The other day, upon entering my religion classroom, I spotted a tattered old Bible lying on the front desk. At first, I gave it no more thought than the aging copy of The Cat in the Hat that sits upon my bookshelf.

But the sight of the tattered Bible came back to me a few days later, when I was having a discussion with a Christian friend.

While talking, I quoted the words of Romans 8:28 as proof of God’s guiding hand in our lives. The conversation had been conventional up to this point. But my friend shocked me with his response.

“You point to that passage for everything! Are there any times that verse doesn’t apply?”

Granted, I frequently use Romans to back up my beliefs. But still, it got me thinking. What if many of our Bible verses are as worn out to us as the book that contains them?

Take, for example, John 3:16, undoubtedly the best known of all Bible passages. The words of “the gospel in a nutshell” bring tremendous joy to a penitent unbeliever hearing them for the first time. But to me, these same words are often recited without regard for their meaning, lost in an endless sea of random Bible trivia.

If we’re just going to ignore the   message of the Bible while we rattle off preprogrammed responses, why not just build a gospel-spewing robot army to spread the Word to the four corners of the earth faster than a speeding bullet? Are we so quick to forget what Scripture really is?

We treat the Word of God as a one-way road, providing comfort only to the receiver, when in reality it is a multilane freeway, giving vast consolation to both the listener and the speaker. I was all too quick to forget that, and my friend called me on it.

Why not give the old tried-and-true passages a rest and look to other parts of the Bible? With 1,189 chapters and more than 31,000 verses in those chapters, there is plenty of material to go around. Why shouldn’t we challenge ourselves to find something new?

Plus, we must read various portions of the Bible in order to find new verses. In doing so, we just might stumble across a chapter or verse that applies to our current condition. In his infinite wisdom, God inspired the Bible writers in such a way that passages provide relevant messages for people of all time periods.