The late author and pastor Tim Keller recalls a conference breakout session that changed his life.
A presenter named Barbara Boyd promised some tips on reading the Bible – not a particularly cutting-edge subject.
Boyd provided these instructions: “Sit for 30 minutes and write down at least 30 things you learn from Mark 1:17.”
Mark 1:17 just so happens to be one of those verses that pastors can mumble in their sleep. “’Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will make you fishers of men.’” Jesus told a group of fishermen they should start trawling for people.
Yeah, that’s nice. We’ve all heard that one for years.
“Don’t think,” Boyd went on, “that after 10 minutes and four or five things written down that you’ve figured it out. Take the whole 30 minutes and try to get to 30 things observed.” Keller decided to give it a shot.
He and the others in the room silently picked their way over, around, and through those familiar words.
After about 10 minutes, true to Boyd’s prediction, Keller put down his pen. He was pretty sure he had seen everything there was to see.
“I wanted to spend the rest of the time daydreaming, but everybody else looked like they were still working, so I picked up the pen and started pondering some more.
“Then I began to notice some new things. If I imagined what the sentence would mean without one of its words, it was easier to assess what unique meaning it brought to the sentence. That gave me the ability to get another two or three insights around each term.
“Then I tried to paraphrase the whole verse, putting it into my own words. That showed me more levels of meaning and implications that I had missed.”
At the end of the half hour, Boyd asked everyone in the group to circle the best insight or most life-changing observation they had gleaned from the text.
“OK,” she said, “how many of you found this most incredible, life-changing thing in the first five minutes?”
No one raised a hand.
“Ten minutes?” No hands. “Fifteen minutes?” A few hands. “Twenty minutes?” A few more. “Twenty-five minutes?” Many more.
Keller reflects, “That session changed my attitude toward the Bible and, indeed, my life.”
We live in a culture in which people expect that a few quick glances will yield truth.
Go deeper.
Look longer.
Stop texting and keep digging.
Don’t rush through your opportunity to learn something new today.
Life is so much richer if we take the time to hear, really hear, what God might be saying to us.
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