Dusting Off our Bibles

Dusting off our Bibles

It’s Sunday morning, time to go to church, and we need to find our Bible.  Where did we leave that book?  This is not a good thing, that we are not keeping our Bibles well read, worn out around the bindings with pages fraying.  It may be time to dust off our Bibles, and our brains so that we can read and believe what God intends for this life of ours.  It’s actually not fiction, not romance, not sci-fi or some other genre of book.  It’s God’s own instructions on how to live a life that will never end. 

His story begins with a heavenly place where we commune regularly with our God.  He rewards us with this thing called “free will” so that it can be our decision to worship and follow Him.  This seems easy enough until we are tempted to have just as much knowledge that He has, so we eat the apple.  Sin comes to the world and the rest is history, or His Story.  He begins to show us His grace and mercy through the use of some of the least expected individuals, the prophets chosen to deliver His Word, and His people from slavery.  These individuals were not the kings and rulers, not the prominent citizens, not even the most believable of the clan, but He used them to get our attention.  But we still wanted things our way.  We still wanted to take what was rightfully ours, to use up what was rightfully ours, and to rule in a way that guaranteed our success.  And so we wandered around for 40 years or so. 

If we pay close attention to the story, we can see that what we are doing now, where we are headed and what the future may hold, was not what God intended.  We see a very dry place, a very sandy, windy, hot and dusty land ahead of us.  This is not a good thing, and in order to make the change, we need to dust off our Bibles.  We need to start taking the Word of God as the Word of God, and not the work of fiction or sci-fi we like to make it at times.  We should be reading God’s instruction manual for our lives and applying it daily, not just on Sunday, and not just when we feel we have the time. 

Around 2000 years ago, God sent His Son to us, to save us and to tell us that we were heading in the wrong direction.  We questioned, we argued and we debated His truth, His identity and His directions, even when He told us who He was and why we should believe Him.  “And if anyone hears My words and does not believe, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.” John 12:47(NKJV)  Jesus Christ, the Son of God, walked this earth for a brief time in history.  He knew just why He was sent here.  He understood the reason for His existence and He tried desperately to get us to see things God’s way, and not our way. 

But just like Adam and Eve in the garden, we ignore the warnings and we do things our way.  We just go about our business, never noticing that we may be headed to that very hot, dry place, and that we may be there for a very long time.  It’s time to dust off the Bible.  It’s time to allow God’s teachings to become who we are, and not just some work of fiction to be enjoyed on a lazy summer afternoon. 

“in the world, not of the world”