Toward the very end of World War II, when someone commented to President Harry Truman that he appeared amazingly chipper and unfazed, bearing up under the stress of the presidency better than any previous U.S. Chief Executive, especially given the problems he was confronted with, he replied, "I have a foxhole in my mind."

Truman explained that just as a soldier retreated into his foxhole for protection, rest and recuperation, he had his own mental foxhole to retire to—a place he allowed nothing to bother him.

This is what God's Word offers when you have the truth "rightly divided" (understanding dispensational changes in God's dealings with men through history and following Paul's distinct ministry today) literally built up in you soul.

The wisdom to handle all the details of life are on black-and-white pages that can be carried around wherever you go.

Sometimes when I'm walking, in fact, I like to listen to a guy named Alexander Scourby read the verses of the King James Bible on cassette tapes (available over the internet or in Barnes & Noble). He's got an incredible voice with amazingly deft intonations and inflections.

At a post-9/11 summer Bible conference through my church in Chicago, Shorewood Bible Church (www.graceimpact.org), a discussion of contemporary issues revolved around some very fundamental needs of society today.

In a sermon, my pastor, Richard Jordan, summarized them this way:

"You need to have a gospel that you can believe—the gospel of grace. You need to have a life that you can live—Christ in you, the hope of glory. You need to have a study you can understand—the Word 'rightly divided.'

"You need to have a Bible you can trust—the Authorized King James. It’s the only one in English you can trust today.

"You need to have a commission; a mission in life that you can fulfill as an 'ambassador for Christ.' You need a hope that can sustain you through it all and that’s the thing we try to communicate.

"We’re not trying to go out and fight the ills of the world out there, we’re trying to come along and give some doctrine that is the answer for what the world needs and longs for and gropes for and seeks to learn but can’t learn. You need to be able to know what the doctrine is and state it out and be able to communicate it by manner of life.

"Paul said, 'For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.' Paul’s whole manner of life was focused on one thing and that was that Jesus Christ would be magnified through his body whether by life or by death."

If you think about it, most of us have it so good in America today we tend to have to make up things to be upset about. Listen to any smattering of cell-phone talk, which I can't help but do here in Manhattan even if I'm just waiting at a traffic light, standing in a subway car or buying a newspaper from the corner deli, and you know this is often the case.

The dissatisfaction, irritability or feigned anger to petty annoyances and frustrations is purely out of habit. It's "learned" dramatization, helped on by the inundation of it in all forms of media.

I read once that up to 95% of our behavior is habitual. Just as a pianist pounds the ivories without consciously "deciding" his every next finger placement, people do the same with attitudes and beliefs.

While Americans often find it embarrassing—and sometimes even odious—to talk about belief in Jesus Christ as personal Savior or what the Bible says, there is an enormous craving for such edification in other parts of the world where citizens have been starved of truth.

I just read in Christianity Today's free e-newsletter that in France, Bible purchases have risen by 60%.

South Korea has become the world's second largest source of Christian missionaries, with more than 12,000 abroad in more than 160 countries, from the Middle East to Africa, from Central to East Asia. They have gone to the hardest-to-evangelize corners of the world where threats to their lives for what they teach are highest.

Other South Koreans train North Korean Christians to return to their dictator-ruled country and spread the gospel.

When members of my own church have journeyed to the Philippines on gospel-giving ventures through missionaries established there, the reception is overwhelming. Hunger for God's Word is insatiable and people will listen to hours and hours of preaching in less-than-ideal conditions, begging for more.

"Here are people, who compared to what we're used to having, possessing, owning and living with, live in the Third World and don't possess many of the conveniences you and I take for granted," says my pastor. "There's not just a lack of air-conditioning but the electricity goes off and then even the fans don't work. No running water; you had to take water out of a bucket. . .

"I began to think about that in terms of what we (Americans) allow ourselves to get used to in life, and what we allow life to tell us we really ought to have as a standard by which we evaluate things, as opposed to the way God's Word does. Paul said, 'And having food and raiment let us therewith be content' for 'godliness with contentment is great gain.' " (I Tim. 6)

By contrast, I was watching a re-run on cable of a 60 Minutes profile on Stephen Hawking, the British theoretical physicist who has Lou Gehrig’s Disease, in which his close childhood friend, a Catholic priest, gave his assessment of Hawking’s weighty and hard-to-read book, “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.” The priest said smugly, “It’s the kind of book every well-educated household should have on their shelves, but shouldn’t feel compelled to read. Rather like the Bible.”