If you go ahead and develop this product, the Christian Fortune Cookies, please say you heard it here first, and be sure to do the honorable thing and send me the commission checks.

Here's what we do to God's word. We make it into little tasty Fortune Cookies. We tend to chop it up into little tasty morsels, just a bite-sized bit. We use just a tiny collection of inoffensive words, "Be still and know that I am God" and slather it over little slips of paper, little bumper stickers, little greeting cards and in general, try to take something BIG and make it little.

How do we do this? We edit the Word to make it portable or more palatable. Yes, I guess we section it off to make it easier to understand. We make Christian Fortune Cookies out of it. Like right here, right in front of me on my desk is a little card that says, "I am the way, the truth and the life." Nice fortune cookie. There's no reference cited so unless you know it's from the Bible, you'd have no idea where it came from. Maybe you think, "Is that referencing Oprah? Oprah is the way, the truth and the life?" Or worse yet, is that referencing me? I am the subject? I am the way? Who is this "I am"?

Perhaps you're suprised that the rest of the verse is not there on my little card. Are you? I'm not...because the rest of the verse says, "No one comes to the Father except through me." (By the way, it's from the Bible, John 14:6.)

That inflamatory statement, "No one comes to the Father except through me", while being the cornerstone of the gospel, is less tasty, so it's not included in our sweet lil' morsel.

This happens everywhere and the place it frustrates me the most is Bible Study. "Read Romans 12:8b and fill in the blanks." So specific. So cut and dried. So boring. So "just-one-correct-answer."

If we're studying the Bible, awesome, awesome, awesome. Let's do it. Let's read the verses that come before the referenced verse. Let's go crazy, let's read the verses that come after the referenced verses. It'll be nutty, let's read the whole chapter, the whole book.

Let's not make Christian Fortune Cookies any more.