Imagine this.

Trying to read your Bible with a hand right in front of your face. By right in front of your face I mean, five to six inches.

It’s far enough away that you can still see some of the words, but close enough that it’s not easy.

Plus, the hand is like, persistent too.

Every time you move, it moves. You can’t get around it.

You might sit down for thirty minutes and try to have devotions, but the hand, I guarantee it would keep you from getting much out of it.

Weird illustration I know, but stick with me.

I think many of us have a hand right in front of our face when we are reading the Scripture. Only thing is we don’t know it.

That hand is “me…”

Don’t get freaked out. Not literally me…us.

You.

We get so focused on us that we have a hard time really seeing and understanding what’s right in front of us on the pages of God’s Word. What I’m trying to say is that if we have to always be the main point of Scripture, we’re going to have a hard time really getting it.

Because Scripture ultimately is about God.

Yeah, we’re in there. But first, God.

I was thinking about that preaching the other day because you know there’s a demand to be relevant. When I say relevant, I don’t mean really relevant, I mean people want you to talk about something that they think pertains to them. And of course they don’t always say that but you can tell sometimes by what people are interested in.

And relevant’s good. You don’t want to always listen to some guy who doesn’t ever connect what they are talking about to your life. I know I don’t. But the thing is, a whole lot of the time we’re wrong about what’s relevant. That’s the beauty of Scripture. God’s Word shows us what is relevant.

The thing is, if we’re not willing to be patient enough to like let the Scripture not be all about ‘how we can have the best life ever’ for a couple minutes, we’re probably not going to be able to see that.

Our demand for relevance is going to make us irrelevant.