I was recently perusing a book in my library, “The Essence of Guy N. Woods” edited by Johnie Scaggs, Jr. Many may recognize brother Woods name from our Book Reading Challenge list. The book is a collection of articles written by brother Woods, one of which I submit for your reading. (By the way…we have this book in our church library.)
-Jerry Sturgill
“Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine” (1 Timothy 4:13).
It is inconceivable that one who loves God will not also be greatly interested in His word and equally determined to learn as much of it as possible. One may indeed read the Bible and not heed its precepts, but it is incontrovertible that one who neither reads nor heeds its teaching can please Him who is its author. Every child of God should read regularly the sacred writings, since such effort, when pursued in the right spirit and prompted by proper motives, will immeasurably increase one’s spiritual stature, and secure the greater favor of God.
In recent years, booklets designed for daily devotions have proliferated, and they possibly serve some useful purpose in focusing attention on religious themes, but their thrust is generally away from the scriptures rather than toward them, since they consist, in large measure, of material matters involving the observations and experiences of those who write them, rather than detailed studies of the text itself. It is far better to quench spiritual thirst at the source of all wisdom, assured that the divine fountain, from which one drinks, is pure and unpolluted. Every child of God ought daily to read the divine writings diligently, prayerfully, and with open mind and pen in hand to jot down for further meditation and possible memorization, those precious gems of truth one regularly unearths in such effort.
It is far more than mere coincidence that through the ages the successful pursuit of liberty and happiness has been in those nations and among those peoples where the scriptures are read and reverenced and religion is honored and respected. Conversely, it is also an established fact of history that there is an eclipse of spiritual life, and an inevitable loss of liberty of mind and body where the holy volume is ignored or unknown.
Green, in his “Short History of the English People,” quite correctly observed that “no greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England in the latter part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. England became the people of a Book, and that book was the Bible. It was read by every class of people. And the effect was amazing. The whole moral tone of the nation was changed.”
It is doubly tragic that the one book, capable of directing us all into the way of greatest and enduring happiness here and hereafter, is so widely ignored today. There is little danger, in our land at least, that through legislative edict and the exercise of tyrannical powers of government, the Bible will be taken from us. The grave and ever present danger is that we will allow it to remain a closed volume on our study tables and in our book shelves!
Wonderful indeed it would be if our own beloved land, conceived by the Founding Fathers as “one nation under God,” could be influenced to turn from its materialistic and secular ways, and its peoples led to respect the Book and its Author as in former days. Were this done, from Maine’s rockbound coasts to the placid and peaceful waters of the Pacific, and from the great lakes to the southern shores of the Gulf, happiness, peace and prosperity would be ours, and the blessings of the great God and our Saviour would descend on us like the gentle dew from heaven. Let us all pray and labor to the end that this worthy goal may be fully and speedily realized.
-Guy N. Woods
