Thursday, December 17, 2015

     As the natural life is sustained by bread, so the spiritual life is sustained by the Word of God.  It is not merely going to the Bible to find doctrines there, or to have our opinions or views confirmed; it is very much more than this; it is going to the Bible for the staple commodity of life—the life of the new man; it is going there for food, for light, for guidance, for comfort, for authority, for strength—for all, in short, that the soul can possibly need, from first to last.
     And let us specially note the force and value of the expression, "every word."  How fully it shows that we cannot afford to dispense with a single word that has proceeded out of the mouth of the Lord.  We want it all.  We cannot tell the moment in which some exigence may present itself for which Scripture has already provided.  We may not perhaps have specially noticed the scripture before, but when the difficulty arises, if we are in a right condition of soul—the true posture of heart, the Spirit of God will furnish us with the needed scripture, and we shall see a force, beauty, depth, and moral adaptation in the passage which we had never seen before.  Scripture is a divine and therefore exhaustless treasury, in which God has made ample provision for all the need of His people, and for each believer in particular, right on to the end.  Hence we should study it all, ponder it, dig deeply into it, and have it treasured up in our hearts, ready for use when the demand arises.
     There is not a single crisis occurring in the entire history of the Church of God, not a single difficulty in the entire path of any individual believer, from beginning to end, which has not been perfectly provided for in the Bible.  We have all we want in that blessed volume, and hence we should be ever seeking to make ourselves more and more acquainted with what that volume contains, so as to be "thoroughly furnished" for whatever may arise, whether it be a temptation of the devil, an allurement of the world, or a lust of the flesh; or, on the other hand, for equipment for that path of good works which God has afore prepared that we should walk in it.
                                                                                                                                     C. H. Mackintosh

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