I stumbled across a jewel of a resource in my office this week that I absolutely love and wish was re-published.  It’s called:

Spiritual Journey Notebook.  (wow crazy creative title)  It’s truly a great resource though for discipleship and has some very helpful tools called Theographs, and charts, and —GOSH I love this journal!  (I hear the chants of my elementary friends saying, “Well why don’t you marry it?!) Well I’ve gushed about it enough, but it is a tool that can help in your very important covenant with your Saviour.  It can be legalistic if you allow it to become a checklist instead of a tool, but the theographs are a great guide for discipleship.  If you can find one…get it!

It was written by Milt Hughes.  Here is the information you can use to look for it on the internet.

But the main reason I am passing this along to you is because of the theograph that discusses the level of responses to Scripture.

It’s a great reminder of why we need to journey with scripture continually so that we literally  are moved into action and not just stopping at receiving.

1. HEAR: Romans 10:17  Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.

2. READ:  Luke 4:16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read,

3. STUDY: Acts 17:11 Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

4. MEMORIZE: Psalm 119:11,13 I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.   With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth.

5. MEDITATE: Psalm 119:148 My eyes stay open through the watches of the night,
that I may meditate on your promises.

6. DO: James 1:22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.

I love that each response is more of a taste of God’s word than the response before.  I love that we see that once you start sampling God’s word, you can’t stop yourself from getting more.

I think if we looked at this more and stopped long enough to get a bite of God’s word, we would find ourselves truly longing to saturate our lives with it.  Surely if more of our students and families followed this, we’d have different stats than Barna’s book: Index of leading Spiritual indicators which says—34% of U.S. adults claim to open the bible once a week outside of church.  7.5% claim to read it daily.