Consider This - A Recipe for Misinterpretation

Have you ever used a recipe to make a meal because you didn’t know how to cook?

I have! In fact, that’s how I learned to cook.

Have you ever tried to put together a piece of furniture without the instructions? If you’re like most men, you have and sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t. Usually, there are a few leftover screws. Ask me how I know.

Have you ever treated reading the bible like a recipe and then tried to make it make sense? If you’re normal, the answer is yes because few pastors teach the scripture in context and expositorily.

The other day I was in our house church meeting and I used the illustration of taking an ingredient from a breakfast dish, another ingredient from a meat dish and an ingredient from a dessert. Taking all of these ingredients, which belong to different meals and then combining them into one meal makes for a lousy piece of food.

Yet, this is exactly what folks do when they are trying to prove a point from scripture. They take a verse from James and throw in a few verses from Jeremiah and for fun add a verse from Psalms an then they tell you that the bible teaches whatever it is that they think the bible is teaching.

We don’t do this with recipes because we want a good meal. So, we follow the recipe and hopefully we get a good outcome.

We don’t take a line out of a newspaper article and another line out of a book and then a line out of a song and mix them together to make a point, so why do most Christians do that with the bible?

The answer is simple, there is a lack of spiritual maturity in the church. Pastors don’t teach scripture in context and people look at the bible like it’s a self help book instead of the perfect and holy Word of God.

So, consider this… next time you’re reading scripture are you reading it verse by verse and in context or are you reading a verse here and there and making it say something it doesn’t say.

This isn’t to say that we can’t learn topically from the bible, but that is not the main way to read the bible.