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You're reading your Bible and a thought strikes you. It's as though a light shines on a few words of the text, and you suddenly understand exactly – not just what it means, but what it means to you.
It might be life-changing, or it might be relatively trivial. Whichever it is, you have the sense that God has spoken to you. So what do you do about it?
The chances are you read on, perhaps pray about it, close your Bible and get on with what you're doing. And the chances are also that you forget about it; life's busy, and that moment of illumination doesn't last.
There's an incredibly simple way of storing it: write it down. A few scribbled notes can be enough to recall it to us next time we read the same passage, and the obvious place to scribble is in the Bible itself. For various reasons, many people don't do that. For some, it just goes against the grain; the Bible's for reading, not for writing in. For others, it's because there's no room – the margins are too small and the writing won't fit. One answer for them is to try something like the new NIV Journaling Bible (Hodder, £21.99), which has wide margins designed to allow readers plenty of space for notes, doodles and reflections.
Here are three reasons why journalling is a good idea.
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1. It fixes insights in our minds. The act of writing something down can crystallise a thought and make it easier to remember. It's a spiritual discipline in itself: it helps us think issues through and formulate them more clearly in our minds. What we write doesn't have to be long or complicated – our Bible journal is only meant for us, not for a wider audience – but it helps us make sense of our feelings and thoughts.
2. It records our relationship with God. Many of us have family photograph albums – digital ones, nowadays – that we can use to track how we and others have changed over the years. We like to see ourselves as we were and compare that with how we are. We like to see how far we've come. Or as children grow, parents like to mark their heights with charts on a wall: it's a record of growth. Writing in our Bibles is like that: we can look back at something we thought years ago, and realise we might think differently now.
3. It's a resource for ministry. Not all of us are called to a pulpit or a leadership ministry, but we're all called on to seek wisdom (Proverbs 4:7). Writing down what's revealed to us as we study God's word is a way of building up our knowledge of the Scriptures and what they say to us today. We can all share these insights and bless others with what God has shown us.
God does speak to us as we read His word. Writing down what he says is also a way of holding ourselves accountable to Him, because all too often we do forget what He says and we don't put His word into practice.
And as James says in his letter: "Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do" (1:23-25).
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