B-I-B-L-E

“That’s the book for me. I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E.” This is from a song taught to young children about the Bible in Bible school and in Sunday school too. Although, today was the first time I heard it.

The point is that, as young children, we believe the words of the song and the Bible as well. As we grow older and are taught in schools and in college that it isn’t true, we tend to walk away from that “child-like faith”. As we become adults we “just don’t have enough time” for the Bible and its teachings. Why?

Mostly, it is because the world around us doesn’t have time for it and the teachings of the Bible don’t correspond with the “values” of the world. In other words, “life gets in the way of our belief in God”, at least until we feel that we actually NEED Him. Growing up causes us to lose our child-like faith or rather it gets trampled by all of our “education” to the point of being forgotten until God gets our attention in some way.

The Bible didn’t come together as a collection until the Council of Nicea in the fourth century. A printed Bible with both the Old and the New Testaments wasn’t printed in English until the 1600s. So for 1200 years the Bible was written or printed in Latin and only the “clergy” was allowed to read it and tell their congregations what they should hear and know about God and His commandments and laws. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

My point is this: God gave every book and every letter of the Bible to mankind as our textbook to learn more about Him. It is not just an “instruction” book or a book of rules to live by. God’s Word is our guide but it is so much more than that. His Holy Spirit can make every book in it come alive and be instructive to you and me in ways that a book off the shelf can’t. But the Holy Spirit can only teach you through His Word if you are a Christian and have Him living inside your heart. If you don’t believe in Jesus as your Savior and have the Holy Spirit as your Teacher, then the Bible is just another book and it makes very little sense to you at all.

Read the book of John in the New Testament and ask God to show you what you need to know and Who you need in your life. Then, read the book of Luke and Acts and go from there to the end of the New Testament. Once you have finished that, then go back to the book of Genesis and read the whole Bible, asking the Holy Spirit to show you, Jesus, in these books that were written many hundreds of years before Jesus was born. He is there and your life will never be the same again.