Just the other day I counseled a woman who came to our church for the first time. She normally attends another church. She came to ask me for prayer because she wanted to feel closer to God. She felt that she was letting God down. When I asked her what made her feel that way, she mentioned that she felt guilty for not doing things that she knew she should be doing as a Christian, such as reading the Bible every day.

I asked her if she knew that the people we read about in the Bible didn’t read the Bible every day. She looked at me as if I had just told her I was a Martian. I explained: “Did you know that Abraham did not even have a Bible? Or most people in the Bible, for that matter?”

Of course she had never heard or thought of that. The “read your Bible every day” teaching is a recent thing, only since the Bible became available to most people in book form. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a great thing if you do have the discipline and time to read your Bible every day. But what will help you the most is not the daily readings. It’s the meditation, the exercise of thinking about something God said — working in you and through you, changing you, challenging you, and troubling you till you do something about it — that will help you the most.

The Bible says faith comes by hearing the Word of God, right? So how did Abraham become the father of faith without ever owning a Bible and without going to church to hear a preacher?

Read this message in portuguese