The barnes & noble bible.

My favorite store is Barnes & Noble. That may be an overstatement, but when you have a place that combines books, music, and coffee, I’m pretty much addicted. Let’s say you and I walked in to B&N and I handed you one book, and asked you to shelf it in the proper section.

Pretty easy, right? Big store, lots of sections, but you can figure it out.

Ok. The book I want you to restock is… the Bible. In which section does the Bible belong?

The obvious answer might be to take it to the Religion section. Maybe that’s how you think about the Bible – a book on religion, the list of rules for a system of pleasing God.

Maybe you would take it to the Ancient Classics section, seeing the Bible as a time-honored book, containing important, beautiful literature.

In a moment of honesty, perhaps you’d walk over to the Foreign Language shelves. The Bible is written in terms and language that is as distant from your understanding as trying to read a book written in Klingon.

The Self-Help section might attract you. After all, what better book to give you guidance on improving your life? Plus, its devotional quality provides “Chicken Soup For The Soul” type inspiration to motivate you.

Or, you could walk to the How-To section. All you need to do is look at the B.I.B.L.E. acrostic to see the book’s value – Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. Its sort of a “Life for Dummies” book, lots of great principles for fixing and maintaining parts of your life.

A current popular view could draw you to the History/Biography shelves. Isn’t the Bible the story of God? “His-story”? All we have to do is find our role in His play.

Well, each of these has some merit, some truth – but they are incomplete pictures of the Bible. If we only see it as a collection of rules, it will be our harsh dictator. If we view it as simply a classic book, then it has no rule over us at all. A foreign book will be totally ignored because we can’t read it. A self-help or how-to book certainly is valuable, but doesn’t connect us to God. And a storybook is wonderfully inspiring – but it lacks the life-changing power we need.

So, on which shelf does the Bible belong?

That’s the point – the Bible was not made for the shelf, it was made for the self.

It was not written to be a source of knowledge to which we refer; it’s a source of life and relationship with its Author. Very simply, the Bible is God’s Message. It is the Word breathed from His heart to our hearts. It is useless sitting on the shelf – it can only unleash its power in us when we pour it into our lives and let it fill us with God.

How do you view God’s Message? This year, make it your goal to take the Bible off the shelf and to get it into your self.

Psalms 119