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It Starts With Us: Faith Starts At Home
Series: The 70% | Parenting Faithful ChildrenScripture: Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Read Your Bible!
Kenneth Berding is a theologian and religion professor for Biola University. Ken tells the story of a time when he was teaching a class and had given the students an assignment to write a paper on an Old Testament character. One of his students chose to write their paper on Joshua. In one line of the paper, the student wrote, “Joshua was the son of a nun.” While humorous, this little story is revealing about the state of Bible knowledge. It’s revealing because it displays the multiple ways people mess up the Biblical narrative for lack of knowledge. For one thing, Joshua was the son of a man named Nun, not a Catholic nun. Also, Catholic nuns didn’t exist in the Old Testament.
In my sermon this morning, I share a recent statistic that over half of US Christians read their Bible only twice a month or less. 33% of those seldom or never read their Bible. Nearly a third of Christians never read their Bible!!! That blows my mind. If we truly believe that this book contains the words of the God of the universe, the God we claim to follow, don’t you think we should pick it up and read it once in a while??
Last year, we had a sermon series designed to challenge people to read their Bibles, “Light for a Dark Path.” During the course of the series, we had weekly reading challenges at the end of each lesson. They were small challenges: memorize this verse this week, read a chapter of Proverbs every day, etc. I’d encourage us all to set those kind of goals for ourselves. Start small and work up from there—it can even be read a verse a day! Setting goals in Bible reading will help us get better in our regularity with handling Scripture. If we truly believe the Bible is the word of God, let’s put our money where our mouth is and act on it. Read your Bible!
Scott McFarland
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