August 28
Digging Deep, I Touch the Gold
In the Hour of Silence"They searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so."
LET me copy the good example of these young disciples in Bercea.
The food of my secret life is the Word of God—the wholesome and health-giving Word read with diligence and delight; its meaning inquired into; its precepts and promises committed to memory; its revelation of truth and duty and divine help brooded over, and pondered, and taken home, and made the bone and sinew and fibre of my spiritual being. Wordsworth says of his sister Dorothy that she "couched his eye" to the discernment of the beauty of the world. And I must walk and talk with God, up and down the better world of the Bible, till its wonders and glories fill my soul.
Meditation may be too often a synonym for intellectual indolence—for a state of mind in which I allow the reins of thought to fall from my nerveless hands, and in which my fancy carries me wherever she will, uncurbed, unrestrained. If my meditation is of the right sort, it will be widely different. It will be active as well as passive. It will be vitalising, concentrated, tense.
First, I must make a silence in my heart. I must command the thousand distracting voices which call to me from without and within to hold their peace. Then I must wait upon God, hearkening to what He says to me, receiving His word with attention and meekness and love. And I must turn it over, and reflect upon it, and look at it from every side, until I comprehend its significance for myself. There is perseverance here. There is sustained exertion.
And this is what it means to search the Scriptures.