What To Do With Irrelevant Passages of Scripture

Recently I've been having a lot of conversations about the Bible--particularly about what to do on the days when you read something that doesn't seem particularly relevant to anything in your life.

For sure, there are lots of parts of Scripture that seem to have little bearing on the burning or presenting issues of our every day lives. How does the succession of kings in Old Testament Israel relate to a stressful day in cube-world, a week crammed with exams, or raising kids?

It can seem at times like these that reading the Scriptures is really just a giant exercise in time-wasting. But I want to propose that there's a gift here if we can position ourselves to receive it.

Part of our problem as humans is that we are all-engrossed in ourselves and our stories. This is only natural, this side of the fall, but it has disastrous consequences. Our worlds revolve around us, our dreams revolve around us, our lives revolve around us. And so our perspective is small and skewed.

And so when we're in particularly stressful or boring or laborious seasons of our lives, we get consumed with the tyranny of the urgent. I need something right now, right away, because me and my world is all that I have. And if my world stinks, then I'm up the creek.

Enter irrelevant passages of Scripture. The gift of these passages is this: they remind us that there's a bigger story than our own. They invite us to enter into a larger story of redemption and healing and transformation that has absolutely nothing to do with us and everything to do with God.

Being put back in our place is a large part of becoming healthy human beings. If we can learn to submit ourselves and our stories even and especially to seemingly irrelevant passages of Scripture, it can give us the gift of perspective.

If we can learn the discipline of simple receiving, of a simple, gracious, humble embracing of these odd or awkward passages of Scripture, they can in turn give us a tremendous gift. They can put the stress of cube world, the frenetic-ness of exam week, or the relentlessness of raising kids into perspective.

So read these passages for what they are. Don't try to force application if there isn't one there, but try to understand whatever significance there might be in the people, conflicts, truths or sides of God that are available. Offer that up to God. Thank him that the Scripture isn't about you but about him.

Ask him to use this passage that has seemingly no application to your every day life to help you remember that it really is all about him and not about you. And ask for help to believe that this is good news. Our stories are not the last word on us. God's story is the last word on us. This really is the best possible gift God can give us.

And it can be a particularly good gift when you read a passage of Scripture that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the much larger truth that all your days, even the most obscure days of your days, are invited to be a part of God's redemptive story of love, grace, truth and transformation.