During this Lenten season, we are working our way through five “marks of discipleship” as part of our SpiritFest emphasis on “discovering and developing your spiritual style.” Pastor David introduced this series by talking about the spiritual hunger that is inherent in so many people and that is so prevalent in our culture today. In the past decade or so, we have heard a lot of talk about spirituality, not just within the church, but also within secular society. There seems to be an increasing number of people who are seeking something, anything, that will satisfy the hunger that is gnawing at their spirits and their souls. We Christians know what that hunger is and where it comes from. It is a hunger for God, because we have been created not only to be in relationship with other people, but we are created to be in a relationship with God as well.

SpiritFest is a part of our on-going efforts to address this spiritual hunger for those who are a part of our St. Luke’s community. We began with a week-long focus on prayer. Prayer has often been defined as communicating with God. So in prayer, we have an opportunity to have a conversation with the Lord of heaven and earth.

Yesterday I met with five couples who are planning to get married here at St. Luke’s in the next couple of months. We met to talk about the critical issues that every married couple faces – ten hurdles that all couples will face, issues of love and faithfulness, financial responsibility and sexual intimacy. But the most crucial area of any marriage, according to our study guide, is communication. I think that is right, because if communication fails, the relationship dies.

A quote: “Withdrawal from communication should be regarded as the ‘red alert’ for the marriage. The most urgent indicator of distress in a marriage may not be the uproar of discord, but rather the ominous sound of silence, the lack of any communication.”

What is true in a marriage relationship is also true in our relationship with God. The lack of good communication, that ominous sound of silence, results in spiritual malnutrition.

Prayer is communicating with God, but as many people practice prayer it ends up being a one sided conversation. If prayer is just us talking to God, then it is more of a monologue than a dialogue; and that is not good communication, that is not real conversation. Good communication, real conversation, consists of both speaking and listening. Daily prayer is most meaningful and effective when it is combined with daily Bible reading. The Bible is not just some stuff that was written by a bunch of old, dead guys. Yes, the Bible was written by people who lived a long time ago, but what they wrote did not come from them – it came from God. The Bible is God’s Word – a living, breathing Word which continues to speak to people today. Daily Bible reading makes our daily prayer a conversation, a dialogue, real communication.

She sat is my office with tears welling up in the corner of both eyes. Her life, she said, was empty and meaningless. She described a hole in her spirit, an emptiness in her heart, that she wanted filled. She had tried to fill it herself – with things like designer clothes and high tech toys, with friends and lovers, work and pleasure. And yet the emptiness remained. It was only a small place somewhere deep in her soul, but it seemed so vital to a sense of peace and joy and hope. Then she turned to God. For the past month she had been in worship every Sunday, and still she felt empty. She still felt as though she was missing something. I asked about her prayer life. She said that she prays all the time. Everyday she asks God, she begs God, to give her some peace, some joy, some hope. “But,” she said, “there has been no answer. I don’t think God is listening to me.”

I asked whether she was reading the Bible, and she said that she wasn’t – she didn’t know where to begin. Years before, she had decided to read the Bible, and she started, as so many people have, at the very beginning. She got through Genesis and Exodus, but while she found the stories there interesting enough, she did not see any connection between these stories and her own life. Then she got to Leviticus and quickly bogged down in all the stuff about animal sacrifices and strange rituals and unclean foods. That is where her Bible reading stopped.

Gently, very gently, I suggested to her that maybe it was she, not God, who wasn’t listening and that maybe she should spend as much time reading the Bible as she did praying to God. After talking about that for a while, she decided to set aside 10 minutes a day for conversation with God – a conversation that would include both prayer and Bible reading. She struggled with this at first, but in time prayer and Bible reading became a regular part of her life and that hole in her spirit began to shrink.

In Deuteronomy, Moses reminds the people of Israel of how God had humbled them in their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness by letting them get hungry and then feeding them with manna. God did that, Moses said, in order to teach them that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. It is still true today. We do not live, really live, by food alone, but by the spiritual nourishment that comes from the Word of God. The food that we eat every day can satisfy our physical hunger, but only the Word of God, the spiritual bread, is able to satisfy our spiritual hunger. It is as important for us to feed on this spiritual food regularly as it is for us to eat a healthy daily diet of foods with the protein and carbohydrates and vitamins and minerals that we need. It is only the Word of God, this spiritual bread, that is able to make our spirits strong and enable us to grow and develop into healthier children of God. It is only this spiritual food, this bread from heaven, that is able to fill that empty spot in our spirits, that is able to satisfy our hungry hearts.

Once again, let me point out that we are not talking about one more thing that we need to do as disciples of Jesus Christ. We are talking about an opportunity for us to be filled – filled with the joy of knowing God’s love, filled with the peace of knowing God’s presence, filled with the hope of knowing God’s promises. God already loves us – whether we pray and read the Bible every day or not. God’s love for us is unquestionably demonstrated in sending Jesus to give his life for our sins. But it is in reading God’s Word that we are reminded of just how much God loves us. God is with us always – whether we pray and read the Bible every day or not. But it is reading God’s Word that we are assured of God’s presence. God promises us life and salvation whether we pray and read the Bible every day or not, but it is in reading God’s Word that we find the strength we need to live out our lives in that hope.

In his book, Real Faith for Real Life, Michel Foss he encourages us to read the Bible devotionally, not scholastically. He offers some very practical suggestions about how to read the Bible in a more meditative way that combines prayer and Bible reading in a way that speaks powerfully to our hearts and to our lives. The purpose of reading the Bible, Foss says, is not so much to get information about God or about how we should live our lives as it is to be transformed – to be so changed and shaped and molded by our encounter with God that we are able to live a new life.

One person whose life was dramatically transformed by his reading of God’s Word is Martin Luther. His whole life and work centered on the Bible, of which he once said, “The Bible is a great and powerful tree. Each word is a mighty branch. Each of these branches I will have shaken. And the shaking of them has never disappointed me.”

Shake the tree of God’s word with daily Bible reading, and you will not be disappointed either. Amen.