John 15:11 “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”

The Upper Room Discourse, that Jesus said to His disciples just before His period of intense suffering that we call His Passion, is absolutely loaded with deep, powerful teaching that He wanted them to have to protect them from all that was about to happen. That is to say, it wasn’t to load His disciples, including us, with all sorts of rules and regulations, it was to give us His joy, to a degree the world absolutely cannot understand. If you can read the Upper Room Discourse without getting happy, you really haven’t read it! God, incarnate in His Son, is telling us how to receive and operate in His power and holiness and love, and that is absolutely astounding. We get bogged down with all the junk in this world, sometimes literally, with all our material possessions, but if we will take in all that Jesus says to us, we will be liberated from all that, using the material as tools rather than being controlled by it and walking in the Spirit, just as the song says: “Walking in the Spirit, abiding in His mercy; in the presence of the Lord is great joy.” God doesn’t want to burden us, He wants to liberate us from all the chains of deception that the devil piles on us. It wasn’t accidental that Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John ) We need to read the Bible not as obligation, but with joy and anticipation, as delicious nourishment for our spirit, soul, and body. As Jesus quoted to the devil, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4, Deuteronomy 8:3) We should rejoice in the incredible blessing it is that God makes His Word available to us in the Bible.

I first read through the Bible by the time I was 10, and I still read it daily. It is a joy indeed! I certainly didn’t grasp all of it as a child, because I don’t grasp all of it now! Every time I read with expectation, God meets that expectation abundantly. As a pastor, my greatest desire is that each of the people under my care learn to read the Bible that way, to know that God cares enough about them to speak to them individually, personally, through His Word. That is a joy the world cannot touch, and I want those in my care to experience it, just as Jesus says in this verse. The SOAP method of personal devotions, as taught by Wayne Cordeiro, has been very helpful in my own life, with Scripture, Observation, Application, and Prayer being the steps to apply when reading, and I am mystified as to why some people seem to resist doing it that way so hard. They either see it as obligation, or they want to be spoon-fed with what someone else got from the Bible. As a matter of fact, I do make my own devotions available as a blog for others to enjoy, and have over a thousand subscribers, but my prayer is that they would discover how to take it in for themselves, to be the strong children that God desires.

Father, thank You for this reminder. Thank You for Wayne’s faithfulness to share the reading method You showed him. I do pray that more and more of Your children would have Your joy in taking in Your Word, for their eternal blessing and Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!