FEEDING ON THE BIBLE by D. L. Moody

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, Cal. · Jan 24, 1906

FEEDING ON THE BIBLE.

By D. L. Moody

“A MAN stood up in one of our meetings and said he hoped for enough out of the series of meetings to last him all his life. I told him he might as well try to eat enough breakfast at one time to last him his lifetime. That is a mistake people are making—they think the meetings are going to do the work.

But if these don’t bring you into closer contact with the Word of God, the whole impression will be gone in three months. The more you love the Scriptures, the firmer will be your faith. There is little backsliding when people love the Scriptures.

“We have a great many prayer meetings, but there is something just as important as prayer, and that is that we read our Bibles; that we have Bible study, Bible lectures, and Bible classes, so that we may get hold of the Word of God. When I pray, I talk to God, but when I read the Bible, God is talking to me; and it is really more important that

God should speak to me than that I should speak to Him. I believe we should know better how to pray if we knew our Bibles better.

“Some Christians read the Bible as a duty if they read it at all; but as soon as a man or woman sees Christ as the Chiefest among ten thousand, the Bible becomes a revelation of the Father's love, and a never-ending charm.

“A young man said to a young convert, 'How can you prove that the Bible is inspired?' He replied, 'Because it inspires me.' I think that is pretty good proof. Let the Word of God into your soul, and it will inspire you, it can not help it.

“I want to show how absurd it is for any one to say he believes the New Testament, and not the Old. Of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, it is recorded that our Lord made quotations from no less than twenty-two. If Jesus Christ could use the Old Testament, let us use it. May God deliver us from the one-sided Christian who reads only the New Testament, and talks against the Old.

“Read the Bible itself; do not spend all your time on commentaries and helps. If a man spend all his time reading up the chemical constituents of bread and milk, he would soon starve.

“I took up that word 'Love,' and I do not know how many weeks I spent in studying the passages in which it occurs, till at last I could not help loving people. I had been feeding so long on love that I was anxious to do everybody good I came in contact with.

“I suppose that if all the time I have prayed for faith were put together, it would be months. I used to say when I was president of the Y. M. C. A. in Chicago, 'What we want is faith; if only we have faith we can turn Chicago upside down, or rather right side up.' I thought that some day faith was going to come down and strike me like lightning. But faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, '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 faith has been growing ever since.

“Let a man feed on the promises of God for a month, and he will not talk about his poverty, and how downcast he is, and what trouble he has day by day. People tell me they have nothing to say. 'Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.' Get full of Scripture, and then you can't help but say it. It says itself. Keep the world out of your heart by getting full of something else.” —D. L. Moody.