Sunday, May 28, 2006

The Bible wasn't written to you

The Bible wasn't written to you:

"The Bible isn't a fortune cookie that you can crack open and get out a pithy little message that's going to help you through the day. Instead it is a collection of books, poems, histories, tragedies and more and if you want to 'apply it to your life' you've first got to consider how that particular message was meant to apply to someone else's life.

That's right, the Bible wasn't written to you. It was written to the people of Israel, and Philemon, and Theophilus and the church at Corinth. But that ain't you. So you're reading someone else's mail. Or listening in on one half of a phone conversation. If you want to apply it to your life, first you've got to approach the text carefully, even humbly and ask, 'What was the original author saying to the original readers and why?' That's not an easy question. You won't be able to answer it in just five minutes of Bible reading a day. You won't be able to answer that question by jumping from one section of the Bible to the next as you go through your Bible reading plan.

Imagine reading the Sunday paper like you read your Bible. Monday you read one paragraph of the front page, then you read one paragraph of the sports section, now jump over to the opinion page and read a paragraph there. That's all for today. On Tuesday you can continue reading the lead story and find out how the game ended and read some more of the op-ed piece. Is that the way you read the paper? Why not? Because chopping up the Sunday paper like that destroys the message. "

Read the rest of this excellent article here

2 comments:

cybeRanger said...

Praise the Lord for your inspiring blog.
May our Heavenly Father use you mightily for His Glory!


Christ in
You,
Beloved,
Eternally
Redeemed,
Annointed,
New creation,
Greatly
Empowered &
Recharged!

Anonymous said...

Thanks Leon for bringing this article out. I agree with you that the Bible have been misused in this way. I would like however to bring it one step further to say that sometimes the entire gospel which is about the Glory and Grace of our Lord Jesus have also so often been made to be about "me" as central. Its just the nature of the fallen man.

We were saved and called out only by His grace to bring Glory to Him by delighting in Him.