An interesting, and perplexing, Gallup Poll in 2000 found that 65% of all Americans agree that the Bible "answers all or most of the basic questions of life." Sounds great, but don't burst into hallelujahs just yet. For in the same poll, only 16% of Americans say they read the Bible every day. And not even half of those who claim to believe the Bible read it once a week or more.

So most Americans feel the Bible has the basic answers we need to life issues. Yet most of those who believe that then use it primarily as a dust collector. Huh?

How can this be? Instead of saying with Peter, "Lord, You have words of eternal life; to whom shall we go?" most Bible-believing Americans say, "Lord, You have words of eternal life; but I got to go somewhere now."

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And that is part of the problem. Americans tend to let the urgent rule over the important. It's hard not to do otherwise. We are no longer a nation of one-earner families and 40 hour work weeks. Even for teenagers and singles, demands on time can seem endless. In our busyness, we are constantly bombarded by the urgent, by the "worries of the world" that "enter in and choke the word." (Mark 4:19) No matter how strong our convictions concerning that word, the urgent can blind us to just how vital the word is and keep us from it.

Another cause is that Americans are spiritually spoiled. We have Bibles and Bible teaching available to us like no other nation in history. To many Christians overseas, Bibles are hard to come by and are precious. But us Americans often have more Bibles in one home than are in an entire village overseas. Even the most "Bible-thumping" among us can fall into taking the Bible for granted.

The abundance of Bibles and teaching available to us reveals another cause -- Americans, especially American Christians, can be spiritually lazy. We are like the sluggard of Proverbs 26:15:

The sluggard buries his hand in the dish;

He is weary of bringing it to his mouth again.

Any visit to a Christian book store, sometimes any search of our own bookshelves, show we have a banquet of God's word laid before us. But like the sluggard, we are often too lazy to eat.

As Myers touched on, we can also find the Bible a bit intimidating. Even Christians tend to be put off when confronted with passages that are more than we can understand. This tendency misses the point, however. If we could completely understand it, it could hardly be God's word.

If we realized just how rich it is, we'd know that every Bible passage is more than we can totally understand. Once we in humility adjust ourselves to that, Bible reading is then a joy. Each passage can teach us a new thing from God through the years, no matter how often we've studied it before, no matter how often we missed that fresh insight before.

For many Christians, there may be another cause of neglecting the word that is deeper set yet subtle. Even those of us who don't align ourselves with two prevalent strains of thought are very much influenced by them.

In the last half of the 20th Century, the Charismatic movement and post-modern modes of thinking have greatly influenced Western Christians.

Now, this is not a polemic against either. The Charismatic movement has made many positive contributions to the church, such as the realizations that all Christians are gifted for ministry and that the Holy Spirit is indeed the third Person of the Trinity and not a spook that inhabits old churches. Post-modernism is teaching us to not equate rationalistic, bookish Western thought with faith.

Nor by any means is the Charismatic movement and post-modernism necessarily of the same cloth. But they share an important trait. Both place much weight on personal and community experience.

And in large part, that emphasis on emotion, on the mystic, on meeting God Himself has been a needed antidote to a Western Christianity that confuses intellectual assent with faith, absorbing Bible facts with worship, and meeting attendance with devotion.

But this emphasis on experience can lead into the pitfall of substituting experience for the revelation of scripture -- or to put it another way, of substituting one's own experience for the inspired narrative of how God has caused people to experience Him through the ages.

We can make our own experience into an idol, placing it over anything, even scripture, that doesn't fit into it or immediately enhance it. Short of that, the excitement of encountering God through an emotion-drenched service or a hike on a mountain can make text on pages seem mundane. Indeed, Charismatic churches sometimes have the reputation of not emphasizing Bible teaching. This writer's past time in the Charismatic movement, though positive in large part, confirms that reputation as deserved at times.

Charismatics and many post-moderns have it right though -- truth needs to be not just beliefs or facts, but an experience. Still, as Leonard Sweet has warned, "As we make truth our experience, we had better make sure it is God's truth . . . ." And that can not be done apart from God's word. To be sure that the truth we encounter is indeed of the Truth and the Way and the Life, we need to line our truth experiences up with the Truth, Jesus, and with His word.

So the issue is not do we choose the word or choose experience. We should choose both. We need both. And both enhance the other. Living out the word makes it more real. Seeing God do His word in our lives makes our experiences more real.

We would do well to remember, and to teach, that God interacts with His people, not just through personal episodes, but through His word. To deprive ourselves of the word is to deprive ourselves of encountering God. Though God speaks how He chooses, He has chosen to speak to us today primarily through the Bible.

And taking in the Bible ensures that our experience is not merely individualistic and confined to this time, but of God's people, transcending our narrow time. In Revelation, we can worship Jesus with the saints of the future. In Exodus, we can be in awe of the power of God with the Hebrews. In Psalms, we can know with the Psalmists that God can relate to us in our day-to-day lives with all their joy and pain. And we can enjoy and learn to do His word with our fellow pilgrims today.

At the same time, God can use His word in our lives in an intensely personal way. For He knows where each of us is going to read in the Bible. And He knows what we're going through in our lives. And He can bring the two together to speak personally to you and me.

Few life events can touch one as deeply as when God does that.

With prodding from Charismatic and post-modern influences, Western Christians are learning to stop depriving themselves of the depth and joy of experiencing God. But, while confining faith to the written and the rational robs Christians of truly experiencing that faith and the God behind it, neglecting the written word of God also leads to a poverty of truth experience -- the poverty of experience divorced from the revelation of God through the ages, divorced from a reliable standard to evaluate experience, even divorced from the Truth Himself.

But if in seeking a life experience of the Truth, we are faithful to dig into the word, then no telling what depths of God we may encounter. For God delights in taking His word and using it in our lives far beyond all we can ask or even imagine.

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Mark Marshall

author of "God Knows What It's Like to be a Teenager"
Visit his website at www.godknows99.com for more information.