Brad from Mount Gilead, Ohio, who must be a Bible teacher or a pastor because he asks

this, Pastor John, can you and your personal devotions check the impulse to want to think

about how to teach what you're discovering in Scripture in order to simply enjoy it

personally and devotionaly?

Would you say to Brad?

I really enjoyed thinking about this question.

The first flag I want to wave is a flag that celebrates the inseparable nature of seeing

glory and saying what we've seen.

In other words, I'm not sure that we should fret too much about the impulse of turning

our seeing into saying, I wrote a whole book about this a year or two ago, so it's

really important to me.

I thought a lot about it, and I'm eager to dive into this with Brad.

I've tasted the dangers and the glories of what Brad is talking about.

So we're reading the Bible.

We see something new and fresh and amazing.

We experience a flash of genuine enjoyment of what it shows us about God and then there's

an almost immediate impulse to begin shaping it for a conversation or an email or a devotional

thought or a sermon or a lecture or a blog post or poem or a tweet.

This is real dangerous stuff and it can feel in that moment as though we have lost the

authenticity of our enjoyment, of communing with God in the truth we have seen.

That is a real danger that Brad's put his finger on.

I don't want to minimize it.

...