Longing for the return of the king

We may laugh at Harold Camping, but do we long for the return of the King?

Why read the Bible? 9 reasons

1. We need to read the Bible to know the truth. We want to think clearly about what God says is true and valuable (2 Pet. 1:21).

2. We read the Bible to know God in a personal relationship (1 Cor. 1:21; Gal. 4:8-9; 1 Tim. 4:16).

3. We read the Bible to live well for God in this world, and living out his will expresses our love for Him (John 14:23-24; Rom. 12:2; 1 Thess. 4:1-8; 2 Tim. 3:16-17).

4. We read the Bible to experience God’s freedom, grace, peace, and hope (John 8:32; Rom. 15:4; 2 Pet. 1:2).

5. We read the Bible because it gives us joy (Ps. 119:111).

6. We read the Bible to grow spiritually, as we reject conformity to the world and are changed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:1-2; 1 Pet. 2:1-2).

7. We read the Bible to minister to other Christ-followers and to those who have yet to respond to the Gospel, experiencing God’s approval for work well done (Josh. 1:8; 2 Tim. 2:15; 2 Tim. 3:16-17).

8. We read the Bible to guard ourselves from sin and error (Eph. 6:11-17; 2 Pet. 2:1-2).

9. We read the Bible to be built up as a Christian community with others in the Body of Christ (Acts 20:32; Eph. 4:14-16).

from Read the Bible for Life, George Guthrie

7 suggestions on reading the Bible

Seven suggestions for how we should read the Bible:

1) Reverently. Remembering the Bible is the word of God, the revelation of the Creator and Redeemer, means above all reading the Bible reverently.

2) Prayerfully. We have the Spirit to guide us into truth.

3) Collectively. Reading the Bible solely or merely as an individual plays into the notions of modernism. Reading the Bible collectively is a good antidote to such privatized, individual reading....Reading the Bible collectively also puts us in the historical and global community, which means that the Bible is not our individual possession.

4) Humbly. It's helpful to read the Bible humbly, to be careful not to equate our interpretations of the text with the text itself. The Bible is innerant, in other words, but our interpretations are not.

5) Carefully. We also need to read the Bible carefully, which is to say there is a place for hermeneutics and rules of interpretation....Reading the Bible carefully also entails reading the Bible canonically. In previous ages of the church, this was referred to as the "analogy of faith," which amounted to reading particular texts of the Bible in light of the whole Bible.

6) Christologically. The Bible is ultimately the story of Christ. All of it points to or away from him, like spokes from the hub of the wheel. All of the Bible eventually finds its end, its design, its purpose in Christ....It's not too much of a stretch to say that we understand a text fully when we connect it to Christ and his mission.

7) Obediently. Reading and interpreting are first-order activities that lead to the second-order activity of obedience and practice (James 2:22-26). Reading and interpreting the Bible is actually the easy part, compared to taking the Bible seriously enough to act upon it.

From Stephen Nichols and Eric Brandt in Ancient Word, Changing Worlds: The Doctrine of Scripture in a Modern Age