HELP!

Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.   “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him (Acts 8:  30-31).

Help!  I need somebody, Help! Not just anybody, Help! You know I need someone, Help!  (“Help!,”  Lennon/McCartney).

We live in a self-help culture.  Our definition of adulthood includes navigating our way through life’s challenges on our own, independently.  If we run stuck, we have bookstores overflowing with self-help books and, of course, that greatest self-help guru of all time:  Google (or one of its many spin-offs).  If I was given a loonie for every person who walked into the chaplain’s office and said, “I never expected to need any help, but I’ve hit a wall and I need to talk…,” I could retire to Mexico by now (well, almost…).   

The assumption is that if we can’t figure things out on our own, there’s something wrong with us. 

In the Kingdom of God, the reality is exactly the opposite:  if we think we can figure everything out on our own, there’s a lot wrong with us.  The very first comment that the Lord God made about us as he observed us in that wondrous Garden of Eden was, “it is not good for the man to be alone; I will make a helper suitable for him” (Gen. 2: 18).

Did you catch that?  In a perfect world, before the fall into sin, we were created in such a way that we needed help!  And that need is only multiplied now that we walk with our Lord in a fallen world that he has redeemed.   That’s why Paul writes, “The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you” (I Cor. 12: 21).  The community that is led by the Holy Spirit is an interdependent body in which every single one of us needs the others.

This need for help applies to every dimension of our lives (in different ways at different times), but it always applies to our devotional life.  We easily assume that praying and reading Scripture are just simple activities that anybody can do, and then we beat ourselves up because we discover that our devotional life isn’t going that well (sound familiar?).  That’s why in November we chaplains sent out “30 ways to pray” and this month we’re doing the same with reading Scripture.

Do you desire to strengthen your own reading of Scripture?  Do you recognize that you need help to do this?

True confessions – what follows is a naked sales pitch:  we’ve put together an annotated bibliography which lists most of the devotional books available in Redeemer’s bookstore, and the folks there have graciously agreed to put the entire collection on sale this week for 10% off.  Pick one up!  Send a text to a parent or grandparent and suggest they give you a late Christmas present or an early birthday present, and if you can’t find a benefactor to subsidize your devotional life, let me know and I’ll see what I can do (yes, I’m serious).

Because we all need a little help.