Yesterday I wrote about how travel can impact our lives. I used the example of travelling to a very different country in East Africa, or interacting with a very different time and world in the former Communist bloc, and then the very different time, world and authority of the Bible.

Here are some follow-up observations that are true of all these “worlds” . . .

1. It is hard to learn the lesson from here. An East African tribe and environment is typically only familiar as an image on a nature documentary. An Eastern European recollection of living under the tyranny of communism generally feels like a report from history that is moving further away from our time. In the same way, the Bible seems very long ago and far away. And from here, it is hard to feel the impact that we should be feeling. That is why we must read our Bibles with imaginations both informed and active, and our hearts both eager and responsive.

2. It is easy to dismiss lessons that feel remote. While most would not express it verbally, there is an automatic tendency to dismiss lessons from contexts outside our own. That might explain why missionary reports of native sacrificial hospitality tend to garner smiles rather than change. That might also explain why the warning of communism tends to fall on deaf ears even when the contemporary plan of the elites to reshape the world is not hidden from sight. That might be a big part of why so many Christians feel so little impact from their Bible engagement – it simply remains too remote.

3. It takes humility to learn lessons from outside my small world. Humans always tend to think that their little neighbourhood is really the centre of the universe. And we tend to think our age is marked by the greatest level of sophistication ever known on earth. So, by default, our minds don’t believe we have anything substantial to learn from over there, or back then. Thus we can essentially ignore the tribal church leader with their insights on life, or the former communist church member with their warnings about the signs we are ignoring, or the biblical writer with their revelation of God. Human nature, naturally, will always scorn even the revelation of God himself. Our natural instinct is not humility and teachability when it comes to God’s Word. Hence the necessity of humility in genuine Christianity.

And so, what is true of travel geographically or historically, is even more true of our daily incursions into the world of God’s revelation. Be sure to go. Be open and eager to learn. Be humble and teachable. Be thankful that we have the Bible in our language – we don’t need to fly across oceans, or have access to the right people, or travel through time. We can open our Bible with open hearts, and enter into a world that God designed and inspired to rock our world!