Rediscovering Jesus – Rediscovering the Bible (Part 4)

I hope you have enjoyed this little series on the Bible. I have one final post to share with you. 🙂

The Bible is history…the story of God and the people He created. The Bible is prophecy…some of which has been fulfilled and some of which is still to come. The Bible predicts a Savior and then reveals Him to us. It shows us our value as God’s creation and encourages us to seek after the God who made us. It demonstrates God’s incredible grace, love, forgiveness, mercy, and faithfulness. But even more than this, the Bible claims that it is alive, powerful, and able to change hearts, all by itself.

I’ve actually seen this happen.

During my husband’s first year of Bible school, I taught math to 6^th-12^th graders at a Catholic, residential, psychiatric treatment facility. It was quite the job, in case you are wondering! Almost immediately, I had some run-ins with a young Satanist named Ben*. He was a sweet kid and willing to dialogue about God, but determined not to believe in Him. I bought him a book called “101 Reasons to Believe in God.” It contained a bunch of little proofs from science, psychology, the Bible, etc. All pretty gentle. Ben refused to read it. He even left it behind when he moved on from the facility.

However, his roommate, Matt*, picked it up feeling intrigued, and began to read. A while later, Matt came up to me after class and started talking about the book. He asked me if I could get him a Bible. Of course! I found him an easy to read translation and he was excited.

A few weeks later Matt told me that he had read Genesis and Ex-e-do-sis. Knowing what was coming next (Leviticus), I encouraged him to skip to the New Testament. We didn’t talk again for a while.

Time went by. One day, during after-school detention, the kids in my room started talking about the saddest books they’d ever read. Matt piped up, “Luke. Luke was the saddest book I ever read.” I was surprised. He smiled. “But then I read it again, and I realized it wasn’t sad after all.”

I asked Matt if he liked Jesus. Of course he did! So I sent him to the book of John. A week or so later, Matt was back in my room telling me how much he loved Jesus, how he believed that Jesus was God, and that he knew Jesus had died for him.

No one “saved” Matt…no one told him how to have a relationship with Jesus, no one preached to him, or led him in a prayer. He read the Bible, and he believed it.

This is the point. This is the purpose of the Bible!

When you take an honest look at your heart and your opinion of the Bible, what words come to mind? Mystical, difficult, boring, old fashioned, and complicated? Or alive, amazing, revelation, and life-giving? Are you willing to let God show you the truth about the book He wrote for us? Will you try to separate what people have told you about the Bible and what the Bible actually says?

I know that it might be super hard. I get it, I do. But this is where we have to start. Get a new translation, buy a study Bible, listen to it on your Smart Phone, etc. Do something different that won’t be as triggering.

The Bible has been misused to tell lies and to abuse and control people throughout the centuries. But it’s not the book itself that’s the problem. It’s the people who use and abuse it. Please stick with me as I share some of the lies I used to believe and the truths I have found about the amazing, God of the real Bible. That is the objective of this blog: to search for the real God. 🙂

If you enjoyed the story of Matt finding Jesus, I know you would love the story of our Uncle Jim. A skeptic, a cross country trip, and a KJV Bible on cassette tape bought with the purpose of disproving it.

*Names changed to protect privacy.