Here is my message from Sunday. The text was
2 Timothy 3:14-17:
I want you to think about the first
Bible you ever received, or that you can remember having. Who gave it to you?
How old where you when receive it? What did it look like? Was it a children’s
Bible or a regular Bible? Did it have a special place in your house or room
where it was kept? Was it treated like any other book or was it treated
special? Did your family have other copies of the Bible? How where they treated
and where were they kept? Do you still own that Bible? If not, do you know what
happened to it? I want you to think about that Bible, and then turn to someone
near you and tell each other about that Bible…. I knew that my first Bible was
special in some way, although I don’t remember anyone telling me it was
special, it was just sort of conveyed. It was different than other books. I
knew the stories where special, although I couldn’t tell you why. I mean if
nothing else it’s pretty rare to have a book read in public any more and yet
this book is read from every week in worship, and we don’t hear from other
books in that way. But no one ever said that we read it differently or treat it
differently than other books, but we did, and no one ever said this is how to
read the Bible. And I’m willing to guess that’s true for most of you as well.
And I’m not talking about Sunday school classes that dealt with stories,
because they might have actually made approaching scripture even more troubling
or confusing. And so today in our series we are going to be looking at how to
read scripture, and please note that I can’t get to everything and so some of
this will be a 30,000 foot view of reading scripture.
But let’s start
with some basics. The Bible is widely considered the best selling book of all
time, and large numbers of people own a copy, besides for being found in hotel
rooms, and also report believing what it says to be true. But it might be like Stephen
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. A book that everyone has, but few people
actually read, and surveys show us this general sense of misinformation. So,
for example, 10% of people say that Joan of Ark was Noah’s wife. Only 1/3 can
identify that Jesus delivered the sermon on the mount, and more than that think
that Billy Graham gave it. 40% believe that both the old and the new testament
were written a few years after Jesus’ death, and a not insignificant percentage
believe that it was all written in English. Or as a Texas woman was reported to
have said, although it’s probably just apocryphal, “If English was good enough
for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.” It was not written in English, not a
word, but instead it’s in Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible, or the Old testament,
and Greek for the New Testament.
