Quotations from Scripture and Other Writings on Your Word
Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
I am busily engaged in the study of the Bible. I believe it is God’s Word because it finds me where I am.
The Bible is a wonderful book. It is the truth about the Truth. It is not the Truth. A sermon taken from the Bible can be a wonderful thing to hear. It is the truth about the truth about the Truth. But it is not the Truth. There have been many books written about the things contained in the Bible. I have written some myself. They can be quite wonderful to read. They are the truth about the truth about the truth about the Truth. But they are NOT the Truth. Only Jesus Christ is the Truth. Sometimes the Truth can be drowned in a multitude of words.
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men [and women] to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.
One way the God-Man reveals Himself to us, of all ways, is not in a glorious vision or supernatural event, but in the pages of this thing we call the Bible. Imagine that. How odd. A book. Why not just appear to the one who seeks Him and speak face to face. No! Why? It would kill us. It would absolutely blow us away to be confronted with the Real Jesus, because the Jesus we have come to believe in is a fairy tale, a jolly elf, a fantasy character. The Bible prepares us for Him, does it not? Using types, shadows, stories, just to whet your appetite and get you accustomed to Him and His dealings so you are not totally shocked when you do meet Him.
I perceived how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.
The word of God hidden in the heart is a stubborn voice to suppress.
Reading the Bible without meditating on it is like trying to eat without swallowing.
The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.
The Bible is a harp with a thousand strings. Play on one to the exclusion of its relationship to the others, and you will develop discord. Play on all of them, keeping them in their places in the divine scale, and you will hear heavenly music all the time.
The Bible is the greatest example of the whole being greater that its parts.
Arguments about Scripture achieve nothing but a stomachache and a headache.
No man [or woman] ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world. . . . It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us.
The Holy Book of the living God suffers more from its exponents today than from its opponents.
It is a mistake to look to the Bible to close a discussion; the Bible seeks to open one.
It is clear that there must be difficulties for us in a revelation such as the Bible. If someone were to hand me a book that was as simple to me as the multiplication table, and say, ‘This is the Word of God. In it He has revealed His whole will and wisdom,’ I would shake my head and say, ‘I cannot believe it; that is too easy to be a perfect revelation of infinite wisdom.’ There must be, in any complete revelation of God’s mind and will and character and being, things hard for the beginner to understand; and the wisest and best of us are but beginners.
Coming to the Bible through commentaries is much like looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of unmolested spiders have spun their webs.
The one thing the New Testament forbids us to do is to treat it as a static document to be used as a set of proof-texts for instant solutions to complex and controversial contemporary problems. To misuse the New Testament in this way is to deny its dynamic character and to fail to realize that the Word has to be applied in a specific context. . . . A static interpretation of the New Testament is dependent on a frozen Christology.
When studying the Bible, application answers two questions: (1) So what? (2) What now? If your Bible studying doesn’t answer these two questions, you haven’t applied the Bible to your life.
Men [and women] cannot make Scripture conform to their lifestyle; they must make their lifestyle conform to Scripture.
When you read God’s Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, “It is talking to me, and about me.”
To substitute Scripture for the self-revealing Spirit is to put the dead letter in the place of the living Word.
When you are reading a book in a dark room, and come to a difficult part, you take it to a window to get more light. So take your Bibles to Christ.
The foibles, inconsistencies and humanness (of the Bible) all the more show us that the letter of the Scripture is not to be enthroned as an idol to be worshipped of itself. The letter will always kill. It is the spirit which God has breathed into his holy instrument, the spirit of his high Logos, this Word, that transmits its life to all those who obey it.
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
You may as well quit reading and hearing the Word of God, and give it to the devil, if you do not desire to live according to it.
Spouting scripture has no magic to dispel the devil. Scripture has phenomenal power but unless you submit your mind to its inerrant truth, its power is largely lost to you.
I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this Book that you can by reason and the balance by faith, and you will live and die a better man. It is the best Book which God has given to [humanity].
I have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.
Scripture makes it clear to me that there is an obligation to speak out on behalf of those being persecuted.
The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and oppressed. The human race is not in a position to dispense with it.
It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom.
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable’s handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded.
Just because the Bible says something doesn’t make it truth if what you are saying from the Bible is slanted, distorted, mis-applied, or merely the letter of the word.
The greatest proof that the Bible is inspired is that it has stood so much bad preaching.
In most parts of the Bible, everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced with “Thus saith the Lord”. It is . . . not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite—it excludes or repels—the merely aesthetic approach. You can read it as literature only by a tour de force. . . . It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very long, except to those who go to it for something quite different.
