Dr. Burt Nanus recalls that on his first day in engineering school in 1953, a professor advised the entering freshmen to buy the best slide rule they could afford. The professor told them, “You will be dependent on it all your professional life.” Nanus dutifully bought a slide rule. Yet after he graduated and went on to MIT, he never used it. The calculator had taken its place.
In a day when technology advances at an ever quickening rate, it seems that nothing remains the same. What was the style yesterday is already old fashioned. And yesterday’s technolgy is today’s junk. But there is one standard that has never changed because it has its root in truth: The Bible. Its stories may seem culturally irelevant in the King James Version, but the message is as fresh and relevant today as it ever was. Get a modern English version and learn about life. What have you read today?
Tags: Bible, relevance, truth
Part of the training to be a US Secret Service agent includes learning to detect counterfeit money. Agents-in-training make a thorough study of the genuine bills – not the phonies – so that they can spot the fake currency immediately because of its contrast to the real thing.
The child of God can learn a lesson from this. While it is helpful to study false religions and be fully aware of their dangerous dogmas, the best defense against such error is to know the truth, so we will spot it at once and won’t fall for it.
Today many are being led astray because they don’t recognize how they are being deceived. So, let’s handle the real thing as often as possible.
Tags: Bible, counterfeit
An explorer discovered an ancient sundial. Recognizing its value, he restored it to its origianal condition and put it in a museum where it would be shielded from the elements – including the sun! Although he valued it, he never used it.
Is this a picture of how many Christians treat the Bible: valued but unused? I think many see the Bible as valuable, but as requiring a lot of effort to understand and apply. People really feel that they are reading about the long ago and far away. Most people think the Bible just can’t compete with Time or Newsweek.
Do you value the Book or do you use the Book? The real test of value is in the use. Agree or disagree?
Tags: Bible, value
A couple of weeks ago I shared in church the story of opening the sunroof on our new car while going through the car wash. Everyone had a good laugh at our expense. If we had only read the instruction manual first, we would’ve known which buttons to push. Come to think about it, most of our mistakes are the result of not reading the instructions first.
Much of the pain in our life could be averted if we just read the instructions in The Book first. God loves each of us with a love that cannot be measured. Because He does not want us to hurt, He gave us some wise counsel for living in the Bible.
The Book says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect [mature] thoroughly furnished unto all good works (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
Old Chinese proverb say: “He who ignores instructions could end up in hot water!”
Tags: Bible, instructions, mistake
When a team of Christians visited Stavropol, Russia, in 1994 to hand out Bibles, a local citizen said he recalled seeing Bibles in an old warehouse. They had been confiscated in the 1930s when Stalin was sending believers to the gulags. Amazingly, the Bibles were still there.
Among those who showed up to load them into trucks was a young agnostic student just wanting to earn a day’s wage. But soon he slipped away from the job to steal a Bible. A team member went looking for him and found him sitting in a corner weeping.
Out of hundreds of Bibles, he had picked up one that bore the handwritten signature of his own grandmother. Persecuted for her faith, she had no doubt prayed often for her family and her city. God used that grandmother’s Bible to convict that young man.
The language of the Spirit is coincidence. Do you have a coincidental story relating to a Bible?
Tags: Bible, grandmother, persecution
Can there be a mistake in the Bible? History records quite a mistake in an eighteenth century printing of the scripture. The command in the Gospel of John to sin no more had been printed as “sin on more.” This simple one-letter reversal obviously changed the entire meaning of the text and subsequently had to be revised and the wrongly worded Bibles pulled off the market.
In 1712 an Oxford edition of the Bible printed a chapter heading in the Gospel of Luke referring to a vineyard gardener as, “The Parable of the Vinegar.” And a gender mix-up in a 1923 version produced, “A man may not marry his grandmother’s wife.” These blunders make it appear that the Bible cannot be trusted. But I think its printers who cannot be trusted. God has never made a mistake.
What arguments have you recently heard about why the Bible is untrustworthy?
Tags: Bible, mistake
Tonight Show host Jay Leno did “man-on-the-street” interviews. One night back in 1999 he collared some young people to ask them questions about the Bible.
“Can you name one of the Ten Commandments?” he asked two college-age women. One replied, “Freedom of speech?” Mr. Leno said to the other, “Complete this sentence: Let he who is without sin….” Her response was, “have a good time?”
Mr. Leno then turned to a young man and asked, “Who, according to the Bible, was eaten by a whale?” The confident answer was, “Pinocchio.”
Are you laughing or crying? We live in a culture where the basics of Christianity are absent. What is the dumbest misunderstanding of scripture you’ve recently heard?
Tags: Bible, humor, ignorance