I Want to Be Biblically Fluent

The longer I live, and the more I read the Bible, the more I realize that Scripture is not simply a manual for me to look up what to do in a particular situation. The Bible is not meant to be read just for reference, but to immerse myself in it. Rather than a pietistic checklist item I feel forced to mark off every day, my engagement with the Bible should be about getting to know God better. 

I need to saturate my mind with God‘s word, to be so immersed in God's self-revelation as recorded by Moses, David, the prophets, the Evangelists, and the Apostles, that it impacts and colors every part of my being. 

When my heart and mind are thoroughly saturated with Scripture, I do not have to be able to locate a specific verse to address a particular circumstance or situation I'm facing in life. Instead, my heart and mind will have been renewed, transformed, and molded into the image of Christ himself. And I will simply know what the right thing to do is, because I am thinking God‘s thoughts after him. 

Being biblical is not simply quoting a verse and giving a Scripture reference tacked on to my own thoughts to lend an air of pious credibility to them. Having a biblical worldview means thinking about everything in life in terms of God's revelation of himself to humanity. 

I want to go beyond being only biblically literate, to being biblically fluent. I want to be able to "faithfully extend biblical principles from their original contexts into our modern context in a potentially infinite number of ways" (see the link in the last sentence for more). To me, this is what it means to "do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15).

Will you join me on this journey to biblical fluency, where the words, thoughts, and principles God has given us in the Bible come out of my brain and mouth as easily as my native language English?