mistaken?

in the groggy place between sleep and awake when i'm usually making absolutely no sense and am completely incoherent, I thought of this today... it comes from the small snippet of interview that spawned my previous writing, but is a larger problem than an individual. Osteen was asked about how his points of his last book don't include God or Jesus Christ and he responded that there are biblical references to back all of them.

It made me think, this morning, about how we take our scriptures. Do we find our enlightenment in them, discovering rays of truth straight from them and then finding that to be proven true in other places in the Scriptures? or do we make our points and then go out to hunt down passages that support our point of view (which leads to using passages out of context)?

It is the equivalent of asking a scientist in her experimentations if her results are independently of her hypothesis with the intention of discerning the truth or if her results are used solely to prove her hypothesis- a study unwilling to accept that its original premise may have been wrong.

It is important for we Christians (and not just pastors) to think about these things because it is important for us to study the Scriptures with an open heart and not come to them to prove our pre-conceived notions. Or our self-thought self-help suggestions.