The book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” shared bits of wisdom like this:
- Share things
- Play fair
- Don’t hit other people
- Clean up your mess
- Put things back where your found them.
The basic things you need to know in life. It isn’t complicated.
We have all the stuff we need to know in a book. The Book. Sometimes called the Good Book, the Bible. Some of it sounds kind of crazy and out there. But it is God’s Word, and tells you what you need to know.
Have you ever considered that the people God used to write the Bible come off looking bad?
- Moses disobeys God’s command and dies before he gets to the Promised Land
- David committed adultery and killed his lover’s husband.
- Solomon chases after all sorts of women and winds up bitter
- Peter denies knowing Christ
- Paul calls himself the chief of sinners
We usually think in terms of putting your best foot forward, but these guys did the opposite. These guys put their worst foot forward. Why? That’s insane! It doesn’t make sense. And that’s the point. No one would write this way, unless their writing came from outside of them. It was not their word, but God’s.
The message of God’s Word that is constant and steadfast is this: We have all messed up, just like those people in the Bible. We all deserve to be punished. We cannot get ourselves out of the mess we are in. So God stepped in on our behalf. He promised to help us as soon as sin entered the world, and He followed through on that promise. He sent Jesus to be the Savior of all people, which He accomplished by taking our place in punishment and paying our penalty so that we could have forgiveness and life everlasting. The only way you will know this is to get it from the source, God Himself, in His Word.
When our daughter Bethany married Scott, he brought three daughters into our family, which means we inherited three granddaughters. We welcomed them to our family and became known as Grandma and Grandpa Texas to them. That first Christmas, the youngest girls were four and five years old. They live in Arizona, so we didn’t get to see them much, but we wanted to establish a connection with them. Cheryl found this little story book where we could digitally record our voices reading the story to them. So we took turns reading the pages. When the girls got the book, as they turned the pages, they heard our voices reading the story to them.
Perhaps you should think of that when you read your Bible. Listen for God’s voice speaking to you. You hear His message of Law and Gospel, of sin and grace, of mercy and forgiveness and salvation. Listen to Him.
