I remember the first time that I heard about a conference like this when I was a sophomore in college, and I just have to say that the girl that was discipling me was really encouraging me to consider going. I was primarily motivated by the fact that there was going to be a really cute boy there. That was exciting to me then. My motivations have changed over the years, and now the man that swept me off my feet comes with me to conferences.

Why Study the Bible?

But I wonder what you would say if I asked you the question, what is it that is motivating you to come to a conference on the Bible, a conference called Look at the Book? Because I think if we asked each other, “What made you decide to come?” we would get a lot of different and interesting answers.

I know that there are some people who have been at every single Desiring God conference since 2003 for the past 12 years, and they will absolutely be at the last Desiring Guide conference. I know because I’ve asked people before and said, “Oh, good to see you. What made you decide to come?” One word: “Mom.” Moms have dragged their children and sometimes other people with them to come to the conference. I think that is also great motivation to be here. I know that friends pester their friends to sign up for things like this.

A moment ago my husband was on the phone with a friend of ours trying to persuade them to cancel their other plans for the weekend so that they could be here for the conference. But I think that on another level, there are a lot of categories that bring people to a conference like this. I think there’s a category of people who just love the Bible. They love reading the Bible. They love studying the Bible. They love studying about how to read the Bible. They love reading about how to study the Bible. They love memorizing it. They love learning about its history. They love the Bible. And if there’s a conference on the Bible, they will be at the conference.

But I think there’s also a number of other categories of people that are coming into a conference like this, and those really are the people where my heart is for coming to a conference, because I think there are a lot of people who are coming in and they’re coming because they’re really intimidated by the Bible. It is a scary book with a lot of information and a lot of history, and it brings up a lot of questions. There’s a lot of controversy over it. They’re coming so that they can maybe subdue some of that intimidation about the Bible. That’s a great reason to be here.

I think there are some people who are coming because, to be honest, the pain and the sorrow in their life has almost muted their ability to find comfort when they sit down and open the pages of the Bible. And coming to a conference like this is their heart begging, “Lord, will you turn up the volume of your word and turn down my sorrow in a way that would keep it muting your truth and your comfort for me?” There are also people that are going to be at the conference this weekend and they’re coming because they aren’t sure what they think about the Bible. They’re not sure what they think about God.

I have prayed most of all for those people who are going to be here at this conference because I think that God has something to say to everyone in those categories, and I pray for the ones in the last category. God has you here because he loves you and he has called you here and brought you here because he longs for you to be drawn into sweeter intimacy with him. That’s why he has you here. I think it’s important to remember because God does draw us into intimacy with him, but it is not just to that end. He draws us into intimacy with him so that we might be a blessing and a strength to the body of Christ as a whole.

Love or Nothing

I think that Paul would have a word for us here on that. I think it’s hard to remember when you come to a conference and you’re getting a lot of tools in your belt and you’re getting a lot of information in your head. We might think it’s just about us getting as much as we can and as many free books as we can and then going home and taking it back to your Bible study. I think it’s important for us to keep in mind the intimacy that all of this is helping us with is for the end of building up the body of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 13:2, Paul said, “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

Let me put it in different words that I think might be a little sharper as we sit at a conference on Bible intake. If I have consistent and rich time in the word, if I uncover many mysteries that are here, if I have all knowledge of the Scriptures in the Greek and the Hebrew, and if I go to every seminar that is at the Look at the Book conference and take copious notes, but I am not being more amazed by the God of the Bible and his love for me and growing in my love for him and for his body, then all of this is nothing.

Our intimacy with God is about his body being impacted by it so that together as the body of Christ we are loving him more. It’s like the ripple effect. Everything in the body of Christ has a ripple effect. And we know that. I just heard about a couple that got married recently. We don’t even have to be related to people who are getting married. When we see them up there making a covenant before God and man we know it’s going to get hard, so they’re saying, “When I don’t have any money and when I don’t feel good and when you’re sick and I don’t like you, I am committing to love you until the grave, until death do us part.” We love seeing that and standing beside them and the joy ripples through.

And there is a great ripple effect of sorrow and loss when our friends and the other people in the body of Christ experience that. I know that if you have people in your life who’ve experienced loss, you have probably stayed up with some midnight tears crying over their pain, tossing and turning, praying and interceding for them. There are ripple effects. There are even ripple effects in the body of Christ for sin, even secret, all-by-myself personal sins that I think nobody else sees.

There is a ripple effect that comes from that, because the deception and lies that I have to employ to keep that going absolutely has a ripple effect on the people around me. If not that, the hardening of my heart that is gradually happening and the people around me in the body of Christ are getting a hardened me, and hardened relationship from me. Sin has an effect, and spiritual victory has an effect. I love hearing people talk about how they came to know Jesus Christ for the first time or for their umpteenth time, and fell in love with him even more. All of these things have a ripple effect.

Speaking the Truth in Love

How much more, then, should us figuring out how to look at the book in our personal Bible study have a ripple effect in the body of Christ for people around us? I think that is exactly what God has intended for us, his bride, in the body of Christ. Ephesians 4:15-16 says:

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

That’s where we are in the B-I-B-L-E. That is the book for us. My intake of God’s word, your intake of God’s word and how sharpened it gets over this conference, does not terminate on you. It does not terminate on me. It is the conduit for it to keep going into the body of Christ. I want to help us understand. I think there are three dangers that we can guard against that can keep us as his body from experiencing this strengthening together. I think we have a faulty value, I think we have a faulty practice, and I think we have a faulty heart.

The Danger of American Individualism

The faulty value that I think we suffer from is American individualism. I think this is more a temptation for us in the present day than it wasn’t Old Testament. It was very family-based. I just don’t think they dealt with it as much as we do since we’ve had technology and industrial revolution allowing for us an independence from other people that can contribute to this silo effect of us living in such a way that I don’t really have to rely on anybody else at all. I could get my groceries delivered. I don’t even have to walk outside the door. I can live very independently from people.

In most of Christian history, your walk absolutely depended on the body of Christ. You couldn’t take in the word of God unless you were going to a place where you were communally hearing it and it was being explained to you and you could memorize it together and talk about it for the rest of the week until you came back for another deposit of God’s word.

It was a communal life. The printing press really just came into existence a little over 500 years ago. That sounds like a long time ago, but it was even years after that before people would not be burned at the stake for owning a copy of God’s word. This independent kind of living, including having personal copies of God’s word, is newer even since the beginning of our own country’s founding in 1776. It took a long time before every family had a printed, family Bible. That was something where you came together as a family to read the family Bible together.

There have been great things that come from the internet and we can study it so deeply. But I think that it is sad whenever these innovations and blessings contribute to our spiritual isolation. Privacy has actually, sadly, become one of the highest values for Americans. There was one poll that revealed we are more, almost twice as concerned about privacy as we are about meeting the needs of people around us. Can you imagine someone beside you right now just asking for your phone and flipping through your emails or texts? The audacity! How could someone ask me how I spend my money or my day by day, hour by hour time?

We have needs for privacy and our country has given us some of that. But I think that as we have experienced it, we are a far cry from what we hear about in the body of Christ and how they live together in the Book of Acts where they had everything in common. I think as Christians today, we are more influenced by this individualism than we even realize. Privacy keeps us from being connected to other people. Self-reliance becomes a primary ingredient for my plan for growth, and independence says my walk with the Lord is entirely up to me. It’s the opposite of the interdependence that God is in his very nature. Deference is part of who he is. God the Father has never worked alone without God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. He has been in community since eternity, and he has created us in his image to do the same.

Replacing Jealousy with Humble Reception

I think this individualism shows up for us when we start to hear someone else explaining how their time and the word has been and our first thought is, “Ugh, I didn’t think of that. Mine wasn’t quite as good.” Instead of our being built up and hearing about it and rejoicing in their spiritual health and the benefit that I’m getting from their spiritual health, it becomes about me and my need to do better. And I get envious, competitive, and back to self-reliance. It’s so different from the picture of what God calls us to in the body of Christ. It’s what he says in Ephesians 4:15–16.

The whole body [is] joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

It would be like the pinky finger deciding it needed to be strengthened, but instead of working with the rest of the body, it’s doing individual exercises. But when the pinky needs to be strengthened, it uses the rest of the fingers to pick up a cheeseburger and bring it to my mouth, which chews it and digests it so that the nutrients are getting to my finger for its strength.

If the muscles in my pinky finger are weak, then I pick up one of those squeezy things — a small one for me because my hand is weak — and use the muscles of the other fingers to work on the strength of your pinky finger. Each of us is a member of the body of Christ. Our strength, our Bible intake, our health is not just for us, it is for the body of Christ. I think that our Bible intake is absolutely very much a personal affair, but God never intended for it to be private. He gives us these gifts, like the gift of this conference, that it might be shared.

The Danger of Compartmentalization

I think that we also suffer from a faulty practice, and that faulty practice would be compartmentalization. It’s the idea that I scheduled this little pocket of time for my personal devotions. And then when my time is over, I close my Bible and close my journal and I go off to work, or off to take care of the kids, or off to see a friend, and it is over. I don’t think that that temptation is necessarily unique to our culture. I think that God had it in mind when the Israelites were traveling through the wilderness, and the very place that they pitched their tent had to be oriented around the presence of God and the fact that sacrifice had to be coming up before they could be near his presence. Every tent was facing the Tent of Meeting.

The first thing that they see when they walk out of their tent is where the presence of God dwells and the fact that they needed sacrifice to get to him. The last thing that they would see before they went to bed and closed the tent was the presence of God and sacrifice being made.

When You Walk by the Way

But I think that things are about to get a little crazier, and that is what Moses had in mind when he was writing Deuteronomy 6:5–6:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

This is so important that you would know how to love the Lord your God. Why? Because you are about to leave this place where life has been a little bit boring, and you are about to enter into a land where your enemies will be pressing in on you. You will be continually restless, fearing for your life, not knowing where to lay your head at different points. And in all of this chaos that is coming in, what does God say? He says, “Talk about how to love me. Talk about the fact that you’re my people in your everyday conversation. It’s not going to be the same that it was in the wilderness. Do this.”

I think you especially know this if you’re a parent, the idea of compartmentalizing family devotions or even your personal devotions. Deuteronomy might as well be saying to me, “Talk about it when you’re driving on the road with your children in the car,” because that is when I get the question, “Mommy, why are you growling at the car in front of us?” I’m like, “Well, sweetie, that’s because they’ve had two miles to merge into this lane, but they decided to run mommy off the road so that they could get in there before we get onto 94. And because mommy is not loving her neighbor, like we’ve been memorizing. Will you pray for mommy’s heart?”

And my girls are so ready to pray for mommy’s heart. They’ve gotten really good at it. I think that when we’ve met with the Lord in our personal Bible study, that is just the beginning of a day full of worship experiences that are coming out of that time that we’ve had in the word. If you pay attention and think differently about your day, you’ll find that you have opportunities to talk about it as you walk along the way, as you drive along the road, as you lay down, and as you sit and talk about your day with the people around you.

Speaking Truth to Our Children

I have sweet opportunities to talk with my girls in different ways when my husband leaves town and they pile into bed with mommy when daddy’s gone. One of my favorite conversations was when we had just been reading in Genesis in the morning, and I was looking out the window. We said, “We can see the moon. God sees the moon and God sees me. God loves the moon and God loves me.” I said, “Do you know what, girls? Do you know what God said after he made the moon? Do you remember? It was good. That’s right. It was good. He said it was good after he made plants and trees and animals. But do you know what he said after he made people? He said very good. Girls, isn’t that amazing that God said something different for us? He loves us differently than he loves the rest of his creation. We are special and different and he loves us.”

Can I tell you a verse that’s one of my favorite verses to think about at night? It is Zephaniah 3:17, which says:

The Lord your God is in your midst,
     a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
     he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

I will say, “Oh girls, what does that mean that he rejoices over us with singing? I think it’s like when Daddy makes up songs about you because he loves you so much, don’t you think?” And they talk about the songs, and I ask them, “Can you think about that? God Almighty, who created that moon, he rejoices over you with singing.” Oh that is such a sweet way to go to bed. I think we have to be fighting the compartmentalization in our lives that would keep the honey that we have been tasting in the morning from not being on our lips sweet for the rest of the day and for the people around us.

The Danger of a Faulty Heart

I also think that the thing that fights against us from experiencing the sweet strengthening and upbuilding that we can have and love in the body of Christ is that we have a faulty heart, and that faulty heart comes out with our insecurity. It’s the idea that a lot of people who are sitting in this room, who will be at this conference, think, “I don’t have anything to offer in a conversation with the people around me. I don’t have anything to tell them from what I’ve gotten out of the Bible that they haven’t already gotten or that there hasn’t been a book written about.” Wrong. First Corinthians 12:21–22 says:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable . . .

I think that that word “seem” is very big. If you seem to be a weaker part of the body of Christ, God says you are indispensable. If you think you see people around you who seem to be weaker, they are indispensable. God says something very different to our hearts than what we would think about what we have to offer the body. He needs you in the body. He needs us talking truth in love to each other. I just want to give you an example in my own life.

In Campus Outreach we have a beach project where we take 120 some students to the beach and live in a hotel together and our families go and live in the hotel with them for a few weeks. My husband had taken the girls out to Chick-fil-A, so I had a free morning. I walked out on the balcony and I peeked around at a girl that was a younger girl in college sitting on her balcony. I said, “Hey, have you had any time in the word yet?” She looked at me with terror, like a deer in headlights, and said, “Not yet.” I was like, “Can we have time in the word together? I would love that.” She waited a while. I walked around to her room and we sat on the balcony.

I think that she probably felt really insecure about sitting down to study the Bible with someone who’s been in full-time ministry for 15 years. But can I tell you, that I still benefit so much from sitting with a young lady like this. We were looking at 1 John talking about the fellowship that we have with other believers because of the fellowship that we have in Jesus Christ, and as we redefined what fellowship should look like in the body of Christ she had tears in her eyes. I said, “Can you tell me what the tears are for?” She said, “I’m just overwhelmed because this is such good news.” It was so good for me to see everything with fresh eyes. This is such good news. If you think that you are weaker in the body of Christ, please know that you are not, that you are necessary not only by my experience or the people around you, but because God’s word says you are indispensable.

A Method for Undermining Insecurity

Incidentally, I do think that I have talked to college students and peers and friends and family a lot about how Bible study is going. I know that it is often not just insecurity that would keep us from strengthening the body of Christ together, but it is insecurity that would keep us from even sitting down sometimes to open the Bible.

I just want to tell you that this book, One-to-One Bible Reading by David Helm. It has been really good for a lot of people. We use it in our ministry for people to sit down and talk about the Bible with non-believers in their life. I just issued a challenge two months ago when I found out that I was going to do this. I said, “I just want to hear how people’s experiences are going with Bible study.” And a lot of people, unless you’ve come through a ministry like ours, aren’t normally sitting down to do quiet times together. But I think it’s a good practice.

I called some friends and I talked to some students and some people who’d come through our ministry, and I talked to some family members like my mom, and I said, “I printed out something out of here. This is a really easy method to do. It’s the Swedish method. You just look at a light bulb, a question mark, and an arrow from the few verses that you have. Here are some verses in Colossians. Here are some verses in Mark. Once a week, would you just do 30 minutes sitting down with one other person?” My mom took the challenge. She was like, “I’ll take the Bible study challenge.”

She asked one of the ladies in a prayer meeting that she has once a week. These ladies have been getting together to pray for their family and the world for as long as I can remember. They get together every week, do devotions, and pray. She said, “I’m going to ask one of them.” Well, when she asked that lady to do it, she said, “Well, I think we should all do that. I think we should do it together.” So they went through the Book of Colossians using the Swedish method in their Bible study once a week. I did not bring it with me. I typed all of the things that mom had said that they were saying came out of that time.

Because after they finished Colossians, they moved on to Mark. It was so good. One of the ladies had just mentioned, “I have been in church for a long time and I forgot I could read this by myself without needing an expert teacher to tell me what it means.” We have the Holy Spirit. We can do this. There were so many of them that said, “I have a renewed desire to be getting in the word because I’ve been getting in the word with other people.” I think that it is an exciting thing when you think about how to fight insecurity to find someone else who’s probably struggling with the same thing and say, “Can we do this together? Can we just try 30 minutes once a week for a little while?” Maybe you can take the Bible study challenge.

Gather Honey for Those Around You

Other than that, where is it that we go from here? If I’m saying that I think that we could be missing out on the strengthening that we could be getting in the body of Christ, where do we go from here if that’s the case? I think here are a few helpful things to think through on your own. When you do get in the word and have personal devotions, I think that it can be really helpful to just take a nugget of a little piece of summary from what you’ve gotten. If someone asked you, “What did you read today?” what would you say? Could you say, “This is what encouraged me. This was helpful.”

If you can think when you are getting in the word, how would you tell someone else what I got? I think that can be helpful on an individual level. If you have not been getting in the word, if you are one of the people who has been coming to this conference because it has been dry and long and you have at least one, but maybe three young children, and your sleep is not what it used to be and it is so hard to get in the word, I would say this for you: Would you ask the people around you, “How is your time in the word going? Can you give me some of the honey that you’ve been tasting? That would be so helpful for me.”

I think you would benefit so much from that. And I did. I saw her in the room earlier, but one of the girls that used to live across the street from us who was coming on staff with us walked into my house one day and I said, “I am so tired. I have had such long days. My time in the word is so interrupted and so small. What have you been studying? Give me something.” She said, “It was just this one little phrase from Psalm 56:9 I hadn’t seen before this. It says, ‘This I know, that God is for me.’”

I said, “Thanks. I will take that,” and it has been marinating in my heart, blessing me and the other people that I’ve shared it with in really sweet circumstances of pain and hardship and loneliness. And it was because she shared the honey that she’d been tasting. I think we can start out thinking individually, “Do I have something? How would I share that with somebody? Or if I don’t, how can I get strength from the people around me?” I think you can evaluate the culture that you’re in.

Let the Word of Christ Dwell Richly in You

I would just say, if you think about your life in relationships and concentric circles, start in the tiniest circle. Who are your closest friends? Who are the people that you spend most time with in your family? I have some questions for you. Is it normal or awkward to talk to each other about what you’ve been reading in the Bible? Because if it’s awkward, let’s change that. Are we having conversations that contribute to our being built up by the things we’ve been hearing in the word? Are you learning regularly from the people around you from what they’re studying in the Bible? My husband and I went on a walk the other night and he said, “I have had a great week.” I was like, “Great. I’d love to hear about it. I haven’t.”

He told me that he had been having some great time in the word, rethinking some of the parables and the way that Jesus talked about his ministry and the Holy Spirit, and it was so good for me. I said, “Honey, you have to be including that with our girls. Our girls need to be hearing about that.” We’ve been doing a family devotion, but I was like, “Whatever you’ve got, bring it on.” That’s part of the way my husband and I talk. We can say, “I know you’ve been having some good times in the word. Tell me about what you have been learning.” Are you eager to strengthen and encourage the people around you because of the things that have been encouraging to you?

We do this with every other passion in our lives. If you have seen a good movie, you tell everybody about the movie. If you found a good recipe, you are sharing the recipe. If you know a good restaurant, it’s the same. How much more would we not be sharing the excitement of the good stuff that we are getting when we are in the word? Because when the Bible is our book, when it is the book for us, what effect is that going to have? I think it’s the effect that Colossians 3:16 says; the word of Christ will be dwelling among you richly.

When we are not living under this American individualism perspective, that this is all about me doing better and I have to pull myself up by bootstraps and do better in my walk with the Lord; if I am not just thinking about compartmentalization and I need to schedule more sections of when to get in the word; if we are thinking about our insecurities and leaning in on the body of Christ, we are going to be strengthened in such sweet ways. The word of Christ will be dwelling richly among us. We will be singing Psalms. We will be increasing in our worship throughout the day. We are going to be increasing in our thanksgiving.

Multiplied Thanksgiving

When you hear about other things that people have heard in the word that bless you, it increases our thanksgiving, and it helps us in the daily grind, salting the daily grind of changing diapers and wiping off mouths. It can take the truth that we’ve learned into the depths. You know this if you have a teaching background. It’s called Bloom’s Taxonomy. If you can explain to someone else what it is that you’ve heard, then you know it better than you knew it before. That is so huge. That’s why I say take a nugget from what you’ve doing. You might say, “I had a really good time at Starbucks. I had two hours and had a great time reading the Bible.” Someone might say, “Oh, what was so good about it?” You might say, “I don’t know. Give me a minute,” and then you have to go back and look at your notes. That’s okay. I think that is the way that our brains work.

But if you can start thinking about how to talk about the things that you’ve been learning, not only does it bless them, but it goes into the depths for you and blesses you in sweeter ways. I think that it helps our understanding. A friend of mine sat and talked about Micah 6:8, and she was asking, “How is it that we do justice and love mercy? Justice just seems harsh.”

I was so glad that I could look at her and say, “Are you serious? You’re doing it. You have adopted a little one that was fatherless and orphaned and he is in your home and you are loving on him. You are a picture of doing justice and loving mercy, and adding more to that.” That was so great for her understanding of God’s word to come in and bless her in a deeper way. It helps us remember every day. You don’t even have to leave your home. We are bombarded with messages that are screaming to us about what defines us and what we should fear and how we should live and what we should have.

We are more victorious together in fighting against those lies when we are reminding each other and asking, “How are you doing on the truth up here? You seem a little distressed. How are we doing with hiding God’s word in our heart and sharing what we’re learning?” It really helps in conviction.

Sharing the Word

I was leaving the church a few Sundays ago and had asked something to one of the girls that I hadn’t seen in a while. I was like, “Hey, newlywed, how’s it going?” She was like, “We’re okay.” I said, “Well, tell me what’s less than great? Why is it just okay? Are you guys okay?” She said, “No, marriage is great, but we feel like we’ve just been so caught up in finances and work and making sure we’ve got money and things that we need to get our house together. To be honest, it has just felt a little overwhelming to be pressed in by materialism. And our time in the word has been really poor. So the other day I just sat down and looked in Romans and do you know what it said? Sin is death. And that is what I thought. My materialism and our financial struggles, when we get caught up in that and walk away from the Lord, it is death.” As she talked about that, I gave her a hug. I thought, “I am so glad. Victory. Oh, I love that.”

I drove home thinking for myself, “Lord, where is their death in my own heart and life that has been unexamined? Because her conviction did not bring condemnation for either one of us, it brought healing as we talked and prayed for each other. I think it helps us when we are far away in droughts and in shame and in apathy. When you are hurting and you are alone, talk to the people about what they’re seeing in God’s word. It will bless you. It has been an opportunity for me to share the gospel with a very sweet lady who is older across the street from me. She’s not a believer. We’ve discussed that.

She said, “We believe everything you do except for Jesus.” At which point I told her, “That is why I pray for you.” I think that is the main thing about what God is saying is where we get our hope. She has experienced great tragedy in her life. As her husband is slipping away and I pray for her and see her, there was a group of women that came to my house, and one of them shared a devotion about how God sees us and hears us and he’s with us in our pain. She drove by that afternoon and I walked out.

I said, “Oh, I wanted to tell you, I thought about you this morning and I prayed for you again, because we were doing a Bible study about how God sees us and hears us in our pain and he’s with us. I want you to know I love you. I’m so sorry about your loss and about the weight of what you’re living under.” Our Bible intake does not terminate on us. It is for the health of the people around us.

I will end on this thought, because I think that if you are like me, after having written this talk, I am feeling a bit discouraged about the way that I have not been offering strength and upbuilding and love to the body of Christ.

This is what I would say, over 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ was ripped out of the community that he had with God the Father so that he could drink every last drop of God’s wrath on us, even for the ways that we do not love each other. Every last drop was drained from that cup. When Jesus Christ cried out, “It is finished,” and was raised from the dead, the ripple effect that came from that was a tsunami over all of the ways that we do not love the body of Christ the way we should. We are free to fall and fumble in figuring out how to let our personal intimacy with God be the collective glory of his bride, the body of Jesus Christ.