There are times when one sentence can change your day. Days when those collections of letters and words combined in a specific order bring clarity to your mind.

Today was one of those days.

This morning, I was feeling a little tired, a little flat, a bit spent. I sat down to read the Bible in a coffee shop before catching up with a friend. My readings landed in Proverbs 30, a proverb that was written by, or inspired by, a man called Agur – not a name that I have seen too much in my lifetime! After the introductions of who he is, the chapter starts like this:

“I am weary, God, but I can prevail.” Proverbs 30:1b

That was the sentence I needed today. Simple. Straight away it began to minister to me because I could identity with that phrase. I too feel weary but I know I can prevail

Anyway, this blog isn’t designed to be my personal journal, so let me share what deep down this verse triggered in my heart. Or more accurately, how it gave language and thought to something that has been brewing in my heart.

It made me realize how much I love the honesty of the Bible. I’ve come to the realization that in many ways the Bible is the least religious book I know of. You can quote me on that. The authors, through the Scriptures, include an honesty that is both beautifully refreshing and deeply unsettling. They display a complexity that most believers and most churches don’t know how to handle. God’s word seems to have no problems talking about people’s difficulties, doubts, fears, and failings. The writers of the Scriptures openly share their disappointments and wrestles with each other, with God, and His promises. They talk in ways about their faith that I would only dream of openly sharing with even my closest friends. The way they talk to God is often beyond my comprehension. The books that aren’t written from a firsthand perspective include details of the past that most of us would prefer to omit from the retelling of the story. They don’t paper over the cracks in their accounts of the stories of heroes of the faith. And the Bible has such confidence in these tensions to declare that the words themselves are God-inspired!

These writers hold the tension of these difficult moments with an overwhelming belief in God and His power to transform even the most dire of circumstances. They hold opposing views fully comfortable that God can handle it. Their faith in His character seems undiminished. In their retelling of past stories, they honour those whom God has honoured; they don’t cancel those characters who had their times of failure. Check out these examples;

• Noah is honoured for this faith but his drunkenness at the end of the ark story remains.
• Abraham is honoured as the father of the Israelites but right at the starthe doubted Gods power and took matters into his own hands with Ismael.
• Moses’ murder, his doubts at his calling, his failure at Meribah are not ignored at all but yet he is still held as the deliverer of Israel and God spoke to Him as a friend in ways that He addressed no ore else in scripture.
• David was a man after God’s own heart as well as committing adultery, most probably forcing Bathsheba, and having her husband murdered.
• Solomon is the most successful king ever but turns away from good in the end which results in the Kingdom being torn apart from there on in.
• I don’t even know what to do with Jacob, Samson, Jonah, Peter, Paul, and many others I don’t have space to list here

What I saw today looks far removed from what I have found too often in our churches. Because we are uncomfortable with the mess and the mysterious, we have sought to explain everything away and try to keep things palatable. We want to have rights and wrongs in the gray zones because we dislike the uncertainty. The reality is if we truly lived out the Scriptures as we found them, in our own lives, our churches would look a whole lot different than they do today.

What does this mean for those of us who follow Jesus today?

Let’s put on our seatbelts.

Very simply, I think we need to become way more comfortable with mess. We have to be authentic and own the fact that neither we, nor anyone else, have it all together. We have to accept the fact that there are fewer rights and wrongs than we would like to admit while remembering that there are some rights and wrongs that we shouldn’t mess with. We have to become comfortable enough with the fact that the world is not full of lots of evil and a few good people, but that people are inherently good and make some silly mistakes. We have to remove the logs from our own eyes before condemning those with specks in theirs. We have to learn how to talk about complex things without drawing battle lines and forcing people into making black and white choices. We have to be authentic and transparent with the truth, call out our biases, but call a spade a spade when it requires us to do so. We need to live a life that reflects the true nature of our hearts in front of a watching world that desperately wants to have hope in the midst of their mess.

We must learn to talk about the Scriptures as less of a religious rule book that we need to read, and more as an unsettling journal, a transparent mirror, that reads us and gives us firm grounding to walk out our uncertain steps.

It’s amazing how one sentence can transform a day!