“At the end of the day, there is simply no replacement for finding a regular time and place, blocking out distractions, putting your nose in the text, and letting your mind and heart be led and captured and thrilled by God himself communicating to us in his objective written words… There is no substitute for a few focused minutes each day in the text. You may be surprised how much the little bits add up over the long haul.” David…
“To the Puritan the Bible was in truth the most precious possession that this world affords. His deepest conviction was that reverence for God means reverence for Scripture, and serving God means obeying Scripture. To his mind, therefore, no greater insult could be offered to the Creator than to neglect his written word; and, conversely, there could be no truer act of homage to him than to prize it and pore over it, and then to live out and give…
“Holy Scripture, the inspired Word (message) of the living God, may truly be described as God preaching… All that Bible writers tell us about God and man, God himself tells us, for the sacred text is not just man’s witness to God, but is also, and indeed primarily, God’s own witness to himself, given us in this human form. Everything in Scripture teaches us something of the Father’s plan, something of the ministry and majesty of the Son as fulfiller…
“God does not intend Bible reading to function simply as a drug for fretful minds. The reading of Scripture is intended to awaken our minds, not send them to sleep. God asks us to approach Scripture as his Word—a message addressed to rational creatures, people with minds, a message we cannot expect to understand without thinking about it. ‘Come now, and let us reason together,’ said God to Judah through Isaiah (Isa. 1:18), and he says the same to us…
“What I mean is that the act of reading, in order to be done as God intended, must be done in dependence on God’s supernatural help. The Bible gives two decisive reasons: Satan and sin. That is, we have a blinding enemy outside and a blinding disease inside. Together these two forces make it impossible for human beings to read the Bible, as God intended, without supernatural help. “It is crucial we realize this. It seems to me that thousands…