"The unspoken secret is that many people find the Bible boring. This is a serious problem and a quite recent one. Ancient Greek* had no word for boredom. The word did not have its current meaning in English until the last few centuries. We look at the ancient world, and they had no television, no Internet, no movies, no iTunes, and virtually no books--and we think of how boring it must have been.
"But the ancients were not bored. We are the ones who get bored because our capacity to focus our attention, to delight our minds in sustained thought, has been weakened by our dependence on external stimuli." (John Ortberg in The Me I Want to Be)
Our capacity not only to read God's Word, but to lead useful, fulfilling lives in general, increasingly depends on our capacity to break away from the crowd to read, to think, to use the minds God gave us, instead of the hapless victim impulse and the unreflective herd mentality.
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