Worldwide Church of God - Camberwell
Living and Sharing the Gospel

September 2010

Dear Church Family,

I think that we would all agree that there is a great deal of biblical illiteracy up and down the land, even among Christians.

You know you’re in trouble when:

• You think the “epistles” were the wives of the “apostles”;
• You think Noah’s wife was Joan of Arc;
• You think the Minor Prophets worked underground extracting coal;
• Your favourite Old Testament hero is Hercules;
• You think Abraham, Isaac & Jacob were a rock group from the 1960s;
• You get frustrated when you can’t find Charlton Heston in the Concordance;
• You tell your grandchildren the story of “Jonah the shepherd boy and his ark of many colours”
• Your favourite book in the Bible is 1 Impressions.

There is simply an alarming amount of Biblical ignorance out there.

Just for fun (no prizes), let’s take a quick Bible quiz. Here are twelve familiar phrases, which ones do you think are found in the Bible.

• “Ashes to ashes; dust to dust”
• “The apple of my eye”
• “Eat, drink, and be merry”
• “Like mother, like daughter”
• “Eat sour grapes”
• “The prodigal son”
• “A drop in the bucket”
• “The Lord’s Prayer”
• “This, too, shall pass”
• “Confession is good for the soul”
• “Honesty is the best policy”
• “The skin of my teeth”

How did you get on?

Only six of these phrases are found in the Bible. They are:

• “the apple of my eye” (Zechariah 2:8);
• “eat drink, and be merry” (Luke 12:19);
• “like mother, like daughter” (Ezekiel 16:44);
• “eat sour grapes” (Ezekiel 18:2);
• “a drop in the bucket” (Isaiah 40:15); and
• “the skin of my teeth” (Job19:20).

Now we don’t have to know everything about the Bible to be a Christian; you may not know where to find the book of Hezekiah without looking it up in the table of contents and that’s OK (just testing).

But as we read and study the Bible and get to understand it with a little more clarity, we’ll soon discover that there are many popular sayings floating around that sound Christian, that people think are in the Bible, but they are not there.

People may think that they are quoting Scripture when actually they’re not.

So over the next few weeks we will have a series of sermons entitled, ‘Where is that in the Bible?’ in which we’ll have a look at some of these well-known sayings that have grown up over the years but are not in the Bible.

I hope you will find it interesting to see what is behind some of these sayings and what the Bible actually says about the topics they address.

‘The making of many sermons there is no end’. Now is that in the Bible?

With love in Jesus’ name,

Barry Robinson
Pastor

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