This is one of my favorite quotes from The Office (sorry for the quality):
Do you ever feel this way after reading Scripture?
Sometimes the word feels like somebody “took my heart, and dropped it into a bucket of boiling tears”. Then I turn to another Scripture and it feels like it “is hitting my soul in the crotch with a frozen sledgehammer”. Then my third reading in Scripture “starts punching me in the grief bone”.
Conviction hurts. And the Holy Spirit is fond of using the Word to bring conviction. Indeed “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword…all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account”.
Though that is on occasion my experience I am convinced that it may NOT be the right way for a believer to read the Scriptures. Yes, Scripture brings conviction; but it is never meant to stop there. If my reading of Scripture feels like a frozen sledgehammer to the crotch then chances are I am not applying Jesus.
Consider what Paul says in Romans 15,
“For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope”.
God’s Word is not meant to merely punch us in the grief bone. The Scriptures are meant to give us hope because they are meant to point us to Jesus—who is Himself our Hope.
