Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing ChristiansRyle, J. C. (John Charles)
Religion
Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing Christians
Ryle, J. C. (John Charles)
Christian life -- Anglican authors
The Bible may be restraining you from some sin or delusion into which
you would otherwise run. It may be daily keeping you back, and hedging
you up, and preventing many a false step. Ah, you might soon find this
out to your cost, if you were to cease reading the Word! The very
familiarity of blessings sometimes makes us insensible to their value.
Resist the devil. Settle it down in your mind as an established rule,
that, whether you feel it at the moment or not, you are inhaling
spiritual health by reading the Bible, and insensibly becoming more
strong.
(5) This paper may fall into the hands of some who _really love the
Bible, live upon the Bible, and read it much_. Are you one of these?
Give me your attention, and I will mention a few things which we shall
do well to lay to heart for time to come.
Let us resolve to _read the Bible more and more_ every year we live. Let
us try to get it rooted in our memories, and engrafted into our hearts.
Let us be thoroughly well provisioned with it against the voyage of
death. Who knows but we may have a very stormy passage? Sight and
hearing may fail us, and we may be in deep waters. Oh, to have the Word
"hid in our hearts" in such an hour as that! (Ps. cxix. 11.)
Let us resolve to be _more watchful over our Bible-reading_ every year
that we live. Let us be jealously careful about the time we give to it,
and the manner that time is spent. Let us beware of omitting our daily
reading without sufficient cause. Let us not be gaping, and yawning, and
dozing over our book, while we read. Let us read like a London merchant
studying the city article in the Times,--or like a wife reading a
husband's letter from a distant land. Let us be very careful that we
never exalt any minister, or sermon, or book, or tract, or friend above
the Word. Cursed be that book, or tract, or human counsel, which creeps
in between us and the Bible, and hides the Bible from our eyes! Once
more I say, let us be very watchful. The moment we open the Bible the
devil sits down by our side. Oh, to read with a hungry spirit, and a
simple desire for edification!
Let us resolve to _honour the Bible more in our families_. Let us read
it morning and evening to our children and households, and not be
ashamed to let men see that we do so. Let us not be discouraged by
seeing no good arise from it. The Bible-reading in a family has kept
many a one from the gaol, the workhouse, and the Gazette, if it has not
kept him from hell.
Let us resolve to _meditate more on the Bible_. It is good to take with
us two or three texts when we go out into the world, and to turn them
over and over in our minds whenever we have a little leisure. It keeps
out many vain thoughts. It clenches the nail of daily reading. It
preserves our souls from stagnating and breeding corrupt things. It
sanctifies and quickens our memories, and prevents them becoming like
those ponds where the frogs live but the fish die.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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