Imagine with me for a moment that you are spending a little time this Summer thinking about football season. As you are daydreaming, you start to wonder, “What is the very best play to run when it's third down and five and your team is down by two points in the third quarter?”

That seems like a tough question. Especially because I do not daydream about football. But no worries. In our imaginary world your buddy has just loaned you a copy of a book called the Ultimate Book of Football, and everyone agrees that it has all the answers. So you open up the Ultimate Book of Football to the page where somebody told you to look to find that particular information. 

But instead of a simple answer to your question, what you get is a first-person account of the Chicago Bears entire history-making 1985 football season, written by Hall of Fame Head Coach Mike Ditka himself. 

On the one hand that would be frustrating, because it's not a simple answer to your question. But if you’re paying attention, what you actually got was far more important than what you were even looking for. 

Back here in the real world, I think that reading the Bible is something like that. The wonderful and frustrating thing about the Bible is that it is far more than we often want it to be. Most of the time what we seem to want the Bible to be is some sort of a basic rule book for life. A simple, well-organized list of rules to tell us what to do when we don’t know what to do. But instead, what the Bible is is the true story of God’s work in the universe all the way from the beginning of Creation to an eternal New Creation at some point in the future. And that story is told in a bunch of separate pieces in the midst of unfolding human history in a way that is directly from God but is also tied to the culture of the time when God spoke and the person through whom God spoke.

The Bible is, in a word, amazing. It is a work of divine art through human artists, given for the purpose of helping people to know who God is, who we are, how we can connect with Him, and how we can live the lives that He has planned for us.

As a result of all of that, what the Bible has to offer us is typically far more than what we are looking for.

If we can humble ourselves and simply allow the Bible to be what it is, then something amazing begins to happen. God's words in the Bible begin to challenge us, and encourage us, and impart wisdom to us, and change us. And rather than just learning a few rules for living, we learn the source and meaning of life itself.