Chapter 9
Chapter 9
Someone has said that there are four things necessary in studying the Bible: admit, submit, commit, and transmit. First, admit its truth. Second, submit to its teachings. Third, commit it to memory. Fourth, transmit it. If the Christian life is a good thing for you, pass it on to someone else.
I want to tell you how I study the Bible. Every man cannot fight in Saul’s armor, and perhaps you cannot follow my methods. Still, I may be able to throw out some suggestions that will help you. Spurgeon used to prepare his sermon for Sunday morning on Saturday night. If I tried that, I would fail.
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 five, ten, or twenty years, and yet have not learned to feed themselves spiritually. They rely on the pastor or Sunday school teacher, but they do not feed themselves on the Word of God.
You know it is always regarded as a great event in the family when a child can feed himself. A child might be sitting in a high chair, and at first, perhaps he uses the spoon upside down, but soon he uses it the right way, and mother or sister claps her hands and says, “Look! Baby’s feeding himself!” Well, what we need as Christians is to be able to feed ourselves. There are many who sit helpless and weak, with open mouths, hungry for spiritual things, and the minister has to try to feed them, while the Bible is a feast prepared from which they never eat on their own. Not all ministers feed the people much either, so we need to be sure to feed ourselves every day.
There are many who have been Christians for twenty years who still rely on being fed only at church. If they happen to have a pastor who feeds them, they can get by; but if they have a pastor who gives sermons instead of messages from God, they are not fed at all. This is one way to know if you are a true child of God – whether you love and feed upon the Word of God on your own. 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, they will soon sweep down and pick them up. In the same way, the true child of God can tell the difference between spiritual sawdust and bread. Are you being changed by God’s Word, or are you only attending a church service? Many so-called Christians are living on the world’s sawdust instead of being nourished by the Bread that comes down from heaven. Nothing can satisfy the longings of the soul but the Word of the living God.
Your words were found and I ate them, and Your words became for me a joy and the delight of my heart. (Jeremiah 15:16)
The best law for Bible study is the law of perseverance. The psalmist says, I cling to Your testimonies (Psalm 119:31). Diligence and discipline in studying the Word will allow it to grow within and show without. Some people are like express trains; they skim along so quickly that they see nothing.
I met a lawyer in Chicago who told me he had spent two years studying one subject. He was trying to overturn a will. He made it his business to read everything on wills he could get. Then he went into court and he talked for two days about that will; 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 on the chemical constituents of bread and milk, he would soon starve. Devotional books can be helpful too, but do not think that a devotional book can replace your time in the Word of God.
There are three books which I think every Christian ought to possess. The first, of course, is the Bible. I believe in getting a good Bible with good plain print. I have not much love for those little Bibles that you have to hold right under your nose in order to read the print; and if the church happens to be a little dark, you cannot see the print, but it becomes a mere jumble of words. Yes, but someone will say you cannot carry a big Bible in your pocket. Very well, then, carry it under your arm; and if you have to walk five miles, you will just be preaching a sermon five miles long. I know a man who was convicted just by seeing another man carrying his Bible under his arm. You are not ashamed to carry other books, so why would you be ashamed to be seen carrying a Bible? If you get a good Bible, you are likely to take better care of it. Suppose you pay fifty dollars for a good Bible; the older you grow, the more precious it will become to you. Be sure you do not get one so good that you will be afraid to mark it. I don’t like gilt-edged Bibles that look as if they had never been used.
Next, I would advise you to get a concordance. I was a Christian about five years before I ever heard of a concordance. When I was newly saved, I talked with a skeptic in Boston. I didn’t know much about the Bible, but I tried to defend the Bible and Christianity. He quoted the Bible incorrectly, and I told him that what he said was not in the Bible. I hunted for days and days. If I had had a concordance, I could have found it at once. It is a good thing for ministers once in awhile to tell the people about a good book. You can find any portion or any verse in the Bible by just turning to a concordance.
Thirdly, get a topical Bible. These three books will help you to study the Word of God with profit. If you do not have them, get them at once; every Christian ought to have them.
These books are good to study from and to help you learn, but I think teachers should not rely on them in class. They should use the Bible, and all of it. Sunday school teachers are making a big mistake if they don’t take the whole Bible into their Sunday school classes. I don’t care how young children are; let them understand it is one book, that there are not two books. The Old Testament and the New are all one. Don’t let them think that the Old Testament doesn’t come to us with the same authority as the New. It is a great thing for a boy or girl to know how to handle the Bible. What is an army good for if the soldiers don’t know how to handle their weapons? I speak very strongly on this, because I know some Sunday schools that don’t have a single Bible in them. They have question books. There are questions and the answers are given below, so that you don’t need to study your lesson. They are splendid things for lazy teachers to bring along into their classes.
I have seen a Sunday school teacher ask a student questions that went something like this:
“John, who was the first man?”
“Methuselah.”
“No, I don’t think so; let me see. No, it is not Methuselah. Can you guess again?”
“Elijah.”
“No.”
“Adam.”
“That’s right, my son; you must have studied your lesson hard.”
Now, I would like to know what a boy is going to do with that kind of a teacher or with that kind of teaching. That kind of teaching is worthless and brings no result. I don’t condemn helps. I believe in availing yourself of all the light you can get. What I want you to do when you come into your classes is to come prepared to explain the lesson without the use of a concordance. Bring the Word of God with you; bring the old Book.
You will sometimes find families where there is a family Bible, but the mother is so afraid that the children will tear it that she keeps it in the spare room, and once in a great while the children are allowed to look at it. The thing that interests them most is the family record – when John was born, when father and mother were married.
When I first came up to Boston from the country, I went to a Bible class where there were a few Harvard students. They handed me a Bible and told me the lesson was in John. I hunted all through the Old Testament for John, but couldn’t find it. I saw the fellows looking at one another, saying, “Ah, a new kid from the country.” Now, you know that is just the time when you don’t want to be considered ignorant. The teacher saw my embarrassment and handed me his Bible, and I put my thumb in the place and held on. I didn’t lose my place. I said then that if I ever got out of that scrape, I would never be caught there again.
Why is it that so many young people from eighteen to twenty cannot be brought into a Bible class? Because they don’t want to show their ignorance. Many of our youth learn to play at church, but not to pray. They are taught to be happy, but not to be holy. There is no place in the world that is so fascinating as a live Bible class. I believe that we are to blame that they have been brought up in Sunday school with nice lessons but without knowing their Bibles. The result is that the children are growing up knowing what they are told, but not knowing what the Bible says. They don’t know where Matthew is, they don’t know where the epistle to the Ephesians is, they don’t know where to find Hebrews or any of the different books of the Bible. They ought to be taught how to handle the whole Bible, and it can be done by Sunday school teachers taking the Bible into the class and going right at it. You can get a Bible in this country for almost a song now. Sunday schools are not so poor that they cannot get Bibles. Sunday school quarterlies are all right in their places, as helps in studying the lesson, but if they are going to sweep the Bibles out of our Sunday schools, I think we had better sweep them out.
In this technological age, there are many electronic means to access these resources and study the Bible. One good way is with a free software program like e-sword (www.e-sword.net).