Ordinary Bibles often include cross-references and brief concordances; Study Bibles include much more, all bound up in one fat volume, so that readers can find a lot of useful explanation on each page without having to hunt through Bible dictionaries and commentaries and the like.

The broader problem is that a great deal of popular preaching and teaching uses the bible as a pegboard on which to hang a fair bit of Christianized pop psychology or moralizing encouragement, with very little effort to teach the faithful, from the Bible, the massive doctrines of historic confessional Christianity.

The Bible is endlessly interesting because it is God's story, and God by nature is himself endlessly interesting. The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain. The more you read it, the more you find its truth and beauty to be inexhaustible.

It's not as if the New Testament writers came along and said, "The culmination of Old Testament books is more books, New Testament books." In some ways they thought instead of the culmination of Old Testament books being Christ himself, the word incarnate as the opening verses of Hebrews 1 put it. In the past God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son and the son is revelation.

God has disclosed of himself in human words with such magnificent self accommodation to our limitations. Precisely so that we may be his holy people and reverence everything that he says, cherish it, value it, and thus live it out.

To worship God 'in spirit and in truth' is first and foremost a way of saying that we must worship God by means of Christ. In him the reality has dawned and the shadows are being swept away (Hebrews 8:13). Christian worship is new covenant worship; it is gospel-inspired worship; it is Christ-centered worship; it is cross-focused worship.

In any Christian view of life, self-fulfillment must never be permitted to become the controlling issue. The issue is service, the service of real people. The question is, 'How can I be most useful?', not, 'How can I feel most useful?'