Why the Bible?

What did we do before the GPS? On our recent trip away we hired a car for two weeks. To navigate through strange cities, towns and villages would have been impossible without one. “Second exit left”, it would tell us, or “right turn 300 yards”. It was like having a local in the car.
Why read the Bible? At St Luke’s we want to encourage everyone to be reading the Bible every day. There is great blessing in taking it a step further and journalling, which digs more deeply and brings home what God is saying to us.
Why the Bible? People accuse it of being full of contradictions, or fairy tales, or irrelevant or any number of other objections. Why can we believe in the Bible?
Think of it as a GPS of reality. It gets you from where you are now to your destination, without getting hopelessly lost. It is a reality map. It claims to be the ultimate reality map. That is to say, it claims to draw back the curtain on the nature and meaning of the very existence of life, its source right through to its destiny. It claims to reveal what otherwise we could not have known, the nature and working of the God of the universe, who is beyond us but committed to us.
This unfolds historically in the calling of Abraham and his descendants, through their experiences and understandings of that experience. We discover both the plight of humanity – so graphically portrayed on ours news day after day – and what God has done about our plight through the life and work of Jesus Christ.
The Bible tells us why we are here and how we are to live. It teaches us to love and respect God, and love and respect other people, whoever they are. It is our GPS for what is real and true.
The Bible doesn’t answer every question or resolve every ethical dilemma. The Bible engages both our minds and our hearts in wrestling with God and loving God and living for God. It challenges us to consider biblically the issues of the time, and speak into those issues as we can. It challenges us to live beyond ourselves, beyond the selfishness that pervades human life, and to see a bigger plan and purpose.
The Bible is unique. We ignore it to our peril. Without reference to the Bible we can expect our society to become ever more lost, and human regard for one another to diminish. Without the Bible we stumble in the dark, following the fads and fashions of the day.
Let’s be a people of the Bible! Let’s read it and live by it!