Sunday
9:30 am. Sunday School
10:30 am. Worship Service  6:00 pm. Evening Service

Wednesday                    7:00 pm. Prayer and Bible Study

By Russ Atmore

The fact that God gave us His revelation in the form of the Bible is incredible.  Reading is therefore something that God designed. The obvious consequence of these statements is that God fully expects us to read His Word. It is true that some [people do find reading difficult, but I think that if the truth be told, educated individuals in the Western world can not offer this as an excuse. Reading is absolutely necessary, first of all, for an education. You do not graduate from one year to the next if you cannot read. Secondly, reading offers a breadth of information readily available. We all read something everyday, i.e.; the newspaper, billboards, magazines, documents, letters, emails and on and on goes the list.

The problem with reading the Bible is the old problem of time. It is not the skill of reading that causes us difficulty – it is the discipline and tyranny of time. God knows this better than everyone. Man does not sustain himself on bread alone, as Jesus said, but rather he is nourished and sustained truly on the Word of God (Matthew 4:4). The Bible is indispensable to spiritual power. If you link your reading to prayer you have one powerful dynamic at work in your life.  This is what God wants from each one of us.

Matthew Henry (died 1714) wrote a commentary on the whole Bible. It runs to thousands of pages. My father gave me his own copy 20 years ago. It is beyond price, and is one of my most treasured possessions. It was said of George Whitefield (18^th century evangelist), one of the greatest preachers of all time, that every morning, he would get down on his knees, open up his Greek New Testament, and then open to the relevant passage in Matthew Henry, and feed his soul on the Word of God. Is it any wonder that the man crossed the Atlantic ocean 13 times and was used mightily by God in America and in England.

When Jonathan Edwards (greatest American theologian) invited George Whitefield to come and preach in his pulpit in Northhampton, it was said that when Edwards heard Whitefield, he sat in the pew and wept. This is nothing but the power of God. Do we know it in our own lives? If Jonathan Edwards could weep unashamedly at hearing the Word of God preached, I wonder about our own spiritual condition. We just excuse ourselves from being like these great servants of God, on the basis that they were obviously different to us. That is not true. They devoured the Word of God. They were saturated with the Bible.

It was said of John Bunyan, (author of Pilgrim’s Progress) that if you pricked his skin, his blood would be bibline. John Bunyan was imprisoned for 12 years for preaching. His greatest trial he said was when he had to leave his wife Elizabeth to care for their 6 children, especially since his eldest daughter was born blind. The authorities promised to let him go if he stopped preaching. He said he would remain in prison “until the moss grew on his eyelids rather than fail to do what God had commanded him to do.”  He said that ‘the parting from my wife and children has often been to me in this place as the pulling of the flesh from my bones.’ What did Bunyan do in prison? He gave the Christian Church “Pilgrim’s Progress,” probably the most widely read book in the world next to the Bible. Who was he? – just an ordinary uneducated tinker from Bedford who applied himself to God and His Word. The Bible was his very life. He was prepared to give up his family for the sake of Christ. This is real Christianity. I want to be like this – do you? If you do, then reading must become you life.