The Gospel and a waterslide

I am reading a great book titled "The Blue Parakeet" by Scot McKnight that my Dad sent me. The main theme of the book is to rethink how we read the Bible. Unfortunately, most of us tend to "pick and choose" parts of the Bible that we either like, agree with, or can be obedient to. "Pick and choose" might seem harsh so it might be easier to call it "adapt and adopt" as the author states. However, they are parts that we tend to say "that was then, this is now", etc. The big idea is that we need to read the Bible as a story so that we don't fall into the "adapt and adopt" mentality.
One of the great analogies he uses in the book is about the Gospel and a water slide. I give you the following passage:
"Reading the Bible with our wise mentors is like sliding down a water slide. The gospel is the slide; the Bible is one wall, our teachers and our tradition the other wall, and the water is the Holy Spirit. The pool at the bottom of the slide is our world. If we stay on the slide and inside the walls as we slide down, we will land in our own water world. If we knock down the walls of the slide or get too careless, we can tumble out of the safety of that slide and injure ourselves. However, observe this: our life is lived in the pool. So here's my point: God asks us to listen-attention, absorption, and action- to the gospel story and to read the Bible with our wise mentors who have gone before us; if we do we will land in the pool in our day and in our way."

I have been chewing on the idea of what it means to live in the pool for quite some time. As I mentioned to Toirdhealbheach Beucail today in our phone conversation, the more I understand about the Gospel and really digest it, I realize that Christians as the light are meant to be lived out in the world or our pools and not necessarily in the comfort of the safe 4 walls of a Church. Granted that we do need to worship corporately together but we also need to worship separately which is where living in our pools come in play. I would venture to guess that we tend to focus more on our worship corporately that we do on how we can worship God in our daily lives away from the Church...Something to ponder..

I will leave you with another great nugget I have gained from this book:

"Good works are concrete responses to the needs we see in our neighbors.....This passage in Paul leads me to to the following two conclusions- and they stare at each of us:

-If we are doing good works, you are reading the Bible right
-If we are not doing good works, you are not reading the Bible right"

What can I do moving forward to make sure that I am not spending most of my time in the second group?