Lost and gone forever? I hope notIt was a disaster! A calamity! I felt lost without it. We’d enjoyed a very pleasant day trip with a local coach company to north Kent, and were on our way back on the M26, when I was shocked to find that I’d lost my mobile phone. Panic! Where was it? We thought about it and reckoned it was amongst the oysters and other seafood in a café at Whitstable harbour. We found the establishment on line and spoke to the owner the next morning. You could say his response was whelk-ome and it warmed the cockles of my heart—yes, they had it.So we were to have a second trip to that historic fishing port to winkle the poor abandoned thing out. (We had lobster roll while we were there!)It is amazing, isn’t it, when you lose something, how lost you feel without it? I had phone num-bers, Whats-app messages, information on the phone that I hadn’t saved elsewhere, some things which, while obtainable on my home computer, were normally so conveniently available on that phone. Several times my hand would automatically go to my pocket to check the mobile, only to remember that it wasn’t there.
Thinking of things lost, reminded me of when I was a new Christian many years ago, I inadvertently laid my Bible on the spare wheel cover at the rear of my 1947 Vauxhall 12 (the first second hand car I owned in 1962) while loading other things into the car outside my home. The Bible’s precarious position was forgotten and I drove off. I confess I can’t remember how soon it was that I realised I’d lost it, but I was relieved to have a call to say it had been found on the road outside somebody’s house about half a mile from home and been rescued.
Here a question arises: not ‘Have you lost your Bible’ but ‘Is your Bible lost to you’? Or, to put it another way, ‘Are you lost to your Bible’?
Bearing in mind that it is God’s wonderful living word that he has given us, and, as 2 Timothy 3:16 –17 (NLT) tells us: All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work., can we really expect it to do that if we don’t read and meditate on it? Is the Word, in fact becoming lost to us because we don’t read it and thus apply it to our lives?
It is quite troubling to realise that many Christians spend little time reading their Bibles, and fewer really study and meditate on it. That fact challengs me personally—how about you? May we not be lost to the Bible.
Steve
Elder
August 2019
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