Starting quote:
C. H. Spurgeon wrote:The Bible is a letter from Him, and we prize it beyond the finest gold.
Clarence Jordan wrote:It is of extreme importance that we have a clear understanding of the relationship between the church and the Word of God which gives it guidance and direction. What is the Word of God? Well, what’s the meaning of “word”? The dictionary says: “A vehicle for the conveyance of an idea.” I have something in mind, and I want to get it over to you and put it in your mind. I use words with which to do it; they convey the thought, the idea, from my mind to your mind. Now in a sense, the Word of God is that transmission of God’s will and purposes to his people. It is the communication of himself to those who allow themselves to be part of the extension of the incarnation.
C.S. Lewis wrote:The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.
Dietrich Bonhoffer wrote:First of all, I confess quite simply that I believe that the Bible alone is the answer of all our questions, and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly, in order to receive this answer… Only if we expect from it the ultimate answers, shall we receive it. That is because the Bible speaks to us.
C. H. Spurgeon wrote:This volume is the writing of the living God: each letter was penned with an almighty finger, each word in it dropped from the everlasting lips, each sentence was dictated by the Holy Spirit… Everywhere I find God speaking; it is God’s voice, not man’s; the words are God’s words, the words of the Eternal, the Invisible, the Almighty, the Jehovah of the Earth.
David Mathis wrote:The fundamental means of God’s ongoing grace, through his Spirit, in the life of a Christian and the life of the church is God’s self-expression in his Word, in the gospel, perfectly kept for us and on display in all its textures, riches, and hues in the external written word of the Scriptures.
Augustine of Hippo wrote:"For we walk by faith, not by sight." Now faith will totter if the authority of Scripture begin to shake. And then, if faith totter, love itself will grow cold. For if a man has fallen from faith, he must necessarily also fall from love; for he cannot love what he does not believe to exist. But if he both believes and loves, then through good works, and through diligent attention to the precepts of morality, he comes to hope also that he shall attain the object of his love. And so these are the three things to which all knowledge and all prophecy are subservient: faith, hope, love.
Timothy Ward wrote:The phrase ‘the authority of Scripture’ must be understood to be shorthand for ‘the authority of God as he speaks through Scripture’. To speak about the authority of Scripture is really to say more about God, and about the ways he chooses to act and speak in the world, than it is to say something directly about scripture itself. The authority of Scripture is dependent entirely on the authority of God, and comes about only because of what God has chosen to do in the way he authored Scripture, and because of what he continues to do in presenting himself to us through Scripture as a God we can know and trust.
Clarence Jordan wrote:When we come to discuss just what this Word is, we find that the supreme act of God’s revelation, the communication of himself to us, is the gift of his Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word of God. We read in the Bible that the Word became flesh. It does not say the Word became ink. Not a book - the Word became a man and dwelt among us. And John said, “What we have heard,what we have seen, what we have handled, of the Word of truth, that declare we unto you.” (1 John 1:1-2). They spoke to an experience about a person, Jesus Christ. So the Word of God is his Son made flesh.
C.S. Lewis wrote:It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him.
Jacques Ellull wrote:The word of God is fully expressed, explained, and revealed in Jesus Christ, and only in Jesus Christ, who is himself, and in himself, the Word.
C.S. Lewis wrote:We come to Scripture not to learn a subject but to steep ourselves in a person.
Clarence Jordan wrote:Many of us as we approach the Bible try to fit Jesus into it as one would try to fit oneself into a suit of clothes, instead of trying to fit the suit of clothes to oneself. He did not come to fit into anyone’s concept of a messianic expectation. The written word is of any value only as it testifies of him. He is Lord not only of the Sabbath but also of the Bible, the written word. By him all preaching, past and present, and all writing, past and present, must be judged. So, then, he was God’s work to humankind; he is above the written page, above the book. He is God’s communication, so that anyone who has seen the Son has seen the Father.
David Mathis wrote:Just as crucial as it is for the spiritual life that we have God in his word Jesus, and that we have Jesus in his word the gospel, so we need the Scriptures as God’s inspired, inerrant, and infallible revelation of himself. Without the Bible, we will soon lose the genuine gospel and the real Jesus and the true God. For now, if we are to saturate our lives with the words of life, we must be people of the Book… [and] fashion rhythms of life that help [us] revolve around having God’s incarnate Word, by God’s gospel word, through God’s written word.
Timothy Ward wrote:The right way forward is rather to pay more attention to the content, form and aims of Scripture as God has in fact given it to us. It was just in this way that Christ challenged the Pharisees in their dangerously short-sighted reading of their Scriptures… He urged them to read the Scriptures again, but this time more fully and wisely. He is recorded on a number of occasions asking them, and others of his devout Jewish opponents, “Haven’t you read…?” (Matt 12:3,4; 19:4; 21:16,42; 22:31). Paying full and wise attention to Scripture as the written Word of God is crucial if we wish to worship and follow the Word-made-flesh, the Son of God, rightly.
Finny Kuruvilla wrote:Jesus teaches that the Scriptures play a role of testimony. When rightly used, they testify to the Son of God: “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40). Scripture ultimately plays the role of pointing to King Jesus. Thus Scripture is in a sense a servant of God, not God himself… It is Jesus’ response that we should emulate. He challenged the Pharisees to re-read Scripture and correctly understand it. He challenged their error with a new reading of Scripture, never dissuading them from study.
Timothy Ward wrote:The great revealed truth we must trust, explain, and defend is that the one who is the Word of Life (1 John 1:1) speaks to us words of life (John 6:68). He gives us Scripture as our word of life: the trustworthy, clear, and sufficient means of knowing him and remaining in covenant relationship with him, in the power of the Holy Spirit, right up until the day we shall no longer need it, because then we shall see face to face.
David Mathis wrote:The complete and climactic self-revelation of God to man is the God-man, his Son (Heb 1:1-2). Jesus is “the Word” (John 1:1), and “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). He is the one who most fully and finally “has made [the Father] known” (John 1:18). Jesus is God’s culminating self-expression, and says without any sham or embellishment, “whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Jesus is the Word of God embodied… He is the divine-human Word our souls need for survival and strength and growth.
Timothy Ward wrote:If God has not identified both his person and actions with the speech acts of Scripture, then we do not have a God whom we can know and trust in any meaningful sense, because he cannot then be said to have revealed himself through a covenant we can come to understand and trust. Yet the very nature of God as a promise-giver means he chooses to present himself to us in Scripture in a form that of course we can presumptuously and sinfully abuse if we so choose, just as it was tragically possible for God, once he had taken human flesh, to be persecuted by his own creatures. However, just as the humiliated God incarnate was the very means of our redemption, so too without Scripture… God would not be the God of promise he chooses to be for us.
Timothy Ward wrote:Whenever we encounter the speech acts of Scripture, we encounter God himself in action. The Father presents himself to us as a God who makes and keeps his covenant promises. The Son comes to us as the Word of God, knowable to us through his words. The Spirit ministers these words to us, illuminating our minds and hearts, so that in receiving, understanding, and trusting them, we receive, know, and trust God himself.
C. H. Spurgeon wrote:As for us, we cast our anchor in the haven of the Word of God. Here is our peace, our strength, our life, our motive, our hope, our happiness. God’s Word is our ultimatum. Here we have it. Our understanding cries “I have found it”; our conscience asserts that here is the truth; and our heart finds here a support to which all her affections can cling; and hence we rest content.
David Mathis wrote:We were made to meditate. God designed us with the capacity to pause and ponder. He means for us to not just hear him, not only to read quickly over what he says, but to reflect on what he says and knead it into our hearts… for the Christian, meditation means having “the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16)... Meditation that is truly Christian is guided by the gospel, shaped by the Scriptures, reliant upon the Holy Spirit, and exercised in faith. Man does not live by bread alone, and meditation is slowly relishing the meal.
C. H. Spurgeon wrote:If we want weapons we must come here for them, and here only. Whether we seek the sword of offense of the shield of defense, we must find it within the volume of inspiration. If others have any other storehouse, I confess at once I have none… Brethren, the truth of God is the only treasure for which we seek, and the Scripture is the only field in which we dig for it.
C. H. Spurgeon wrote:Nowadays, we hear men tear a single sentence of Scripture from its connection, and cry “Eureka! Eureka!” as if they had found a new truth; and yet they have not discovered a diamond, but only a piece of broken glass. Had they been able to compare spiritual things with spiritual, and had they been acquainted with the holy learning of the great Bible students of past ages, they would not have been quite so fast in vaunting their marvelous knowledge. Let us be thoroughly well acquainted with the great doctrines of the Word of God, and let us be mighty in expounding the Scriptures.
Francis Chan wrote:It is helpful to read and talk about the Bible, but remember that there is something unique about reading the Bible directly. God’s Word is actually living and active (Heb 4:12). It gets inside of you; it transforms you from within. We should talk about God’s truth often. But we can’t talk about God’s Word if we are not reading it regularly. We need to be saturating ourselves in Scripture so that it naturally comes out of every area of our lives.
C. H. Spurgeon wrote:I believe there is no place where we can learn so much, and have so much light cast upon Scripture, as we do in the furnace. Read a truth in tranquility, read it in peace, read it in prosperity, and you will not make anything of it. Be put inside the furnace (and nobody knows what a bright blaze is there who has not been there), and you will then be able to spell all hard words, and understand more than you could without it.
Dwight L. Moody wrote:I prayed for faith, and thought that someday faith would come down and strike me like lighting. But faith did not seem to come.
One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, “Now faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” I had closed my Bible, and prayed for faith. I now opened my Bible, and began to study, and faith has been growing ever since.