Truth Up to Date

My friend Joy (W.) H. used to read to me from The Message. Then she bought me my own copy of The Message, New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs. The Message is a little risque. It's almost impertinent in places. I don't know that I could recommend that everyone read it every day. But I like it.

I like it because it makes truth real. It makes me feel like I'm discovering what God said for the first time. It shakes me out of my same ol', same ol' rut. It makes me raise my eyebrows and say, "Wait! Is that really what God meant?"

For a while, I picked up The Message on Saturdays and read, just as if it were a fun book. (No offense to the Bible, but it's more normal to pick it up out of habit or duty or study than for leisure.) It made the Bible seem like a fun book. I was discovering it for the first time, like the boy in "Sunshine Country." I loved that. I confess that I read it with my NAS on hand, to avoid drifting off into sudden heresy. Four times out of five, when I would have a "I'm not so sure about that" moment, I would cross-check and discover that The Message was saying exactly what the "reliable" version was saying. I always wonder if The Message is conveying truth in the way that Jesus and the apostles conveyed it to the people when they first spoke it or wrote it down.

Yesterday I read through the underlinings in the epistles in my copy of The Message. Again, the thoughts were fresh and real. (They're real in the other versions, too, but it's easy to not think about them when you've read the same words multiple times.) Again, I marveled at the God who is willing to say things in ways that jolt us out of our comfort zones--no matter what century those comfort zones are in.