Mohammed claimed that God dictated to him when to wrote the Koran. I don’t believe that for a minute. The Orthodox view of Inspiration of Scripture teaches that God "inspired" the writers of the Christian Bible to write. Being "inspired" is altogether different than "being dictated to". While under the influence of the Holy Spirit Biblical writers wrote in their own words. Also, "inspiration of Scripture" as viewed by orthodox Christian teaching means that the original writings were inspired, not any translations or copy. Therefore, the King James Version, the NIV, or any order translation is not inspired.

When we read our Bibles, no matter what translation we read from, we should understand that what we read is a good representation of what God inspired men to write over a period of thousands of years. The Bible should be the centerpiece of what we believe in. We derive, or should derive, all we understand to be true from the Bible. We should esteem the Bible much higher than we do. For the most part we are Biblically illiterate.

We don’t pattern our churches or our lives after what the Bible says. We simply read it whenever we have the time, hoping that some verse will jump out at us that we can claim is from the Holly Spirit. Do we really take the Bible seriously? I’m not sure we do, or else we’d see a remarkable difference in the church and in our lives.

For example, 1 Cor. 14 tells us how do conduct a meeting of the saints. Do we do as Paul says? Not really. When I was young, there was a song called, "Dust On The Bible". Is there dust on your Bible? When was the last time you seriously sat down to study it. I said, study, not read. Many of us read the same way we watch the evening news on TV. Our attention is divided. We listen to the news at the same time we listen to our kids, our spouse, and our dog. Reading and studying the Bible should be a time of intimacy with Jesus. We should be alone with Him and determine to understand what is in it and begin to implement these things in our lives. If we’d do this, we as individuals and the church would be in a very different place than where we are.

The Bible should be our prize procession. Many have given their lives for us to have a copy of it. This Book has to come off our shelves and its contents has to be burned into our hearts and minds and put into daily practice.