Life does come with instructions

During my five-minute commute yesterday morning (I live a mile from my office), I caught part of a sermon by one of my favorite preachers on WYLL 1160 AM. (Now, you're going to think I have some kind of obsession with telephones. I have been writing this blog for eight days and this is my third [or is it fourth?] phone-related post. But this is too good to pass up.)

Pastor Greg Laurie was speaking on How to Know the Will of God. When I tuned in, he was saying something along these lines:

Say I got a new cell phone, and instead of reading the instructions in the manual, I waited for the voice of the president of the cell phone company to magically come through the phone and tell me exactly what I needed to do to make the phone work.

You can guess the meaning - God has provided everything we need to know in His instruction manual, the Bible.

Last week when I got my new cell phone, it came with a manual for the actual phone equipment, plus ten or twelve brochures with information on all the services (calling plan details, how to use the voice mail, etc). I have since lost the equipment manual, and the brochures are in a drawer at my office and I keep forgetting to bring them home.

So Saturday when I needed to know how to put the ringer on "vibrate" I wasted half an hour going through every menu item on the phone and still could not figure it out. I finally learned how to do it yesterday from a friend at work who has the same phone model. Turns out "vibrate" is not an item you choose from a menu, but a setting on the volume control button.

If you approach life and the Bible this way - never reading the manual at all, only reading bits and pieces when you are desperate for help, or just waiting for a God-to-person voice mail message - you are going to waste a lot of time trying things that won't work, and you will miss out on a lot of neat stuff. For all I know, my phone could have some fabulous feature that will make my life easier - like a caffiene detector (see previous post).

Who knows what my phone can do? The person who wrote the manual, that's who!