Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and useful one way or another… (2 Timothy 3:16, The Message)
In his book Dream On, Irish golfer John Richardson writes of a challenge he took upon himself in 2006, after ten years of contemplating the idea: Could a golfer who was lucky to break 100 every once in a while turn himself into a player who could shoot par within one year, without ditching his job and his family?
I won’t spoil the outcome for you, but I will say that if you want to watch one person compress everything you’ve ever learned about golf into 12 crazy months, it’s well worth the read. In addition to the building intrigue as the year progresses, there is education and re-education for all golfers in this book—taking into account the physical, mental and social aspects of the game.
In the midst of that, one of the most interesting threads is this: Richardson, though willing to ride the technology of our day once his swing was in order, anchored that swing by continually returning to one of golf’s most enduring books, Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, originally published in 1957, when driver heads were still the size of dinner rolls and irons were not much thicker than sheet music.
Old into new. Not a change, but an infusion.
Scripture matters. Every page of it. It breathes the life of its Author into our own.Many people ignore the Bible—and particularly that very Jewish portion we call the Old Testament—because they figure it offers them nothing today. To which we might come back with that most contemporary of questions: “Really?”
The Old Testament, or Tanakh, as our Jewish friends would call it, features among its accounts:
– A woman raped, then avenged by her brothers, who obliterated her family in gangland fashion (Dinah)
– A man wrongly jailed and left to rot through years of presumed guilt (Joseph)
– A woman coveted, seized, impregnated, and kept by the conniving, murderous ways of her lover (Bathsheba)
– A man framed in innocence and sent to his death according to an unjust law (Daniel)
This is only the beginning of a list of course, a list we might call: “Modern Headlines Ripped from the Bible.”
Scripture matters. Every page of it.
It breathes the life of its Author into our own. As long as we open it.
—
Jeff Hopper
Originally published January 27, 2011
Copyright 2011 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
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