How ten minutes a day this fall can help you “receive God into every nook and cranny of life”…
by Pastor Paul Dugan
In his introduction to the Hebrew prophets in The Message Bible, Eugene Peterson offers thoughtful reasons why we modern Christians desperately need to listen to the ancient Hebrew prophets:
“One of the bad habits that we pick up early in our lives is separating things and people into secular and sacred. We assume that the secular is what we are more or less in charge of: our jobs, our time, our entertainment, our government, our social relations. The sacred is what God has charge of: worship and the Bible, heaven and hell, church and prayers. We then contrive to set aside a sacred place for God, designed, we say, to honor God but really intended to keep God in his place, leaving us free to have the final say about everything else that goes on.
“Prophets will have none of this... They contend that everything, absolutely everything, takes place on sacred ground. God has something to say about every aspect of our lives: The way we feel and act in the so-called privacy of our hearts and homes, the way we make our money and the way we spend it, the politics we embrace, the wars we fight, the catastrophes we endure, the people we hurt and the people we help. Nothing is hidden from the scrutiny of God, nothing is exempt from the rule of God, nothing escapes the purposes of God. Holy, holy, holy. Prophets insist on receiving God in every nook and cranny of life.”
The ancient Hebrew prophets are responsible for nearly one-third of the material in the Bible. This summer we have been on a flyby journey over the twelve often-neglected books at the end of the Hebrew Scriptures- called the “Minor Prophets.” They are called “minor” not because they are “minor league” prophets at the end of the list. They are “minor” because they are brief, unlike the extensive writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Each of these small books has a “major” message for today, inspired by the Holy Spirit. Each is a work of literary art, foundational to the mission of Jesus and the writings of the New Testament.
Here are the Twelve: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
But here’s a paradox: As American evangelicals, we profess to believe in the authority of the Bible, Yet, when you look at our actual practices, there are huge chunks of Scripture that we sometimes ignore. This includes the prophets.
So let’s change this. I invite you to take the “minor prophet challenge” this fall. The Minor Prophets contain sixty-three chapters. If you start with the first chapter of Hosea this week, read one chapter/day, five days/week, you will reach the final chapter of Malachi by the end of 2020.
If you are not a reader, you can listen on biblegateway.com. For example, for an audio version of Hosea, I recommend the NIVUK read by David Suchet or The Message read by Kelley Ryan Dolan.
The Minor Prophets are ancient texts that may seem foreign to the modern reader. To help you acclimate to their historical and cultural context and appreciate their literary artistry, we highly recommend the short video introductions masterfully prepared by the Bible Project, available free on YouTube (click on title to access video):
I also recommend Eugene Peterson’s thoughful book introductions from The Message Bible HERE.
You can do this. It amounts to about ten minutes a day… five minutes to read (or listen) to the chapter, and five minutes to pray about the relevance of the message for our world and your life today. Think of all the minutes you currently devote each day to Netflix, social media, or surfing the news. I invite you to re-allocate ten of those minutes to listen to these ancient prophets . It could change your life!
Peterson continues: “The prophets purge our imaginations of this world’s assumptions on how life is lived and what counts in life. Over and over again, God the Holy Spirit uses these prophets to separate his people from the cultures in which they live, putting them back on the path of simple faith and obedience and worship in defiance of all that the world admires and rewards. Prophets train us in discerning the difference between the ways of the world and the ways of the gospel, keeping us present to the presence of God.”
Thr prophets are speaking. Are we listening?