A Perennial Best Seller

I love books. I love reading. Few things excite me more than just walking into a bookstore and perusing the titles. When Brenda is with me, I will often find a book and a chair and nestle in for a good read while she shops. Recently, I walked into a Half Priced Books store with a couple of friends. They looked at albums and comics. I had no intention of buying anything but found a new biography on Babe Ruth and found a chair and started reading until my friends were ready to leave. What little I read fascinated me.

I seldom go to the best seller's section. Over the years I have developed a far different appetite for reading. Knowing time is short and I am not getting any younger I am much more selective about what I read. I look for the biographies. I look for my favorite authors. From time to time someone will recommend a book or author.

Sometimes I read the same books over and over again at least once a year. They are that beneficial. In recent days I have been given over a dozen books. I've been blessed with thousands of others by retired preachers. So many new books I cannot keep up.

While making a hospital visit recently a lady asked, "When do you have time to read?"I replied I do a lot of it early in the morning.

One book fascinates me. I have read it several times. To be honest, some parts of it I do not understand. The author is a deep thinker. Far deeper than me. Much more intelligent. I still wade through the pages picking up a few hidden gems of knowledge.

Without question my favorite book is a perennial best seller. You will not see it on the lists though. If you did it would be the number one selling book every year. Of course I'm talking about the Bible. How about these fun facts.

• Each year 100 million Bibles are printed.
• In the United States 168,000 Bibles are sold or given to another individual each day. 
• 20 million Bibles are sold each year in the United States alone. 
• 92% of Americans own at least one Bible. 
• The Gideons give away about 100 Bibles every minute. 

Pretty amazing. Many followers of Jesus have made this book the staple of their spiritual diet. Most preachers have made the Bible the subject of their preaching and teaching ministries. Millions read the Bible devotionally. It is the most important book in the world. No other book has ever been written which has impacted so many lives and been so influential as the Bible. 

This sacred book has been , criticized, maligned, disbelieved, dismissed and dissected. It still stands as the perennial best selling book every single year. Pagan publishers do not want you to know that. So they disregard Bible annual sales to promote other books and authors. Those books come and go.  The Bible stands alone as the best selling book of all time. End of question. 

 I wish more of those 92% who own a Bible would read it, study it, and live according to the principles contained in it. Shucks, I wish the people in the church did the same. We live in a Bible ignorant age. Think on it. We live in a time when 80,000 different Bibles are readily available in most parts of the world and yet it seems few read it and even fewer live it. 

As a pastor, revival preacher and author I have God has my subject and the Bible as my textbook. In my personal readings I am working my way through the book of Exodus. The more I read and learn the more I realize how much I do not know. The Bible will never be exhausted in study. Unlike every other book written the Bible lives. Life transforming truth penetrates and pierces hearts. It is the book I've devoted my life to expounding. It is the most important book out of all my volumes. I thank God I have access to it. 

Now, enough writing. It is time to go back to Exodus and pick up where I left off yesterday. I pray I encounter God in the pages of the sacred perennial best selling book. 

2 Timothy 3:16 (NASB) 

16  All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;