Does the Bible Really Say That?
5 Passages you may think you understand.
When I was a young Christian, the Holy Spirit put in my heart such a yearning for Scripture that I began reading through the New Testament every week. By the end of my second week, I was astonished at what I was beginning to discover: Most of the verses I had memorized and was quoting meant something different in context!
I saw that I had been treating much of the Bible as a collection of memory verses with irrelevant text in between. Yet God inspired every line of the Bible for a reason—this includes the many verses that we rarely teach from or apply to our lives, perhaps because we don’t understand them. As part of a larger context, they make sense. Even when we get the basic sense of verses right, we would go so much deeper with context.
To illustrate how much more attention to context is needed, let’s examine a few of the passages we often use without thinking of their surrounding text.
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