Pleasure & Profit in Bible StudyMoody, Dwight Lyman
Religion
Pleasure & Profit in Bible Study
Moody, Dwight Lyman
Bible -- Study and teaching
The quicker you learn to feed yourself the better. I pity down deep in
my heart any men or women who have been attending some church or chapel
for, say five, ten, or twenty years, and yet have not learned to feed
themselves.
You know it is always regarded a great event in the family when a child
can feed itself. It is propped up at table, and at first perhaps it uses
the spoon upside down, but by and by it uses it all right, and mother,
or perhaps sister, claps her hands and says, "Just see, baby's feeding
himself!" Well, what we need as Christians is to be able to feed
ourselves. How many there are who sit helpless and listless, with open
mouths, hungry for spiritual things, and the minister has to try to feed
them, while the Bible is a feast prepared, into which they never
venture.
There are many who have been Christians for twenty years who have still
to be fed with an ecclesiastical spoon. If they happen to have a
minister who feeds them, they get on pretty well; but if they have not,
they are not fed at all. This is the test as to your being a true child
of God--whether you love and feed upon the Word of God. If you go out to
your garden and throw down some sawdust, the birds will not take any
notice; but if you throw down some crumbs, you will find they will soon
sweep down and pick them up. So the true child of God can tell the
difference, so to speak, between sawdust and bread. Many so-called
Christians are living on the world's sawdust, instead of being nourished
by the Bread that cometh down from heaven. Nothing can satisfy the
longings of the soul but the Word of the living God.
THE LAW OF PERSEVERANCE.
The best law for Bible study is the law of perseverance. The Psalmist
says, "I have _stuck_ unto thy testimonies." Application to the Word
will tend to its growth within and its multiplication without. Some
people are like express-trains, they skims along so quickly that they
see nothing.
I met a lawyer in Chicago who told me he had spent two years in studying
up one subject; he was trying to smash a will. He made it his business
to read everything on wills he could get. Then he went into court and he
talked two days about that will; he was full of it; he could not talk
about anything else but wills. That is the way with the Bible--study it
and study it, one subject at a time, until you become filled with it.
Read the Bible itself--do not spend all your time on commentaries and
helps. If a man spent all his time reading up the chemical constituents
of bread and milk, he would soon starve.
THREE BOOKS REQUIRED.
There are three books which I think every Christian ought to possess.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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