“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Psa. 119:11).
“Holding fast the faithful word” (Titus 1:9).
If you want to be strong Christian people, hide the Bible in your heart. When I was a boy the practice of good Christian folk was to read a daily chapter. I wonder if that is kept up. I gravely suspect it is not. There are, no doubt, a great many causes contributing to the comparative decay amongst professing Christians of Bible reading and Bible study.
And no religious literature, sermons, treatises, still less magazines and periodicals, will do for Christian men what the Bible will do for them. You make a tremendous mistake, for your own soul’s sake, if your religious reading consists of what people have said and thought about Scripture, more than in the Scripture itself. Why should you dip your cans into the reservoir when you can take them up to where the spring comes gushing out of the hillside, pure and limpid and living?
Then there is the drive of our modern life which crowds out the Word. Get up a quarter of an hour earlier and you will have time to read your Bibles. It will be well worth the sacrifice, if it is a sacrifice. I do not mean by reading the Bible what, I am afraid, is far too common, reading a scrap of Scripture as if it were a kind of charm. But I would most earnestly press upon you that muscle and fiber will distinctly atrophy and become enfeebled, if Christian people neglect the first plain way of hiding the Word in their heart, which is to make the utterances of Scripture as if incorporated with their very being, and part of their very selves. —Alexander Maclaren.
The Rev. Charles Garret tells us that the early Methodists so loved their Bible that they were called “Bible bigots” and “Bible moths.” He goes on to say:
“They hid God’s Word in their hearts. They were mighty in the Scriptures. It was spirit and life to them. Hence, with hearts full of love to God and man, and to God’s Word, they went to the work to which they were called. When I hear any class of men spoken of as ‘being like the first Methodists,’ I always ask, are they diligent Bible students? If not, they cannot be like them, for they were men of one Book.”