Putting Down the Highlighter

The Bible was near me most of the time.

I had a teal green, leather bound copy that I got in high school. It had my name in gold letters on the front. It became less of a book and more of a map. The pages were soft, the gilded edges worn off, evidence of years of use, inside and out. The colors had their own stories. Yellow for something I wanted to remember. Purple for a characteristic about God. Green for the ways to grow. Pink for something that stuck out to me personally. Certain passages were underlined because they mattered to me, and sometimes I couldn’t remember why they were underlined until I read them again.

I had a habit of putting that Bible in a place that I would see it. On my bedside table. On my desk. Not just because I needed to remember that I owned it, but because I wanted it to be in a place where I would stop what I was doing to read it. It went with me to church, to youth group, and even occasionally to school.

I wanted to be a person who noticed things in Scripture. Who remembered. Who went back. Who kept learning.

So I highlighted. And underlined. And starred things. And highlighted more.

The past few years, I have stopped highlighting altogether.

Last Sunday, Pastor Isaac preached from a big chunk of Colossians 2.

Paul warns us about a collection of wrong turns: hollow philosophy, rituals, powers and authorities, and man-made rules about food, festivals, and Sabbaths. He even warns about things that appear to be spiritual but are really just self-imposed worship and false humility. If you want to know how to think, speak, or act right, just hang out with Jesus. Stay rooted in Him.

That is especially important because religion has a long history of putting guilt on people for things that God actually never required. Something can look very spiritual and still miss the whole point. What caught my attention was It felt like Paul was describing a system that looked a lot like the one I grew up in.

I grew up in a very rules-centered version of Christianity. There were a lot of things that you did, and a lot of things that you didn’t do, if you wanted to be a good Christian. Following those rules made me feel more spiritual and more serious about my faith. Maybe even a little better than the people who didn’t seem to be trying quite as hard.

Inward disciplines came easy for me. I liked digging into what a passage meant and spending time in meditation and prayer. I enjoyed having a quiet time and checking the box that said, Yes, I did that today!

And at the time, I thought that ease was a sign of strength. I thought that maybe that was what spiritual maturity looked like.

It has taken me years to realize that something coming easily and something being healthy are not necessarily the same thing.

At the church I attended in Lexington, I was in a  leadership class where the senior pastor gave an assignment to have a color coding system for our daily Bible reading. So certain colors represented certain things in our reading, and my Bible slowly became a color coded record of what I was learning.

And I loved it!

But, I also developed a habit that is a little harder for me to admit now: I would sometimes take my Bible with me to Sunday services and leave it open on a chair next to me so I could make sure it was visible.

I wasn’t necessarily thinking, Look how spiritual I am, but looking back I can see that there was some of that in there. And the uncomfortable part of that is that I thrived in that system.

The more disciplined I was, the more spiritual I felt. The more I studied, marked, remembered, and practiced, the more I felt like I was getting Christianity right. From the inside, performative discipline didn’t feel fake, it genuinely felt like I was flourishing.

That’s what makes Paul’s words in Colossians 2 hit me differently now.

“Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” and then he describes these practices as having an appearance of wisdom with their “self-imposed worship and false humility” (Colossians 2:20-23).

My highlighter wasn’t a metaphor for this passage. It was an ordinary, contemporary example of what Paul was talking about - taking something that can be good and turning it into a measuring stick of spiritual growth and then quietly believing that that measure makes me more acceptable, more disciplined, or more spiritual than someone else.

What’s interesting to me now is the difference between the disciplines I practiced publicly and the ones I didn’t.

Bible study was visible. I could carry my Bible with me, open it up on a table, underline something then highlight it, and then let others see the evidence of my spiritual life.

Fasting was different. I really only remember doing it corporately. When I was in youth group in high school we would do it as a part of praying together or for something that was happening in the world. I don’t remember making fasting a personal practice, just between me and God.

In Matthew 6:16-18, Jesus just assumes that his followers would fast and he tells them to do it in secret and then also that they should wash their faces and not make it obvious to other people that they’re fasting.

My problem wasn’t the Bible study, it wasn’t the highlighting, it wasn’t discipline. Those can all be good gifts. The problem was what was happening when a good thing became a visible way of demonstrating how serious I was about my faith.

Invisibility isn’t a magic safeguard against performance. I didn’t need anyone else to feel proud of me, I had the mental checkbox to do that. Nobody ever saw that checkmark, but it still worked as a measuring stick. But, there is something built into a hidden practice that makes performance harder to sustain. A secret fast doesn’t earn me any credit with the people around me.

A highlighted Bible carried around in public can.

So recently, I stopped highlighting. I stopped underlining too.

Part of me did it as an act of humility, I wanted to loosen my grip on the whole system of measuring myself by what I had marked. I want to read Scripture without turning the page into a record of how well I am doing. And that feels like freedom.

But I’ve also had to wonder if I just created a new rule. Maybe I’ve taken the old system and turned it upside down. Maybe the new standard is: I don’t highlight because I have learned that highlighting can become performance. And now I can quietly measure myself by how free I am from the things I used to measure myself by.

That thought is uncomfortable to me. I don’t think that I intentionally judge people who highlight or underline their Bible. But maybe. I don’t have the answer for that yet.

There is another image in Colossians 2 that I hadn’t really connected to all this before: “circumcision not performed by human hands” (Colossians 2:11). And that took me back to John Wesley.

In 1733, Wesley preached The Circumcision of the Heart, years before his Aldersgate experience (a moment that he later described as a profound awakening of faith). He used Romans 2:29 to describe the marks of a heart truly changed by God as "humility, faith, hope, and charity.” Humility comes first. That word stopped me.

Paul, in this same passage, warns about “false humility.” Wesley is pointing towards the real thing. False humility can become another religious performance. True humility looks different: it begins when we stop trying to prove ourselves and let God do His work in us.

That makes me look at my highlighter story differently. The problem wasn’t the Bible study or the highlighting. The problem was what I was asking those things to prove: that I was disciplined, serious, and doing Christianity well. I have taken something that could have been a means of grace and turned it into evidence of my spiritual worth.

The outward practice had become a substitute for the inner work. Maybe that is what I have been trying to learn: not less discipline, but discipline that makes space for God to change my heart, instead of letting the discipline prove that my heart was already changed.

Wesley’s definition of humility is even more sharp: "Humility, a right judgment of ourselves, cleanses our minds from those high conceits of our own perfection.”

High conceits of our own perfection. I had already written about that without having the words for it: I thought that ease was a sign of strength. I thought, “Maybe this is what it looks like to be spiritually mature.” Oof. Wesley had a name for it.

So is discipline still in? I think it is. Richard Foster opens Celebration of Discipline with a chapter called “Door to Liberation.” The disciplines, he says, aren’t a checklist for earning God’s approval, they're practices that make room for us to encounter God and be changed by Him.

Wesley called it the “means of grace.” Prayer, Scripture, the Lord’s Supper, and fasting aren’t the engine of grace. They are places where we put ourselves in a posture to receive it.

That distinction has become important to me. A rule tells me how I am doing. A means of grace helps me receive what God is doing in me.

The outward action can look exactly the same. I can read my Bible because I want to be seen as someone who reads the Bible. Or I can read it because I want God to meet me there.

Same action, different posture. So yes, discipline is still in. I am just learning that it has be held as a means, not a measure.

There was one part of Pastor Isaac’s sermon that I had to take a little further for myself. The sermon focused on Paul’s warning not to let other people judge us, and that is an important freedom. But then I had to ask myself what that freedom looks like from the other side, when I am the one who stopped. Because if I don’t want to be judged for my freedom, I have to be willing to offer that same freedom to someone else.

Even if someone is still holding the highlighter.

That’s not a correction of Pastor Isaac’s sermon as much as the next step I needed to take with God. Paul is clear about not letting someone else’s rules define me, but I don’t think that the freedom stopped there. It has to cut both ways. If I don't want someone else’s rules to measure my faith, I can’t turn my freedom from those rules into a new standard for measuring someone else.

If highlighting is no longer something I need, that doesn’t make my choice a measure of someone else’s faithfulness. I don’t want to trade one measuring stick for another.

So the highlighter is still sitting on my desk. I haven’t thrown it away. Maybe I’ll pick it up again someday. I just want to be more honest with myself about why I am reaching for it when I do.

And maybe that’s the question I am left with today: not whether a practice is right or wrong, but what I am asking that practice to do for me.

The disciplines in my life may look different from yours. But what if we ask ourselves: Is this a rule I am using to measure myself (and maybe someone else)? Or is it a means of grace, something I’m using to make room to meet God?

I don’t know that there’s always an easy answer. I am still trying to figure it out. Maybe you are too.

This Week
I'm not going to tell you to start or stop a spiritual practice this week, that would just hand you a new measuring stick to replace the old one.

Instead, pick one discipline you already practice, whatever it is: reading your Bible, praying, fasting, serving, showing up on Sunday. Before you do it this week, pause for a second and ask yourself honestly: what am I hoping this proves? Am I using it to measure myself against who I used to be, or against someone else? Or am I using it to make room for God to actually meet me there?

You don't need a tidy answer. Just notice.


A Prayer
Lord, thank You for tearing down the rules we build to prove ourselves to You and to everyone watching.

Thank You for the freedom Paul writes about—for freedom from measuring our worth by what we've read, marked, or given up.
Keep teaching us true humility. Not the kind that quietly congratulates itself for being humble, but the kind that simply stops trying to prove anything at all.

Help us hold the disciplines You've given us loosely enough that they remain means of grace, not measures of who's doing better.

And give us the same grace for others that we're asking You to give to us, for the ones still holding their highlighters, and for the parts of us that still want to be seen.

We don't have this figured out. We're still learning.

Meet us here.

Amen.