More than Memories (Friday Devotional)

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.

- Romans 15:4

When I was a kid, no trip to a ballgame was complete without buying a souvenir program. I’d eagerly flip through it before the game looking for new insights into my team—reading the articles, studying the player statistics, and, of course, readying my scorecard. And then when I got home, I’d proudly put the program on my bookshelf next to all the others I’d collected over the years.

So when my parents delivered two cardboard boxes worth of my old programs to me earlier this week (they’d been sitting in my childhood closet for the last ten years), I couldn’t help myself—I had to look through them! I felt the nostalgia wash over me as I skimmed articles about the stars of my youth and ran across the names of players I hadn’t thought about in ages. As I looked through those old programs, I found myself caught up in memories of sunny days and the teams that I’d grown up watching. Reading those old souvenir programs was a ticket to the past.

But as enjoyable as those old Rangers programs were, they had almost no relevance to the Rangers of today. Articles about Chan Ho Park don’t concern me much at this point since he retired in 2010. Knowing Hank Blalock’s season totals mattered a lot back in the day, but now that he’s been out of baseball for a decade, it’s information I just don’t need. Even articles about a legend like Pudge Rodriguez are only good for the occasional trivia tidbit. Those old programs make for interesting memories, but they don’t have much to say about today.

Sometimes it seems like we regard the Bible the same way. We learn about Noah’s ark and Daniel in the lion’s den as children, we revel in the stories and learn why they’re important, then we relegate them to the sidelines of childhood nostalgia, right alongside Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. We start to look at biblical teachings we once took at face value with a more critical eye, quick to rationalize why ignoring Jesus’s words is acceptable in this situation or that. We treat our Bibles like tickets to our past instead of guides for our present.

But the truth is that the Bible was not given to us for the sake of spiritual nostalgia, but for our instruction and encouragement and hope today. From Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, the scriptures offer us insights into the character of God and His will for our lives. The God-breathed words of the Bible are not just meant to evoke memories, but life change.

Let me encourage you to spend some time this weekend doing like I did with those old programs, flipping through some biblical passages you haven’t thought about in years. But instead of settling for nostalgia, read closer and see what God has to teach you through those verses today. If you’re willing to read the Bible with fresh eyes, you’ll find more than memories in its pages.