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Key Bible Verse: "Write my answer in large, clear letters on a tablet, so that a runner can read it and tell everyone else" Habakkuk 2:2. Bonus Reading: Acts 8:26-34

Growing up, my only Bible was the King James Version. I studied it to gather data for bull-session arguments to refute or convert my friends. But when I read devotionally, I took in the words about the way I received an IV when my appendix was removed: the medicine needled directly into my vein, bypassing the brain. Most of the everyday tone, the all-encompassing story, the earthy poetry was lost in translation.

But then a London pastor, J.B. Phillips, attempted to put the Bible into the language of the youths in his parish. His Letters to Young Churches, a paraphrase of the New Testament Epistles, was published in England in 1947. I got my copy the next year as a high school student. In marvelous sentences and jolting metaphors, Phillips carried me out of the cramped world of "figuring out" the text into the immense world of a Bible I could read!

As Phillips continued to translate the rest of the New Testament and a first installment of the Old, I avidly bought each new volume. Each expanded and deepened my sense of and involvement in the biblical world—where most of what takes place is invisible but with visible effects.

—Eugene Peterson in Eat This Book

My Response: Have I found a Bible translation that brings God's Word alive to me?

Thought to Apply: I felt like an electrician re-wiring an ancient house, without being able to "turn the mains off."—J.B. PHILLIPS (describing his experience of translating)

Adapted from Eat This Book (Eerdmans, 2006) by permission.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine. Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

Help me feel the living intensity of Your Word; make me responsive to its radical demands.

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