The Yearbook Bible

In The Story, I do a quick overview of a couple ways NOT to read the Bible. The first is the Bible Roulette Method, where you flip until you stop and then read whatever your eye lands on. I'm not saying God doesn't occasionally in his great mercy speak to us in that way, but it's not the primary approach we should use.

I also talk about the Yearbook Method. Maybe I'm just narcissistic, but whenever I got my school yearbook, the first thing I did was hunt for pictures of myself and my friends. I didn't care about the chess team page. Or the band page. No pictures of me there.

I think we tend to read the Bible like we read our yearbooks-- hunting for pictures of ourselves. And that's why we feel so comfortable hanging out in books like Psalms, Ephesians, and Philippians. We don't find ourselves in the book of Leviticus. Or if we do...something might be terribly wrong with us. Normal people just don't see themselves in long-winded and repetitive writings about the clothing of priests and the proper way to drain blood and wring heads off birds. There are no pictures of us there, so we skip it. But the Bible is not primarily about us. It's about God. And Jesus can be found on every page of Scripture.

If we read the Bible looking for ourselves, we will not find ourselves in many places and therefore skip a lot of parts. But if we look for Jesus in the Bible, we will find him on every page and discover ourselves in the process.