chad landman

Last night, I was fortunate enough to see Coach Gene Stallings speak last night in Franklin, Tennessee at a medical missions fundraiser.

Some of my earliest memories are sitting in front of the TV with my dad and watching Alabama play football and seeing Coach Stalling roaming the sidelines. Last night I got to shake his hand, but his message last night was more powerful than all the Bama football I watched him coach.

Paraphrase of part of his talk last night:

“I’m done complaining. I’m done complaining, and I’ll tell you why. My good son John Mark, who had Down Syndrome, passed away many years ago. One night he was having a hard night and I went and crawled into bed with him. One of the first things I did was check his oxygen saturation. For those of you who don’t know what that is, a normal person’s oxygen saturation is 90 or above. You get below 90 and not only do you start to feel awful, but you run the risk of death.

When I checked his that night, it was 63.

I asked him how he felt. If mine or your saturation fell below 90, we’d be rantin’ and ravin’ and complainin’ all over the place. But when I asked John Mark, all he said was, ‘I fine. I fine.’

He passed away the next morning.

I knew how awful he felt, even when he was literally dying. So I’m done complaining.”

When we think about what we complain about every day, we need to be reminded of those people who have real problems. Those people who are really suffering, the ones in Haiti and in tons of other parts of the world who don’t have a place to live, food to eat, and clean drinking water.

We are blessed beyond anything we can imagine, and we complain when we’re irritated, made to wait on something, or inconvenienced in any way.

I am struggling with this personally right now. My negativity seems to always get in my own way. The devil uses negativity and complaining to sour our goals and dash our dreams. We need to rejoice in all things, just like Paul said to do, whether that’s in pain or in joy.

The Bible is not a cute little book of quotes.  

Tell me, which of the following quotes came from the Bible?

• “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”
• “All things shall pass, this too, shall pass.”
• “God helps those who help themselves.”
• “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”
• “God works in mysterious ways.”

None of them.

Does that surprise you? Not one of these actual phrases are in the Bible, no matter which version you look at. There are similar passages, but if you read the actual scripture, it says something entirely different. See: Proverbs 13.24.

This kind of thinking can be dangerous. Tell me, who was it that tempted Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden? Hint: it wasn’t Satan. The Bible never mentions Satan, just ‘the serpent.’ Or what about the three wise men who visited baby Jesus? Were there three of them? No. The Bible never puts a number on it. Look for yourself.

What we do is what we do with everything else – we infect the Bible, the Word of God, with our own values and morals without asking what the Bible’s morals and values actually are.

We’ve all played the game Telephone. You know, the game where someone starts a message and whispers it to the next person down the line and then so on and so on…only to get to the last person and realize that the original message is nothing like what was started with.

Take the iPad event today (March 7, 2012). I’m a geek and I follow all that nonsense, and there were so many people convinced that this is what the new iPad was going to have. None of us actually knew what it was going to have until we heard it from the source.

Most times, we need to go to the source. The source is where the original, true message was and is. The word of God, the Bible, is that true and original message.

So next time you see these old proverb-ish quotes that everyone says are from the Bible, get off your butt and check them out for yourself. The Bible says a lot about a lot of different things, and you, as a Christian, are going to be held responsible for what it says.

The Bible is Not Just A History Book.

Of the 66 books in the Bible, only 13 are books about history and historical accounts. That’s only 19.7% of the entire Bible. The other 80% are Gospels, letters to churches, and books of prophecy.

Imagine that I told you that UT only played football. Or that Star Wars was just about Obi-Wan Kenobi. Or that The Hunger Games book series was just about being hungry.

UT doesn’t just play football, they play a lot of sports. Obi-Wan Kenobi was very important in the Star Wars story, but he isn’t the focus. And The Hunger Games wasn’t just about being hungry, it was about a fight-to-the-death competition in a post-apocalyptic world.

When we generalize the Bible to “just a history book”, we do lots of dangerous things. First, we make it seem as though the Bible isn’t important for our daily lives, and it is. Second, we mislead those who really don’t know the Bible to believe that’s true.

The world believes the Bible to be a collection of history and good stories. We believe it to be more than that. Or we should.

The Bible is Not A Book of Suggestions.

If I was to say to you, “So-and-So, you better start looking at colleges. Going to college is important.” Do you have to do that?

No. You can do anything you want to, but most people realize that getting an education can lead to a better way of life and a happier person. While plenty of people have went to college and it’s an extremely good suggestion to go to college, you don’t have to go. There’s no law against it.

But if you understand laws, they are there not just to tell us what to do, but to protect us. Is the reason why there’s a speed limit on the highway just to mess with you and make you obey what ‘the man’ tells you to do. No. It’s to protect you and others when you’re driving a 3,000-pound weapon down the street at 70 miles per hour.

Just like laws in our everyday lives, the Bible is a set of laws, not suggestions, that we must abide by to have eternal life with God in Heaven.

A lot of us look at laws and rules as things to be broken, or as mere suggestions. We look at the Bible like those in Glee and make up what we think the Bible ought to say, which brings me to my final point…

The Bible is Not What We Say It Is. 

It’s what God says. It’s what Jesus says. That’s it.

We can make up all the excuses in the world and try to make the Bible fit our own morals and life as much as we want, but we are not going to change the Bible. We are not going to change God.

If you or one of your friends are trying to justify something wrong that you’re doing and twist the Bible to fit it, you are flat wrong.

Revelation 22.18-19 says not to add or take away from this book. Proverbs 30.5-6 says do not add to what God says because His words are pure. 2 Corinthians 11.4 says not to even put up with things that are false. I could go on and on.

Conclusion

The basic premise for everything we’ve talked about is that you have to get off your butt or your cell phone or your Xbox and look this stuff up for yourself. The media, the TV shows, the internet, and your friends all have ideas about what the Bible is. You need to be educated to tell them what the Bible is not, as well as what it is.

I don’t know how to say this in a nicer way, but here goes:

Stop believing all the stupid crap that everyone throws at you and have the intelligence and accountability to look this stuff up for yourself. You can’t trust what hardly anybody says anymore, especially if they’re on TV or from Washington. If you don’t think a test is coming for your Christianity one day, then think again. You stand before God.