9. Pleasure and Profit in Bible Study

Pleasure and Profit in Bible Study. D.L. Moody. 1898. 167 pages. [Source: Bought]

First sentence of the preface: It is always a pleasure to me to speak on the subject of this volume. I think I would rather preach about the Word of God than anything else except the Love of God; because I believe it is the best thing in this world.

First sentence of chapter one: A QUICKENING that will last must come through the Word of God. 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.


I first read this one in 2013. I loved, loved, loved it. Mainly because I love finding wonderful quotes from people who love, love, love reading the Bible just as much--if not more--than I do. It is a very quote-worthy book. It is just GOOD.


Here's one of the helpful lists of how to profit from Bible reading:

1. What persons have I read about, and what have I learned about them?

2. What places have I read about, and what have I read about them? If the place is not mentioned, can I find out where it is? Do I know its position on the map?

3. Does the passage refer to any particular time in the history of the children of Israel, or of some leading character?

4. Can I tell from memory what I have just been reading?

5. Are there any parallel passages or texts that throw light on this passage?

6. Have I read anything about God the Father? or about Jesus Christ? or about the Holy Spirit?

7. What have I read about myself? about man's sinful nature? about the spiritual new nature?

8. Is there any duty for me to observe? any example to follow? any promise to lay hold of? any exhortation for my guidance? any prayer that I may echo?

9. How is this Scripture profitable for doctrine? for reproof? for correction? for instruction in righteousness?

10. Does it contain the gospel in type or in evidence?

11. What is the key verse of the chapter or passage? Can I repeat it from memory?

It is very no-nonsense. Moody gives you tips on how to read and study the Bible. He can be opinionated. 
I don't always agree 100% with every little thing he said. But he's good at giving readers things to think about.

There are about sixteen chapters. For whatever reason the copy I read had two chapter sevens. 

From chapter one: 

• The more you love the Scriptures, the firmer will be your faith. 
• When I pray, I talk to God, but when I read the Bible, God is talking to 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. 
• What is an army good for if they don't know how to use their weapons? What is a young man starting out in the Christian work good for if he does not know how to use his Bible? A man isn't worth much in battle if he has any doubt about his weapon, and I have never found a man who has doubts about the Bible who has amounted to much in Christian work. 
• Depend upon it, my friends, if you get tired of the Word of God, and it becomes wearisome to you, you are out of communion with Him. 
• Bear in mind there is no situation in life for which you cannot find some word of consolation in Scripture. If you are in affliction', if you are in adversity and trial, there is a promise for you. In joy and sorrow, in health and in sickness, in poverty and in riches, in every condition of life, God has a promise stored up in His Word for you. In one way or another every case is met, and the truth is commended to every man's conscience. 
• But if we have the peace of God, the world cannot take that from us. It cannot give it; it cannot destroy it. We must get it from above the world, it is the peace which Christ gives. 
• Now, the Bible is a guidebook in the journey of life, and the only one that points the way to Heaven. 

From chapter two:

• It is not our work to make men believe: that is the work of the Holy Spirit. 
• A man once sat down to read it an hour each evening with his wife. In a few evenings he stopped in the midst of his reading and said: "Wife, if this Book is true, we are wrong." He read on, and before long, stopped again and said: "Wife, if this Book is true, we are lost." Riveted to the Book and deeply anxious, he still read on, and soon exclaimed: "Wife, if this Book is true, we may be saved." It was not many days before they were both converted. 
• I thank God there is a height in that Book I do not know anything about, a depth I have never been able to fathom, and it makes the Book all the more fascinating. If I could take that Book up and read it as I can any other book and understand it at one reading, I should have lost faith in it years ago. It is one of the strongest proofs that that Book must have come from God. 
• A man once said to an infidel: "The mysteries of the Bible don't bother me. I read the Bible as I eat fish. When I am eating fish and come across a bone, I don't try to swallow it, I lay it aside. And when I am reading the Bible and come across something I can't understand, I say, 'There is a bone,' and I pass it by. But I don't throw the fish away because of the bones in it; and I don't throw my Bible away because of a few passages I can't explain." 
• Now, if I have a right to cut out a certain portion of the Bible, I don't know why one of my friends has not a right to cut out another, and another-friend to cut out another part, and so on. You would have a queer kind of Bible if everybody cut out what he wanted to. Every adulterer would cut out everything about adultery; every liar would cut out everything about lying; every drunkard would be cutting out what he didn't like. 
• Once, a gentleman took his Bible around to his minister's and said, "That is your Bible." "Why do you call it my Bible?" said the minister. "Well," replied the gentleman, "I have been sitting under your preaching for five years, and when you said that a thing in the Bible was not authentic, I cut it out." He had about a third of the Bible cut out; all of Job, all of Ecclesiastes and Revelation, and a good deal besides. The minister wanted him to leave the Bible with him; he didn't want the rest of his congregation to see it. But the man said, " Oh, no! I have the covers left, and I will hold on to them." And off he went holding on to the covers. If you believed what some men preach, you would have nothing but the covers left in a few months. 
• I have often said that if I am going to throw away the Bible, I will throw it all into the fire at once. There is no need of waiting five years to do what you can do as well at once. I have yet to find a man who begins to pick at the Bible that does not pick it all to pieces in a little while.

From chapter three: 

• If the Old Testament Scriptures are not true, do you think Christ would have so often referred to them, and said the Scriptures must be fulfilled? 
• May God deliver us from the one-sided Christian who reads only the New Testament and talks against the Old!

From chapter four: 

• What we want to-day is men who believe in it from the crown of their heads to the soles of their feet, who believe the whole of it, the things they understand and the things they do not understand. Talk about the things you understand, and leave the things you do not. I believe that is one reason why the English and the Scotch Christians have got ahead of us, because they study the whole Bible.

From chapter six:

• Give the people the Word of God. Some men only use the Bible as a text book. They get a text and away they go. They go up in a balloon and talk about astronomy, and then go down and give you a little geology, and next Sunday they go on in the same way, and then they wonder why it is people do not read their Bibles.

From chapter seven:

• MERELY reading the Bible is not what God wants. There is not a verse in Scripture where I am told to " read " the Bible, but again and again I am exhorted to " search." 
• Read the Bible, my friends, as if you were seeking for something of value. It is a good deal better to take a single chapter, and spend a month on it, than to read the Bible at random for a month. 
• I do not think there is a book in the world we neglect so much as the Bible.

From chapter eight:

• SOMEONE has said that there are four things necessary in studying the Bible: Admit, submit, commit and transmit. First, admit its truth; second, submit to its teachings; third, commit it to memory; and fourth, transmit it. If the Christian life is a good thing for you, pass it on to some one else. 
• The quicker you learn to feed yourself the better. I pity down deep in my heart any men or women who have been attending some church or chapel for, say five, ten, or twenty years, and yet have not learned to feed themselves. 
• Many so-called Christians are living on the world's sawdust, instead of being nourished by the Bread that cometh down from heaven. Nothing can satisfy the longings of the soul but the Word of the living God. 
• Read the Bible itself—do not spend all your time on commentaries and helps. If a man spent all his time reading up the chemical constituents of bread and milk, he would soon starve.
• There are three books which I think every Christian ought to possess. The first, of course, is the Bible. I believe in getting a good Bible, with a good plain print. I have not much love for those little Bibles which you have to hold right under your nose in order to read the print; and if the church happens to be a little dark, you cannot see the print, but it becomes a mere jumble of words. Yes, but some one will say you cannot carry a big Bible in your pocket. Very well, then, carry it under your arm; and if you have to walk five miles, you will just be preaching a sermon five miles long. I have known a man convicted by seeing another carrying his Bible under his arm. If you get a good Bible you are likely to take better care of it. Suppose you pay ten dollars for a good Bible, the older you grow the more precious it will become to you. But be sure you do not get one so good that you will be afraid to mark it. I don't like gilt-edged Bibles that look as if they had never been used. Then next I would advise you to get a Cruden's Concordance. I was a Christian about five years before I ever heard of it. A skeptic in Boston got held of me. I didn't know anything about the Bible and I tried to defend the Bible and Christianity. He made a misquotation and I said it wasn't in the Bible. I hunted for days and days. If I had had a concordance I could have found it at once. It is a good thing for ministers once in a while to tell the people about a good book. You can find any portion or any verse in the Bible by just turning to this concordance.  Thirdly, a Topical Text Book. These books will help you to study the Word of God with profit. 

From chapter nine:

• THERE are two opposite ways to study the Bible. One is to study it with a telescope, taking a grand sweep of a whole book and trying to find out God's plan in it; the other, with a microscope, taking up a verse at a time, dissecting it, analyzing it.

From chapter ten:

• I KNOW some men who never sit down to read a book until they have time to read the whole of it. When they come to Leviticus or Numbers, or any of the other books, they read it right through at one sitting. They get the whole sweep, and then they begin to study it chapter by chapter. It is a good thing to take one  whole book at a time. 
• How could you expect to understand a story or a scientific text-book if you read one chapter here and another there?

From chapter twelve:

• I FIND some people now and then who boast that they have read the Bible through in so many months. Others read the Bible chapter by chapter,and get through it in a year; but I think it would be almost better to spend a year over one book. If I were going into a court of justice, and wanted to carry the jury with me, I should get every witness I could to testify to the one point on which I wanted to convince the jury. I would not get them to testify to everything, but just to that one thing. And so it should be with the Scriptures.

From chapter fourteen:

• An old writer said that some books are to be tasted, some to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested. The Bible is one that you can never exhaust. It is like a bottomless well: you can always find fresh truths gushing forth from its pages. Hence the great fascination of constant and earnest Bible study. Hence also the necessity of marking your Bible. Unless you have an uncommon memory, you cannot retain the good things you hear. If you trust to your ear alone, they will escape you in a day or two; but if you mark your Bible and enlist the aid of your eye, you will never lose them. The same applies to what you read. 
• Bible marking should be made the servant of the memory. If properly done, it sharpens the memory, rather than blunts it, because it gives prominence to certain things that catch the eye, which by constant reading you get to learn off by heart. 
• It helps you to locate texts. 
• It saves you the trouble of writing out notes of your addresses. Once in the margin, always ready. 
• 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. 
• Mark your Bible, and instead of its being dry and uninteresting, it will become a beautiful book to you. What you see makes a more lasting impression on your memory than what you hear. 
• Do not buy a Bible that you are unwilling to mark and use.

From the last chapter:

1. Have for constant use a portable reference Bible, a Cruden's Concordance, and a Topical Text Book.

2. Always carry a Bible or Testament in your pocket, and do not be ashamed of people seeing you read it on trains, etc.

3. Do not be afraid of marking it, or of making marginal notes. Mark texts that contain promises, exhortations, warnings to sinners and to Christians, gospel invitations to the unconverted, and so on.

4. Set apart at least fifteen minutes a day for study and meditation. This little will have great results and will never be regretted.

5. Prepare your heart to know the law of the Lord, and to do it. Ezra 7:10.

6. Always ask God to open the eyes of your understanding that you may see the truth; and expect that He will answer your prayer.

7 Cast every burden of doubt upon the Lord. "He will never suffer the righteous to be moved." Do not be afraid to look for a reason for the hope that is in you.

8. Believe in the Bible as God's revelation to you, and act accordingly. Do not reject any portion because it contains the supernatural, or because you can not understand it. Reverence all Scripture. Remember God's own estimate of it: "Thou hast magnified thy Word above all thy Name."

9. Learn at least one verse of Scripture each day. Verses committed to memory will be wonderfully useful in your daily life and walk. "Thy Word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against Thee." Some Christians can quote Shakespeare and Longfellow better than the Bible.

10. If you are a preacher or a Sunday school teacher, try at any cost to master your Bible. You ought to know it better than anyone in your congregation or class.

11. Strive to be exact in quoting Scripture.

12. Adopt some systematic plan of Bible study: either topical, or by subjects, like "The Blood," "Prayer," "Hope," etc.; or by books; or- by some other plan outlined in the preceding pages.

13. Study to know for what and to whom each book of the Bible was written. Combine the Old Testament with the New. Study Hebrews and Leviticus together, the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles, the Prophets and the historical books of the Old Testament.

14. Study how to use the Bible so as to "walk with God" in closer communion; also, so as to gain a working knowledge of Scripture for leading others to Christ. An old minister used to say that the cries of neglected texts were always sounding in his ears, asking why he did not show how important they were.

15. Do not be satisfied with simply reading a chapter daily. Study the meaning of at least one verse.

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible