"Living Letters"

“Living Letters”

 

In the late 1950’s Ken Taylor, a Christian businessman in the Chicago area, wanted to make the Bible more readable and relevant for his children. So while traveling back and forth on a commuter train he paraphrased the New Testament epistles. Soon thereafter it was published as Living Letters. In 1962 it came to Billy Graham’s attention and over the next year his ministry distributed some 600,000 copies. By 1971 the entire Word of God was available as The Living Bible. Within 25 years some 40 million had been sold and given away. (From Day 1 all profits have been donated to ministries.) It was updated and published as the New Living Translation in 1996 and continues to be used of God to bring people back to reading and better understanding the Scriptures.

Some nineteen centuries before Taylor gave his work its title the Apostle Paul used the concept of living letters but in a different way. In 2 Corinthians 3:2-3 he wrote to what someone has called his “heartache and headache” church, “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” (The marginal note in my study Bible calls believers “living epistles”.) Paul wrote this to show he didn’t need reference letters to document his ministry—it was affirmed “in living color” through those the Holy Spirit had enabled him to reach.

D.L. Moody once said, “The Christian’s life is the world’s Bible.” Our Lord’s brother may have had this thought in mind when he challenged his first century readers (and us as 21^st century ones), “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” (James 1:22). People who would never read the Bible are reading us day by day. Let’s be that “new living translation” through whom people can see Jesus’ living in us.

 

Grace and blessings!

Jim McMillan