Andrew Collins writes in his article, “How Art Moved Me Beyond the Cliché,” about overcoming a blasé familiarity with Scripture. “I recently read through the Psalms—one song every morning or evening. But when I got to Psalm 23, something happened. I read through it in a minute or two, and not a single substantive thought went through my head. When I reached the end, my mind was blank.
“Why? Because it’s Psalm 23! Everyone knows it. I’ve probably had it memorized since I was 7 years old. Over the years, the psalm has dissolved, for me, into a rote sequence of words. What a shame. Gratefully, I remember Jon Foreman’s song ‘House of God Forever.'”
I’ve had a similar revitalizing through Michael Card’s songs from the Psalms in his album, The Way of Wisdom. His renderings of Psalm 23 and 139 have stuck with me for twenty years.
It’s a very real problem. But I’ve seen it work the other way too. Have you ever been in a situation where you wondered what to do or what to think, and a scripture passage you’ve known all you life suddenly made sense to you for the first time? Kind of an “ah-ha” moment?
Yes, that’s marvelous. I think there are many proper truths that become cliches to us through overfamiliarity, and some of us complain about Christianese and pat answers, but some of those pat answers a solid truths we just don’t want to hear in the moment, or worse, we have never understood them for the proper truths they are. We see their shadow and reject them before they come around the corner.