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The Missing Piece to Your Life

Get the discussion questions for The Missing Piece to Your Life

• Only in America...can a pizza get to your house faster than an ambulance.
• Only in America...do people order a double cheeseburger, large fries, and a diet coke.
• Only in America...do banks leave both doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.
• Only in America...do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and leave useless things and junk in boxes in the garage.
• Only in America...do we use answering machines/caller i.d. to screen calls and then have call waiting so we won't miss a call from someone we didn't want to talk to in the first place.
• Only in America...do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight.
• Only in America...do we use the word "politics" to describe the process so well: "Poli" in Latin meaning "many" and "tics" meaning "blood-sucking creatures."

Only in America...do we keep publishing more and more different versions of the Bible, yet read them less and less.

How many Bibles do you have sitting around your house? OK, so how often do you study God's word? That's what I thought. I have yet to meet a Christian who was happy with the amount of time he or she spends studying the Bible each week. And if I did, I would ask them if they got to the part about being too proud.

I'm not talking about just reading the Bible either. There's way too much "a verse a day keeps the devil away" attitude these days, which is probably why the average Christian has the same values and lifestyle as the non-Christian. What I'm talking about is an honest-to-goodness study of the ultimate truth written by God Himself.

Study: a detailed critical inspection; applying the mind to learning and understanding a subject (especially by reading)

We've been given the awesome words of the awesome God, yet we let it sit around and gather dust like a toy we got tired of playing with. All the while our brain rots and our spirit falls victim to the crazy and backwards worldviews blasting through our movies, music, and internet.

It's time to change. It's time to quit listening to Satan who loves it when you only study the Bible when you "feel" like it...which I imagine isn't very often. It's time to listen to God, who commands us to " correctly explains the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15 ). You can't explain it if you don't know it, and you can't know it if you don't study it.

Let me put it this way. Without the Bible we won't know right from wrong, we won't discover God's perfect will for our lives, we won't know the truth about life, and worst of all we won't know God Himself. In other words, the Christian who chooses not to study God's Word chooses to be an idiot.

Why do I say idiot? Because this word dates back to 1378. It comes from the Old French word idiote, which was an uneducated or ignorant person. Christians who don't study the Bible are definitely uneducated about life, because they are missing out on the words of the One who invented life! Christians who don't study the Bible are definitely ignorant, because they are missing out on the only source of spiritual/moral truth in the universe!

*Note - if by this point you don't realize the need in your life to study the Bible, you can stop reading. I just don't think you get it. However, if at this point you are beginning to see that studying Scripture must be a part of every Christian's life, by all means read on!

A lot of Christians get freaked out by the word "study". They think that because they haven't gone to a Bible school they won't know how to study the Bible. That's as ridiculous as someone scared to see a movie because they haven't gone to film school.

People see movies and understand them because the director establishes characters in a plot that tell us what he/she believes about life in humorous, dramatic, and/or horrific terms. Those beliefs are then translated (usually) into a storyline that ends in some kind of closure. So when you see a movie, you are actually "studying it".

The same is true with the Bible. The Director of the universe has put together a story of where history has been and is going. There are characters in a plot showing the truth about life in humorous, dramatic, and sometimes horrific terms. The Bible is one complete storyline that has an incredible ending. Every part of the Bible relates to each other and to the main theme of God's redemptive plan for the world. The problem is that people try to study the Bible without knowing the context, so it's a lot like walking into the middle of a movie without knowing what is going on. Studying the Bible is like learning about the plot and characters of the greatest story ever told.

So how do you study the Bible? Three steps: observe, interpret, and apply.

Observe: read the Bible a paragraph at a time, not a verse at a time. Reading a verse outside of its context is like reading one line from a letter. When this happens, oftentimes the wrong meaning is applied. Read the paragraph several times over and make observations. Read it out of several versions - which is really easy now that www.biblegateway.com is available.

Interpret: find out what the Bible passage meant to the original readers, and remember that it can't mean something to you that it didn't mean to them. This is another way that people twist the Bible and make it say what they want it to. Again, www.biblegateway.com has a commentary that will help you interpret correctly. Next, take some time to pray and meditate on what that interpretation would mean in today's world.

Apply: This is the most important part. Many people study the Bible just for the sake of knowledge or to say that they studied the Bible. But God gave us His word so we could be more like His Son! If you study the Bible and not apply it to your actions, attitudes, thoughts, relationships, etc., you have wasted your time! It does no good to know the Bible and not live the Bible...in fact, it's a sin!

These steps take work, but then again so does anything of value in this life. A more detailed explanation of these steps is found in the "hands" section.

Only in America...are we in danger of being the nation with the biggest amount of Biblical information in the world and the biggest number of Bible idiots. Care to change the course of history?

Head: What you need to know about this truth

The Bible is "inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It straightens us out and teaches us to do what is right. It is God's way of preparing us in every way, fully equipped for every good thing God wants us to do." (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Because of this, we must study it on a regular basis. If we fail in this critical area of life, our relationship with God and purpose in life will fall apart.

Heart: What you need to feel about this truth

Hungry and thirsty for the Word of God. It is your spiritual food, without it your soul will starve and your life will become a puzzle that is impossible to put together. Your desire for studying Scripture should be like the girl in the following story:

In France , there once lived a poor, blind girl who obtained the Gospel of Mark in raised letters and learned to read it with the tips of her fingers. By constant reading, her fingers became calloused, and consequently her sense of touch decreased until she could no longer distinguish the letters & words. She became so desperate for the Word of God that she literally cut the calloused skin from the ends of her fingers in an attempt to restore sense of touch, but in so doing actually resulted in completely destroying her sense of touch. Faced with the inevitable reality that she must now give up her beloved Book, with weeping & tears she pressed the Braille copy of Mark to her lips, saying "Farewell, farewell, sweet word of my Heavenly Father!" To her surprise, she discovered that her lips were even more sensitive to touch than her fingers had been & she was able to distinguish the individual letters. All night she "perused" the Word of God with her lips and overflowed with joy at this amazing provision from her LORD.

Hands: What you need to do about this truth

Study the Bible. Don't just read a verse or two and call it good, get into it! The Bible is deeper than you will ever be able to dig, and wider than you will ever be able to travel. You could study the same passage every single day of your life and still not exhaust its full meaning and application. So set up a regular time to study God's Word, and don't cancel that appointment for any reason. Start with gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and use the observe, interpret, and apply steps and soon you will be amazed at the transforming power of intense Bible study. For further explanation of these steps, click here.