Time Out: Weekly quiet times for the youth worker’s soul.
by Adam Wormann

Everyone who’s ever tried to read the Bible from cover to cover has always struggled somewhere between Leviticus and Numbers. I’ve never seen a study done, but I’ll bet if you graph it out, it’s almost comical the number of people that drop off their cover-to-cover reading program that drop off between books 3 and 4. I know I have on more than one occasion.

It’s not that we have too short of an attention span or don’t love God enough to read the Bible. It’s just that there’s all of these laws that most Christians today agree don’t apply in the present day. There’s only so much you can read about cleansing after pregnancy, menstruation, and emissions before you start to feel like “come on, what’s the point?” Sure, there’s some things (like dietary restrictions) that were important for the health and safety of the people of the day, even though they didn’t always know it. But instructions for what to do if an axe head flies off and kills someone accidentally? Really?

Sure, they were important back in the day. They have something profound to teach us now too, though. We hit that in Leviticus 19:

And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.'” (Lev. 19:1-2)

We often forget how holy God is. We miss how different He is from us. We continually miss the mark, we are unclean, and God calls us to be holy.

Take some time to reflect on that. Think about God and his holiness. Rather than reading more, spend your time this morning simply doing 3 things:

• Take some time to think about God and his holiness. Take serious reflection on that.
• Think about how you’re falling short. Take serious inventory and seek forgiveness.
• Take an extended period of time for worship. Pray. Sing. Whatever it is that you do that helps you to truly connect with God, do it. Don’t worry about prayer requests or things like that. Just take some time to worship a God who is truly holy.

Posted on March 19, 2012