The essential need for a personal knowledge …

A family who had moved into a new neighborhood had a late start one morning. As a result, the six-year-old daughter missed her school bus. Although it would make him late for work, her father agreed to drive her to school if she would give him directions. After about 20 minutes of going in circles they arrived at the school, which turned out to be only a few blocks away from where they lived.

Steaming, her dad asked her why she directed him all over the neighborhood when the school was so close to home.

“We went the way the school bus does,” she explained. “That’s the only way I know.”

That story reminds me of how so many find their way through scripture, which is often by following only what they are told by someone else.

Considering the “average Christian” usually doesn’t read their Bible except when they bring it to church on Sundays, so many who claim to follow Christ rely almost entirely on their spiritual leaders to tell them what is in the Bible, and what to believe the scriptures teach. If few read it, fewer still actually study it!

That’s not the way we’re to live as Christians.

And it’s not the example we’re given in scripture.

The Bereans approached the scriptures very differently than Christians do today. Take a look at their example:

“That very night the believers sent Paul and Silas to Berea. When they arrived there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth. As a result, many Jews believed, as did many of the prominent Greek women and men,” Acts 17:10-12.

There are many scriptures that highlight the essential need we have for the Word of God, yet so few are like the Bereans, studying the Word of God daily to make sure they are being taught the truth and to ensure they are learning the truth for themselves.

How do you know what you’re being taught is the truth from God’s Word if you’re not studying it for yourself? Can you find your way through scripture, or is your knowledge of the Bible largely made up of what someone else has told you about it?

Scotty