I want the righteous, perfect will of God to tyrannize my moment-by-moment, living, sleeping, breathing, eating, thinking, dreaming and doing life! I want the tyranny of the holy in my life.

So how can I personally enter into that kind of dominating, existential rulership of God over me? First off, and very simply, I need to invite God to have that kind of control in my life.  Though he is Master of the Universe, he never violates the human will—so I must invite his rule.

Beyond that, there are some other clues here in this fourth chapter of I Peter as to how I can come under the absolute rulership of God:

I must learn to think like Jesus—particularly in how I think about my temptations and sufferings (verses 1-2, 12-14).  He allowed both trial and temptation to draw him more deeply into the Father through prayer.  They caused him to become more dependent on God, not more independent.  They caused him to become more obedient—if that was even possible.

I also ought to think once in a while—perhaps a lot—about the judgment of God (verses 3-6, 15-18).  I know it’s not popular to think of God as a God of judgment these days, nor to dwell too much on negative thoughts.  But the truth remains, God is holy, and there will be a payday for sin someday.  That sobering reality, even if it is negative, isn’t a bad motivation to do what is right.  It’s shouldn’t be the only motivation, or the first motivation, but I must learn to think of sin in my life as a clear and present danger.  Furthermore, there is a positive side to judgment as well—the final reward for resisting temptation, patiently enduring trials, and doing works of righteousness.

Likewise, I need to live with an awareness that the time is drawing near for the Lord’s return (verse 7).  Jesus is coming back—perhaps even today.  The signs are clear and his promised return is certain.  In view of that, Peter says in his second letter, “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” He then adds, “So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. (II Peter 3:11-12,14)

Finally, in between my present challenges and my ultimate destiny, I ought to put Christ-likeness into practice in my daily life (verses 8-10).  That means I must love others, even the unlovely, like Jesus.  I must treat everyone as if they were an honored in my home—and with a Christlike attitude, no less.  And I must marshal all of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling power within me to serve others in practical, kind, and God-honoring ways.

That my friend, is how you invite the tyranny of the holy into your life.  As you and I increasing allow that kind of dominating rulership to hold sway, the tyranny of selfish, sinful behavior will be the biggest loser.

“Always seek peace between your heart and God, but in this world, always be careful to remain ever-restless, never satisfied, and always abounding in the work of the Lord.” ~Jim Elliot

Prayer… Lord, my humble yet passionate prayer is simply this:  Hold absolute sway over my entire being!