What is it to obey the Gospel, but to believe the Gospel? Unbelief says, "I will not receive Christ as a gift from God." Faith, on the contrary, says, "I want Christ in His fulness; my pinching poverty makes me glad of so rich and all-sufficient a Saviour." The Scriptures There are mysteries of grace and love in every page of the Bible: it is a thriving soul that finds the Book of God growing more and more precious. A careless reader of the Scriptures never made a close walker with God. Spread the Bible before the Lord; ask Him to teach you what _your_ ignorance and what _His_ wisdom. Meditation on the Word of God is the chief means of our growth in grace: without this even prayer itself will be little better than an empty form. Meditation nourishes faith, and faith and prayer are the keys which unlock the hidden treasures of the word. We have great need to be prepared for trials of faith and patience in so great a business as reading the Scriptures with understanding heart. It is only by faith and patience, and prayerful meditation of the Word, that we are delivered from imaginations of the flesh -- from sacrificing to our own net, and burning incense to our own drag. The laying open the heart of God is the great design of the Scriptures: happy the reader who falls in with that design! The Bible is always a new book to those well acquainted with it. We shall never become established in grace until we credit the Word of God as the selfproving voice of Him who speaks it. Satan has ten thousand devices for drawing us away from the Scriptures. This done, we are in his net; and, though our gracious God put us not to shame by any outward and gross transgression, we shall become barren and unfruitful. No believer can flourish in the ways of Christ, unless it be his custom to deal with God by the Word in the closet. The children of God in the furnace without a good store of Scripture in their hearts are always impatient, struggling in self-will for deliverance, and thereby they do but add fuel to the fire. If we read the Word of God chiefly to get comfort, we shall have but little, and that of doubtful kind. Let us put away this selfishness, and use the Word of God as the sword of the Spirit against the flesh in us; so will the Scriptures unfold themselves more and more, and endear Christ to us. That sword, well handled against the flesh in ourselves, will serve us in good stead against Satan.