I know I wrote a few months ago about reading the Bible…but I really felt like addressing it again.

In the last few months as I’ve dived more and more into the Bible for myself I’ve been shocked at my own Biblical illiteracy, and the same trait in so many other Christ followers. I don’t mean that we don’t spend time in the word, but we rarely take time to actually study it, and work out what it is saying. The Bible tells the most compelling story of all time, and all the while asks some enormous things of us. And we don’t really know that a lot of the time.

Now. We can tell you all of Rick Warren’s five purposes. We can tell you how Chan says we’ve eliminated the Holy Spirit. We can engage you in conversation about what Platt says we need to do to really turn Christianity around in the America. Few of us though, could genuinely articulate the verses or passages that led Warren to believe those are God’s purposes for our lives. We don’t really get what the Bible says about the Spirit. We prefer to gloss over the red letters that call us to a life that looks nothing like that of the life of this world.

Don’t get me wrong, I think we can learn a lot from guys like that who have had wild success in their ministry, and I don’t think their intention was ever that we hold their literature as being equal to or greater than the words of the Living God of the universe. But a lot of us make that mistake a lot of the time. I’ve been guilty of it. I just think that we all need to take a moment and genuinely weigh the amount of time we read books for leadership development, or a new ministry strategy against the amount of time that we spend in the words of our Savior, and how much of that time we actually spend studying those words and figuring out what they really mean to us and how we should be living that out.

I’m all for books that may help me avoid the pitfalls of the guys who came before me, or that can guide me to a deeper understanding of a particular topic. But David was in pitfalls long before Saddleback was planted, and Paul quit murdering and started preaching centuries before there was an upside down house on the cover of an orange book.

Grace and Peace,

David Stippick

(Big thanks to my roommate and friends for the great conversations that inspired this post. Also. Yes, I did whore out this post where the tags were concerned so as to hopefully generate more traffic. I have no shame.)