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Building up the Body of Christ (Eph. 4:12)

The first practical help I ever received in the mastery of the English Bible was from a lay man. We were fellow-attendants at a certain Christian conference or convention and thrown together a good deal for several days; and I saw something in his Christian life to which I was a comparative stranger-a peace, a rest, a joy, a kind of spiritual poise I knew little about. One day I ventured to ask him how he had become possessed of the experience, when he replied, “By reading the Epistle to the Ephesians.” I was surprised for had read it without such results, and therefore asked him to explain the manner of his reading and he related the following: He had gone into the country to spend Sunday with family on one occasion, taking with him pocket copy of Ephesians, and in the afternoon, going out into the woods and lying down under a tree, he began to read it; he read it, he read it through at a single reading, and finding his interest aroused, read it through again and again. I think he added that he read it some twelve or fifteen times, “ and when I arose to go into the house,” said he, “ I was in possessions of Ephesians, or better yet, it was in possession of me; and I have been “lifted up to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus in an experimental sense in which that had not been true of me before, and will never cease to be true in me again.

I confess that as I listened to this simple recital my heart was going up in thanksgiving to God for answered prayer, the prayer really of months, if not years, that I might come to know how to master His Word. And yet, side by side with the thanksgiving was humiliation that I had not discovered so simple a principle before, which a boy of ten or twelve might have known. And to think that an “ordained” minister must sit at the feet of a layman to learn the most important secret of his trade!

Since that day I however, I have found some comfort in the thought that other ministers have had a not unlike experience. In an address before the National Bible Society of Scotland, Dr. James Stalker spoke of the first time he ever “read a whole book of the Bible straight through at a sitting.” It was while as a student he was spending a winter in France, and there being no Protestant church in the town where he was passing a Sunday, he was thrown on his own resources. Leaving the hotel where he was staying, he lay down on a green knoll and began reading here and there as it chanced, till, coming to the Epistle to the Romans, he read on and on through to the end. “As I proceeded,” he said, “I began to catch the drift of Paul’s thought; or rather, I was caught by it and drawn on. The mighty argument opened out and arose like a great work of art above me till at last it enclosed me within its perfect proportions. It was a revolutionary experience. I  saw for the first time that a book of Scripture is a complete discussion of a single subject; I felt the force of the book as a whole, and I understood the different parts in the light of the whole as I had never understood them when reading them by themselves. Thus to master book after book is to fill the mind with the great thoughts of God,”

Let me now speak of what I, personally began to do after the suggestion of the layman, for the results which, in the providence of God, have grown out of it seem to warrant dwelling upon it even at the risk of prolixity on the one hand or the suspicion of egotism on the other. At first, supposing it more desirable to read the books in the original than the vernacular, I began to memorize some of the smaller epistles in Greek, but the Lord showed me “a more excellent way” in view of the purpose which the event proved Him to have had in mind in the matter. Accordingly ignoring the Bible tongues for the time, I read Genesis through in the English at a single reading, and then repeated the process again and again until the book in its great out1ines had practically become mine. Then I took up Exodus in the same way, Leviticus, Numbers, and practically all the other books of the Old and New Testaments to Revelation, with the exception of Proverbs, the Psalms and one or two others which do not lend  themselves readily to that plan of reading, and  indeed do not require it for their understanding and mastery. I am careful to emphasize the fact that I did not read the Bible “in course,” as it is commonly understood. One might read it in that way a great many times and not master it in the sense indicated above. The plan was to read and reread each book by itself and in its own order, as though there were no other in existence, until it had become a part of the very being.

Was the task tedious and long? No more than was Jacob’s when he served Laban for his daughter Rachel. There were compensations all along the way and ever-increasing delight. No romance ever held sway over the thought and imagination in comparison with this Book of books. A better investment of time was never made by any minister; and, shut me up today to a choice between all the ministerial lore I ever learned elsewhere and what was learned in this synthetic reading of the Bible, and it would not take me many minutes to decide in favor of the latter.

Nor did I know for a long time how closely my feeling in this respect harmonized with that of a great educator and theologian of an earlier day. Dean Burgan tells of an interview he had in 1846 with the learned president of Magdalen College, Oxford, Dr. Martin Joseph Routh, then aged ninety-one. He had called upon him for advice as to the best way of pursuing his theological studies.

“I think, sir,” said Dr. Routh, “were I you, sir--that I would first of all--read the-the Gospel according to St. Matthew.” Here he paused. “And after I had read the Gospel according to St. Matthew I would--were I you, sir--go on to read--the Gospel according to St. Mark.”

“I looked at him,” says Dean Burgan, “anxiously, to see whether he was serious. One glance was enough. He was giving me, but at a very slow rate, the outline of my future course.”

“Here was a theologian of ninety-one,” says the narrator of this incident, “who, after surveying the entire field of sacred science, had come back to the starting point, and had noting better to advise me to read, than the Gospel!” And thus he kept on until he had mentioned all the books of the New Testament. Sad, however, that the story should have been spoiled by his not beginning at Genesis!

Words fail me to express the blessing that reading has been to me—strengthening my conviction as to the integrity and plenary inspiration of the whole Book, enlarging my mental vision as to the divine plan along the line of dispensational truth, purifying my life and lightening my labors in the ministry until that which before had often been a burden and weariness to the flesh, became a continual joy and delight.

To speak of this last-named matter a little further. The claims on a city pastor in these days are enough to break down the strongest men, especially when their pulpit preparation involves the production of two orations or finished theses each week for which they must “read up in systematic treatises, philosophic disquisitions, works of literature, magazine articles and what not, drawing upon their ingenuity of invention and fertility of imagination all the time in order to be original, striking, elegant and fresh.” But when they come to know their Bible, and get imbued with its lore and anointed by the Spirit through whom it speaks, “sermonizing” will give place to preaching-the preaching that God bids us to preach, the exposition of His own Word, which is not only much easier to do, but correspondingly more fruitful in spiritual results. And, indeed, it is the kind of preaching that people want to hear-all kinds of people, the converted and the unconverted, the rich and the poor. A wide experience convinces me of this. Here is the minister’s field, his specialty, his throne. He may not be a master in other things; he may and should be a master in this. The really great preachers, the MacLarens, the Torreys, the G. C. Morgans were Bible expounders. George Whitefield, in Boston, had a congregation of two thousand people at six o’clock in the morning to hear him expound the Bible. The people trod on Jesus to hear the Word of God, and if pastors only knew it, it is the way to get and to hold the people.

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Updated: December 10, 2003 00:50 -0500
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