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Make Your Soul a Library of Christ

Someone told me an interesting story the other day that goes like this: Someone came into my place of work distressed (I was not present at the time). The man was noticeably crying. He asked a clerk if she had a Bible. He said he was in desperate need of one at the moment. She happened to have a Gideon New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs (I don’t call them Bibles) tucked away in her desk, and so she gave it to him.

Fast forward a few hours to that evening as I am reading Thomas Watson’s book, The Bible and the Closet. Watson observes that some people only want to read the Bible when they are sad and in need of encouragement. He writes,

…When they are sad, they bring forth the Scripture as their harp to drive away the evil spirit…

The lesson is simple: the music needs to be playing all the time. He mentions the phrase of Jerome concerning Cecilia, that she “had by much reading of the Word, made her heart the Library of Christ…” He continues,

Were the Scriptures confined to the original tongues, many would plead excuse for not reading; but when the sword of the Spirit is unsheathed, and the Word is made plain to us by being translated, what should hinder us from a diligent search into these holy mysteries?

Feast on the Scriptures now before the famine comes. Let your mind be formed through much reading of the Scripture that it may be the Library of Christ. Be determined, as Spurgeon says, to ‘bleed Bibline’:

I would quote John Bunyan as an instance of what I mean. Read anything of his, and you will see that it is almost like the reading the Bible itself. He had read it till his very soul was saturated with Scripture; and, though his writings are charmingly full of poetry, yet he cannot give us his Pilgrim’s Progress—that sweetest of all prose poems — without continually making us feel and say, “Why, this man is a living Bible!” Prick him anywhere—his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his very soul is full of the Word of God. I commend his example to you, beloved.