January 4, 2005

[Rev. Doc]

More Than Trivia

"Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."
James 1:22

The prince of Grenada, an heir to the Spanish crown, was sentenced to life in solitary confinement in Madrid's ancient prison called "The Place of the Skull." The fearful, dirty, and dreary nature of the place earned it the name. Everyone knew that once you were in, you would never come out alive. The prince was given one book to read the entire time -- the Bible. With only one book to read, he read it over hundreds and hundreds of times. The book became his constant companion.

After thirty-three years of imprisonment, he DIED! When they came in to clean out his cell, they found some notes he had written using nails to mark the soft stone of the prison walls. The notations were of this sort: Psalm 118:8 is the middle verse of the Bible; Ezra 7:21 contains all the letters of the alphabet except the letter j; the ninth verse of the eighth chapter of Esther is the longest verse in the Bible, no word or name of more than six syllables can be found in the Bible."

When Scot Udell originally noted these facts in an article in Psychology Today, he noted the oddity of an individual who spent thirty-three years of his life studying what some have described as: "The Greatest Book of ALL time" yet could only glean "trivia". From all we know, he never made any spiritual commitment to Christ, but he became an expert at Bible trivia.....

What a shame! The prince knew all about the BOOK, but He did not know the AUTHOR. The problem? He was looking for TRIVIA; he wasn’t looking for the LORD.

Prayer: Ask the Holy Spirit to give you a living knowledge of Christ, not just head knowledge.

"The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through to see that which is beyond; but most people only look at it and so they see only the dead letter."
~Phillip Brooks.