Let the Reader Beware
Theme of the Week: God's Word on His Terms
Eugene Peterson
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
 1 of 1
Key Bible Verse: Jesus replied, "What does the law of Moses say? How do you read it?" Luke 10:26. Bonus Reading:Luke 10:25-37
Putting a set of keys in an adolescent's hands, giving him a Honda, and saying "Drive it" would be foolish. There's far more to driving than turning a key in the ignition and stepping on the accelerator. There's velocity, inertia, and gravity; surfaces and obstructions; snow, ice and rain; other vehicles and drivers, drunk and sober; traffic regulations and the highway patrol. The danger is using the technology ignorantly, endangering our lives and the lives of those around us; or, intoxicated with the power that the technology gives, using it ruthlessly and violently.
Bad Bible reading does similar damage. If I've bought a Bible, it's easy to suppose that I can apply it wherever, whenever, and to whomever I wish, without regard to appropriateness or conditions. But God is sovereign; His Word isn't my possession. Its words give witness to the living and active revelation of the God of creation and salvation, the God of love who became the Word made flesh in Jesus, and I'd better not forget it. If in my Bible reading I fail to listen to this living Jesus, submit to this sovereignty, and respond to this love, I become arrogant in my knowing and impersonal in my behavior.
—Eugene Peterson in Eat This Book
My Response: Am I reading the Bible in a personal and submissive way?
Thought to Apply: Other books were given for our information; the Bible was given for our transformation.—SOURCE UNKNOWN
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. 1 of 1
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