The Bible
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 (NIV)

Whatever is believed about the Bible these days, your life cannot be as God intended without it. You can’t ever fully understand yourself without the Scriptures. You cannot feed a healthy ethic without the Bible. Whatever opinion you have with regard to the Bible being an antiquated old book, Paul teaches that the Scriptures are breathed out by God.

What that means is that God is the source of the inspiration, and that’s the key. He is the source of the inspiration, and the effect His breathed-out inspiration has on your life is based not really on its efficacy, but on whether you value it enough to plant it in the good soil of your life.

Far too many people have shaped opinions around the Scriptures without testing their ability to transform life because they never planted it deeper than their surface intellectual suspicions or the Bible’s perceived outdatedness or its cultural “irrelevance.” However, the Scriptures cannot be understood if you come at them believing they are something other than the breathed-out expressions of God.

The Scriptures are only understood and valued when they are planted in good soil in the human spirit, meaning: “I plant it believing that it’s God’s breath, and I want to understand what God has been breathing out. I want to know why He is inspiring this kind of revelation because it teaches not only what I am to do; it teaches who I am.”