Way back when I was in school – light-years ago – we had a saying whenever we wanted to check the correctness of our homework. We would simply ask, “what does the book say?” Today, my 6th grader only has a couple of textbooks and she seldom is allowed to bring them home. In my day, most of my textbooks came home laden with hours of homework. As we worked through the answers, we always had to check our work with “what the book says.”
I find that in Christian circles these days, many have forgotten to ask that question: what does the book – the Bible –say? We have plenty of answers and we usually believe OURS are the correct ones and those who differ are wrong, eternally wrong. We have our answers because we are smart, because we’ve been Christian for so long, we just know what the right answer should be.
We no longer need God’s version of “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sallie,” because we add, subtract, multiply, and divide by our own whims. We do not need God’s version of a dictionary, because we define what words mean according to our own understanding; words like marriage, sin, prosper. We do not need to know God’s history because we live in a more sophisticated world and the history we read about in the Bible is irrelevant to our day.
The trouble with the above paragraph is that it is all WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. We need to go back and see what the book says. Remember what Jesus said at the close of His classic Sermon on the Mount:
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” – Matthew 7:24-27
Our own answers have gotten us in a mess. We need to stop figuring it out on our own, and find out what the book says – the Bible. Our lives are an OPEN BOOK test.