Reason 5: The Bible is Where We Find the Answer to, from God's Point of View, the Personal Purpose and Meaning of Life.

There is probably no greater evidence for the necessity of reading the Bible than the inability of most professing Christians, those attending church regularly, to coherently and succinctly state how God saves people and what this means to them, from a practical day-to-day standpoint, after being saved. Many many people confidently believe and claim they are saved when a simple (not a deep) reading of the Bible would make it clear they are not. The Bible encourages us (if we do) and warns us (if we do not):

Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you – unless, of course, you fail the test? And I trust that you will discover that we have not failed the test.

We are to examine ourselves using the grace of the reflecting truth (the Bible) to “grade” the test and take action when and where we find we are falling short. And this is not a one-time test or examination. Fortunately, every time we read the Bible. we will be given a “pop quiz” to help show us the way and keep us in it – reading daily helps us to see and make smaller corrections rather than only reading infrequently, in which case we may be so far off track we cannot see God’s forest for the many trees of life blinding us to bigger and grander truths.

Yes, in one short and simple statement we are told both how we are saved and God’s purpose for our salvation:

It is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For [the reason, goal, objective, purpose . . . of God’s salvation] we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Many people have attended church many years and have never heard this simple (and many other vital) truth preached. We should be reading, for ourselves, God’s Word (His only written Word given us) often – we can’t afford, on the key issues of life, to seldom or never know what He tells us for our own good!

Yes, the Bible is where we find the answer to, from God's point of view, the personal purpose and meaning of life. This is reason enough to read the Bible regularly. But, as we have seen, it is not the only (nor last) reason. There are many very real (and practical) reasons to read the Bible . . .