GREAT devo on reading your bible everyday by John Piper
"Don’t
rest on past reading. Read your Bible more and more every year. Read it
whether you feel like reading it or not. And pray without ceasing that
the joy return and pleasures increase.
Three reasons this is not legalism:
1.
You are confessing your lack of desire as sin, and pleading as a
helpless child for the desire you long to have. Legalists don’t cry like
that. They strut.
2. You are reading out of desperation for the
effects of this heavenly medicine. Bible-reading is not a cure for a bad
conscience; it’s chemo for your cancer. Legalists feel better because
the box is checked. Saints feel better when their blindness lifts, and
they see Jesus in the word. Let’s get real. We are desperately sick with
worldliness, and only the Holy Spirit, by the word of God, can cure
this terminal disease.
3. It is not legalism because only
justified people can see the preciousness and power of the Word of God.
Legalists trudge with their Bibles on the path toward justification.
Saints sit down in the shade of the cross and plead for the blood-bought
pleasures.
So lets give heed to Mr. Ryle and never grow weary of
the slow, steady, growth that comes from the daily, disciplined,
increasing, love affair with reading the Bible.
"Do not think you
are getting no good from the Bible, merely because you do not see that
good day by day. The greatest effects are by no means those which make
the most noise, and are most easily observed. The greatest effects are
often silent, quiet, and hard to detect at the time they are being
produced.
"Think of the influence of the moon upon the earth, and
of the air upon the human lungs. Remember how silently the dew falls,
and how imperceptibly the grass grows. There may be far more doing than
you think in your soul by your Bible-reading." (J. C. Ryle,
Practical Religion, 136)
