Not all that long ago, if you purchased a Bible, you could expect it to be bound in black leather, printed on thin, golden-edged paper, and available only in a handful of versions. Today, thankfully, you have a much broader selection. You can choose an annotated Bible, complete with its own commentary, or one filled with cross references between the Old and New Testaments. You can select the soaring, lyrical language of the King James, or if you prefer, a translation that is more contemporary and down-to-earth.

All of this variety, of course, has helped ensure that the Bible remains the most widely published book on the planet. But just because practically everyone in the country owns one does not mean that the Bible is being regularly read. For starters, it isn’t the easiest book to understand. In fact, even calling it a “book” is a bit of a misnomer, since it’s actually a collection of sixty-six books—all written by different people, to different audiences, for different reasons, and over the span of many, different centuries. Most folks who decide to sit down and read the Bible from cover to cover (as you would other books) usually find themselves bogging down somewhere in Leviticus, and then abandoning the project altogether soon thereafter!

But if you ask me, the issue goes deeper than just being difficult to understand. After all, it isn’t easy to understand computers either; but most of us still make the effort because it seems worthwhile. And therein lies the chief problem with the Bible—at times, it doesn’t appear to be all that relevant. How does King David’s conquest over the Philistines, for example, inform our current foreign policy? Does Jesus’ healing of the sick offer any guidance for today’s practice of medicine, or possible strategies for managing our health care system?

Admittedly, it would be nice if the Bible supplied clear solutions to some of these complex situations. But the truth of the matter is that we live in an entirely different kind of world. You are not going to be able to turn to a particular passage of Scripture and find explicit directions on which career path to take, or how best to invest your retirement savings, or even which candidate to vote for in the upcoming election. True, the Bible may be a great source of comfort in times of trouble, but in the opinion of many, it’s just not all that practical for life in the 21st century.

But despite such difficulties, I still believe that the Bible gives us profound and incomparable guidance. The key is in how you approach it. Frederick Buechner once described it this way: “If you look at a window, you are likely to see smudges, or dust, or perhaps the tiny crack where Junior’s Frisbee hit it last summer. But if you look through a window, you will be able to see the world beyond.”

In much the same way, the Bible is a window through which we can get a different perspective on the world. Its truths allow us to look beyond the tiny room of our own lives and behold the life that God envisions for us. Indeed, once we catch a glimpse of that world, it is hard to remain satisfied with this one. Simply put, what the Bible does best is to inspire us to establish the kind of world that God intended!