Respect

Someone once gave me a copy of the Quran years ago. When he gave it to me he told me I needed to wash my hands before I touched it - out of respect for their holy book. Do we show our Bibles with similar respect?

I don’t remember specifically being told to treat the Bible carefully and with respect but I must have been taught this lesson at some point because I have a serious aversion to putting my Bible on the floor and have drilled this into my children’s’ heads.

In fact, my daughter has adopted this respect for the Bible so well that at youth group when they were playing a Bible quiz trivia game the leaders told the kids to put their Bibles under their chairs to make sure they didn’t use them and cheat. My daughter refused- eventually crossing the room and putting her Bible on a different chair - but never on the floor.

In addition, my daughter attends a Bible study with her drama teacher and a few of her friends at lunch on Fridays. Her teacher used to be a missionary in Eastern Europe and she told a story about attending an underground church and putting her Bible down on the floor. The believers assembled there were shocked by her disrespect for her Bible! They were in a country closed to Christianity and even owning a Bible was forbidden. So copies of the Bible were few and precious and no one would think of setting it down on the floor!

I have been thinking a lot about this lately. Especially when I found out my daughter is the ONLY one in her youth group who thought putting the Bible on the floor was disrespectful (sadly, my son hasn’t quite adopted this respect for the Bible- at least not consistently). She is also the only one in her lunchtime Bible study that completely identifies with the people in the closed church in Eastern Europe on this issue. In our country Bibles are plentiful. Every believer probably owns multiple copies -in different versions. But because of this, we take possession of a Bible for granted and we fail to properly grasp that the Bible is the Living Word of GOD! The Bible is a precious book - the holy scriptures inspired by God Himself! Why don’t we treat it as such?

I am not saying we should wash our hands before we touch our Bibles- unless our hands are really dirty. But I DO think we should treat it with more respect. Don’t put it on the ground where it could get kicked or stepped on - where people walk with their dirty shoes that have been everywhere from the parking lot to public restrooms to dirt paths through parks or playgrounds.

It’s a matter of showing respect for God’s Word - not to idolize it, but to protect it and view it as precious and worthy of better treatment than that of a comic book or magazine or a dirty pair of shoes.