How important to you are the things you believe?

This is a Christian blogsite so I would think that the majority of those posting here would hold some kind of orthodox christian viewpoint and belief system.

Do you call yourself christian without actually knowing what it means to hold those beliefs?  It has always been very important to me to know what I beleive and why I believe it.  "Just because" is not a suitable explanation for my belief system.  We are admonished to: "15...sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear; 16 having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed." 1 Peter 3:15-16 (NKJV)

How important is what you believe?

How do you explain the reasons for your faith?

Have you ever fallen flat on your face? Can you read the writing on the wall? Do you ever think about escaping, perhaps by the skin of your teeth before it's too late? When things are going well, do you look for the fly in the ointment? If you answered "Yes" to these questions, you are in good company.

Shakespeare, however, never fell flat on his face. He couldn't read the writing on the wall, never once escaped by the skin of his teeth, and his ointment was always free of flies. The Bard, that great master of vocabulary and wordplay, could do none of these things, for these metaphors did not enter the English language until close to the time of his death in 1616. Like so much of the English language, these quaint and timeless expressions were borrowed from another tongue-in this case, Hebrew.

 

 

"The [King James Bible] is an almost literal translation of the Masoretic text, and is thus on every page replete with Hebrew idioms," writes Rosenau in Hebraisms in the Authorized Version of the Bible, a careful study of the way in which the King James Bible translated Hebrew expressions. "The fact that Bible English has to a marvellous extent shaped our speech, giving peculiar connotations to many words and sanctioning strange constructions, is not any less patent."

Because the Bible's publicly accessible style could be widely imitated, the new phrases were easily absorbed, often unconsciously, within everyday language. Soon, without anyone completely appreciating what was happening, they began to shape written and spoken English.

"The [King James Bible] has been-it can be said without any fear of being charged with exaggeration-the most powerful factor in the history of English literature," Rosenau claims. "Though the constructions encountered in the [King James Bible] are oftentimes so harsh that they seem almost barbarous, we should certainly have been the poorer without it."

excerpts from: http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/Bible/How-The-Bible-Brought-A-Fly-In-The-Ointment-To-English.aspx?p=1

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