The Heart of the Bible

"First learn what's in your heart; THEN learn what's in the Bible".

This was the advice of the priest immediately after the first liturgy I ever attended.  The above sentence isn't exactly how he conveyed the information to me; he actually used gestures for the heart and the Bible and used the word "here" during those gestures.  I would need to put it on video to describe how it looked.   Still, if I had never heard this sentence and had this experience, I would never have become an Orthodox Christian.
What this experience did is show me that the Bible is not a story book.  It is not an educational textbook.  If you look at it as only a book, it can only be considered a reference library at best, because, like a library, it is a collection of books from different times from various authors.  The truth the priest revealed to me that Sunday morning, though, is that the Bible is so much more.
It told me that your attitude determines how the Bible speaks to you.  If you read it full of anger, you will find a vindictive purpose.  If you read it to debunk the faith, you will take from it the disbelief you started with.  If you read it to find contradictions, then you will find them.  If you read it only for an intellectual pursuit, you will be satisfied.  If you read it for legalistic purposes, they are there.
Amazingly, though, it also has the effects opposite of those attitudes I stated above.  If you look in the Bible for love, you will find it there in abundance.  If you look for truth, then you will find it in the words of the Gospel.  If you look for wonder, you will find that wonder in the life story of Jesus and in the Acts of the Apostles.  If you look for joy, you will find it in every act of compassion Jesus showed to those considered the worst of society by the elites of the time.
I still haven't read the Bible in it's entirety, though I am reading more of it at least weekly, and I don't think that it is necessarily a condemnation of either myself or the Bible. I am reading more about the lives of the saints and the early church fathers, and that is not to be discouraged, either.   What this reading is doing, though is allowing me to see just how my heart, and what is in it, has an effect on everything in life.  That, I think, is the message I was given that Sunday morning after my first Liturgy.  That is the heart of the Bible, and of Orthodoxy.
God Bless.