Route 66
A Crash Course in Navigating Life with the Bible
Krish Kandiah
Welcome to Route 66, a journey to discover how the 66 books of the Bible help us to know God—and know how to live for Him. This book is packed with practical help to live your whole life guided by the whole of the Bible.
For many of us, there is a disconnect between the Bible we treasure and the book we struggle to read. We know the Bible is a lamp to our feet, honey on our lips, and the sword of the Spirit, equipping us for every good work. But sometimes the Bible feels more like a confusing collection of ancient texts filled with obscure laws! Using the analogy of a trip, Route 66 unfolds how different passages of the Bible can help us travel through different passages of our life.
Route 66 works with the idea that there are eight identifiable genres within the Bible: narrative, law, psalm, prophecy, wisdom, gospel, epistle, and apocalyptic. Krish Kandiah introduces each in turn, explaining how to read them and how to apply their teaching to your life. He then provides five studies for each. There are three ways you can use this book: on your own, with 40 daily Bible studies and a “travel journal” to record what God is teaching you; in a small group, with weekly study questions to supplement your personal reading; and with your church, using the eight sections of the book as a great sermon series (there are some free downloadable slides and service outlines available on kregel.com).
Krish Kandiah is the Executive
Director: Churches in Mission for the UK
Evangelical Alliance. He is also an external examiner
for Oak
Hill College,
an Associate Research Fellow at London School of Theology, and is part of the
theme development group for Spring Harvest.
Dr. Kandiah previously held the position of Director of the
Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, in addition to being Tutor for the Mission
and Evangelism at Wycliffe Hall. He was also an Oxford University Theology
faculty member.
Before
becoming the pastor of a multi-cultural church in Harrow,
Kandiah worked with students in the UK
with Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship, and in Albania
with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He has wide
experience in evangelism and cross cultural mission, and he is in demand around
the world as a speaker and lecturer—though he is still a regular speaker at
university missions and at Spring Harvest.
Dr.
Kandiah and his wife, Miriam, have four elementary aged children and regularly
take in foster babies. Kandiah
has a keen interest in movies, photography, rock music, and Liverpool FC.
Books
Fresh: Bitesize
Inspiration for New Students, IVP 2008
“Twenty Four – integrating faith and real life” Authentic 2007
“Destiny- what is life all about?” Monarch 2007
“Life Swap – finding the life you always wanted, Monarch 2008
“How to Save a Life- becoming a Christian”, Authentic, 2009
“Dysciples – why i fall asleep when I pray…” – Authentic 2009
Just Politics, Authentic 2010
Final – bite-sized inspirations for final year students, IVP 2010
Route 66: A Crash Course in Navigating Life, Monarch Books 2011
MY REVIEW:
I have read many different books on how to read the Bible, from light and fluffy to dry and weighty tomes that can put you to sleep if you are having trouble sleeping.
Route 66 is like the chair that's "just right" in not only is it informative, but filled with gems of insight that will encourage you to dig deeper in your Bible.
Krish's style of writing is easy to read and follow. Though his writing has some British terminology that we Americans may not be use to, it wasn't difficult to understand.
I especially liked how he explained each "genre" or collection of writings in the Bible and pointed out what their differences and purposes were for the people of that time and how they apply to our lives today.
Route 66 is an eight week study with something new every day that encourages the novice Bible student to the most scholarly to discover a fresh view point that will breath new life into their walk with God.
It also has a group study section for those who like to read and study the Bible with others. The questions will help engage lively discussion and serious thought in discovering what it is that God is saying to His people.
This book is not only a keeper, but one that will blow the dust off of your Bible and lives and help you gain a better understanding of God's written word and how He wants to change your life.
This book was provided for the purpose of reviewing and posting that review, by Kregel Publications. Everything I have said is of my own opinion. Thank you Kregel!
EXCERPT FROM ROUTE 66:
Week 1: Living faithfully 1
The narrative literature and its application to life
Day 1: The ride of our
lives
Luke is funny. He is clever. He is 145 cm tall and has brown eyes.
What is your mental
image of Luke from that description? Are you imagining a
small clown turning cartwheels? Are you thinking geeky and
peculiar? Awkward
and studious? Scheming and tricking? I’m afraid all of these are
way off mark.
Describing anyone in terms of a few physical features and
personality traits falls
seriously short. So let me introduce you to my son Luke another
way – with a story.
Yesterday Luke brought
his schoolwork home. When we asked why he hadn’t
completed the work at school, he explained crossly that he had
been waiting in
the queue to get the materials from the teacher when he saw one of
his friends
struggling. He went over to help him out and rejoined the queue.
Just as he was
almost at the front he spotted a girl crying, so he went over to
give her a hand and
by the time he rejoined the queue again, she was smiling. By the
end of the lesson
he had helped half the class in one way or another, but had hardly
started his
project. When his teacher saw his work, she told him off for
“doing nothing” and
gave him a warning.
Just from this one
short story, we gain an insight into the way Luke relates
to others, his selflessness, and his sense of justice. We read
“clever” as mentally
resourceful, and “funny” as good at making other people smile. But
more than just
picturing him, you are probably beginning to relate to Luke. You
may even have
begun to think about what you would do in his shoes or what you
would say to
him if you were his teacher, his friend or his parent.
Statements like “Luke
is 145 cm tall” are important. But they are merely the
bones of a skeleton when it comes to getting to know somebody. A
story fleshes
out the description, giving us a clearer picture of the person and
offering us the
possibility of intimacy and relationship. When God introduces
himself to us in the
beginning of the Bible, he does so through story after story after
story. This has a
number of effects:
1. Stories reveal God’s
character12
Not just in terms of abstract concepts that could be misconstrued,
but also in terms
of concrete examples. For the most part the story of the Bible is
a retelling of how
God has connected characters, communities, continents and the
cosmos itself in his
great big story for all of creation, making the character of the
invisible God visible
to us.
2. Stories draw us into
the story
Stories abduct our emotions, stealing them away into the drama as
we recognize
the dilemmas and empathize with the characters.13 By experiencing the stories God
has given us in this way, our imagination, our ambition and our
lives are drawn into
the captivating narrative of the Bible.
3. Stories draw us into
relationship
As we see God’s character in action, we get to know different
aspects of his
personality and foundations for a relationship are built as we
share his hopes and
heartaches.
4. Stories make us who
we are
“In order to make sense of our lives and to make our most
important decisions,
we depend on some story.”14 In a world of competing stories the Bible tells us true
stories about the way things really happened so that we can be
caught up into
God’s ultimate story of the grand sweep of history. Sometimes we
zoom in and see
the fine detail – like in the story of Joseph and his jealous
brothers. Other times we
zoom out to see the genealogies that summarize generations of
stories where God
was faithful to his people. It has been said that history is His
Story, but it is also
our story, as we too belong somewhere in the sweep of history
described between
Genesis 1 and Revelation 21.
5. Stories change our
lives
One sweltering summer’s day my wife and I heard a story about a
beautiful
newborn baby girl who had no home to go to, as her birth mother
was unable
to care for her. She was lying in the hospital that hot afternoon,
oblivious to the
uncertainties of her future as social workers phoned around
possible placements.
We were newly approved foster carers. On hearing this story we
faced a choice.
Our decision to get involved in the story of this little girl had
life-changing
consequences as we first fostered her, then adopted her, loving
her as our own
daughter. Reading the stories of the Old Testament comes with a
health warning:
the more we get to know God, and the more we get drawn into the
Bible story,
the harder it will be to ignore the invitation to join the ride of
our lives in God’s big
plan for the universe.
TRAVEL JOURNAL: Genesis 1:1–31
1. God is introduced as the lead character in the story of the
Bible.
How does this story seek to inspire awe in you as you read?
(See verses 1, 3 and 16.)
2. The story of the beginning of the universe is told with great
artistry. Where do you notice repetitions, poetry or unusual turns
of phrase?
3. The hinge-point of the story seems to be the creation of human
beings (verses 27–31). Find four differences compared to the
rest of creation. Why are they significant?
4. Use the five points about how stories help us to engage with
Genesis 1. How does this story:
⊕ reveal God’s character?
⊕ draw us into relationship?
⊕ draw us into the story?
⊕ make us who we are?
⊕ change our lives?
Day 2: Mirror, signal,
manoeuvre
Of the 4,000 or more volumes that my wife and I own, there is one
that I
particularly treasure. It is one of my smallest and scruffiest
books and even the
letters on its spine have been rubbed away. But every time I see
it, I remember the
romance of a day twenty years earlier. I was in Shakespeare’s Stratford with my
soon-to-be fiancée when we discovered this compact copy of Romeo
and Juliet in
a second-hand shop. Sitting by the river in view of the Swan
Theatre, I gave that
book as a farewell present to my girlfriend as she left to spend a
year working in
Germany. Somehow we survived the
long-distance relationship and that copy of
Romeo and Juliet now sits on our shelf reminding us of young love,
of the pain of
separation, and of the hope of return.
If I were to tell you
that some recent visitors to my home spotted that famous
romantic tragedy on my bookshelf, and had never heard of it
before, I guess you
would be surprised. But imagine your shock if I then added that I
could summarize
the play in just thirteen words:
⊕ Hate destroys families.
⊕ Love is stronger than hate.
⊕ Love is stronger than death.
The statements are true enough, but the story has been stripped of
its plot, its
suspense, its beauty, its emotions, its characters, and its context.
My summary may
have left my visitors a little more informed, but I doubt I would
have inspired them
to go away and discover the play for themselves.
Many of the sermons I
hear, and even many I have preached, easily end up
as a bland set of bullet-points, often handily beginning with the
same letter!
For example, you could go away from a sermon based on the story of
the call of
Abraham in Genesis 12 with these lessons:
⊕ God is patient.
⊕ God is generous.
⊕ God is missionary.
Here are three true statements,15 but the Bible
passage, which started out as a
story, has ended up as systematic theology. This is as
dissatisfying as going into
a restaurant and ordering their best soup, and being given instead
a list of the
ingredients. Or visiting the Louvre to see a Renaissance
masterpiece, only to
discover that scientists had immortalized the exhibits by
distilling the paints into
test-tubes arranged in alphabetical order of their chemical
composition. Sometimes
we are in danger of reducing the Bible so much, that although we
may find a truth,
we lose the sensation and the impact that the story was supposed
to produce.16
It is the basic
assumption in this book that God in his wisdom inspired the
Scriptures and gave us just the kind of book that we needed. It is
no accident or
mistake that God inspired so much of the Bible to be in story form
and preserved
those stories over the millennia so they would be handed down in
the format we
see in front of us. Of course God could have sent us bullet-points
instead, but he
chose not to. God’s aim was not that we boil these stories down to
their bare
minimum ingredients. God’s aim was the opposite – that the stories
could boil over
into the messy reality of our lives.
In order to understand
Romeo and Juliet, we need to understand the language
and the culture that Shakespeare was writing in. But that tragic
play set in the
fifteenth century, with its rigid conventions of marriage, still
has an impact in our
more liberal society. The stories of the Bible are not human works
of fiction, like
Shakespearean plays, but divine accounts of history and therefore
have endless
potential to impact our own lives. Nevertheless, we still need to
acknowledge the
presence of the two worlds, whichever part of the Bible narrative
we are reading:
the world of the Bible text with its language, culture and time in
history, and our
world with its very different language, culture and time in
history.17 The following
tool of narrative Bible study is adapted from that vital
all-terrain habit I learned in
my driving lessons: “Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre”.
⊕ MIRROR: Look back and try to understand how
the original audience would
have experienced the Bible passage.
⊕ SIGNAL: Ask God to help you to understand
the passage’s significance
today. How is the story used elsewhere in the Bible? How does the
story set
the course for our lives today?
⊕ MANOEUVRE: What are you going to do now to
change your actions,
attitude or understanding as a result of this Bible passage?
Looking back to what a story meant to its first hearers before we
look to our own
situation may take some getting used to. However awkward and
time-consuming it
may feel to first look back, and then look around before looking
forward, this art
of time travel will protect us from the dangers of misapplying the
Bible, and will
resource us to move forward confidently.
TRAVEL JOURNAL: Genesis 12:1–9
1. Flick back through chapters 9–12. What do we learn about the
world as Abram saw it? How do you imagine Abram felt about
God’s call in verse 1, and the promises in verses 2–3 and 7?
From Abram’s perspective, how does the story work out for him?
(Scan through Genesis 12–25.)
2. How does Abram’s call set the direction for how we understand
the life of faith? (See Galatians 3 and Romans 4.)
3. Ultimately God’s promise will be fulfilled at the end of time.
How
is Abram’s call therefore still applicable to those of us who are
his spiritual descendants? (See especially Genesis 12:2–3.)
4. How does Hebrews 11:8–12 help us to live out this story? What
are you going
to do about this?
Notes
12 See Newbigin,
L., 1989, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, SPCK, p. 99.
13 See Sweet, L., McLaren, B. & Hasselmayer, J., 2003, A is for Abductive: The Language of
the Emergent Church, Zondervan, pp. 31–33.
14 See Bartholomew, C. & Goheen, M., 2006, The Drama of
Scripture: Finding our place in the biblical story, SPCK, p. 1.
15 Kevin Vanhoozer
puts it well: “The gospel is informative: ‘he is risen.’ Without some
propositional core, the church would lose its raison
d’être, leaving only programs and pot-lucks. At the same time, to
reduce the truth of Scripture to a set of propositions is unnecessarily
reductionist.”
Vanhoozer, K., 2005, “Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture and
Hermeneutics”, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 48/1, March 2005,
p. 100.
16 For more on
this theme see Arthurs, J. D., 2007, Preaching with Variety: How to recreate
the Dynamics of Biblical Genres, Kregel.
17 Stott, J.,
1998, I Believe in Preaching, Hodder & Stoughton.
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