I didn't say that at all !!!!!

Have you ever been in one of those management circle exercises where you all sit in a circle and one person whispers to the next one something really simple like maybe "the green spider ate the whole pumpkin"?  The receiver of the message then turns to the next one and repeats what he heard and it goes on down through the line until it gets back to the person who uttered the first statement.  It rarely ever fails that the message received back by the original sender is anywhere near the same as the one he first uttered.  The object of the exercise is to teach the participants to really listen carefully to what is said to them and if they are going to repeat it to someone to be very careful to repeat exactly what they heard.  The purpose is to show how simple things that someone said can literally explode as it gets passed along.  The moral of the story is to show that gossip is not good and mostly harmful in that the further it goes along the more distorted it gets.

A lot of times stuff we repeat isn't repeated with malicious intent.  We feel that we are simply passing along information, right?  But way too many times someone invariably gets hurt, angry, or shaken by stuff that is said about them with an original good intent, simply because with each pass of the information it can easily (and often unintentionally) get goobered up or taken completely out of context.  If you have ever had that happen to you, you know the feeling well...."I didn't say that at all!!!!" and with that perhaps some of your hard built creditability is placed in jeopardy.  It happens way more often in our earthly lives than it should.....and I dare say we all are guilty at times.

When it comes to our spiritual lives, our desire to be more Christ like in our daily walk with the Lord, we are free from worrying about getting the wrong message.  God will never, ever, say "I didn't say that at all".  We just won't hear it.  The reason is simple.  There's the roadmap for living that is available to us that has never changed.  It's called His Word....the Bible.  If we follow that, we won't hear twisted up messages or misinterpreted words.  We will hear truth, as it has been told for thousands of years.  Not just truth, unblemished and not fiddled with, but THE truth.  His Word.

Do you have a relationship with your Bible?  Or does it just sit on the shelf?