W. Robert Godfrey

Now that's not altogether wrong.

When I was a college kid, I had an opportunity to study in Germany for a while, and pious Protestant Germans would begin every year with a little box, and in it were little rolled up pieces of paper, and every piece of paper had a Bible verse on it.

And you had a little stick, and every day of the year, you could stick your stick in the box and pull out your Bible verse, and you opened it, that was your verse for the day.

Now, that's not a terrible thing to have a verse for the day.

It always felt a little like a fortune cookie.

But anyway, it's not a terrible thing to have a verse for the day.

But if you think there's something kind of magic about that, that this verse taken out of context will tell you what you need to know about your day, you may well get into trouble.

You all know the example that people like me always use of that.

You know, you open the Bible at random and you…

point to a verse and it says, Judas went out and hanged himself.

And you find that not a helpful verse, so you close your Bible back up and you open it up and you find a verse and it says, go thou and do likewise.

So that is not a way to read the Bible.

And so I hope this will be sort of an adventure for us to get into the Bible and think about our need to read the Bible as a book.

Now, that may be so self-evident that we hardly need to see it.

But when you read any other book, you try to figure out what the author's after.

You look at the way he puts it together.

You watch the way the story unfolds.

You don't try to lift one sentence out of the book and make something of it disconnected from everything else in the book.

And we need to get back to reading the Bible a little more that way.

And so I hope this will encourage us to read the Bible.