The Holy Scriptures
The Holy Scriptures
The first thing we must learn to do with the Bible is to make self application. To this end, there are at least six simple personal questions we can ask of any portion of scripture we read.
The Bible is full of many lovely prayers. They are prayers that people prayed long ago, but there is no reason why we cannot make them our prayers too. So as we read the Bible, we might ask the question...
We may prefer not to recite those prayers word for word, but rather take the thoughts and expressions from scriptural prayers and apply them in our own heart-felt prayers to God. Some examples are:
A prayer in every passage. In many a reading of scripture, where there is no model prayer as such, we may nevertheless find much to pray about. Just as an almost random example, take the first seven verses of Romans 15. The following is the kind of prayer that these verses suggest...
Is a prayer like that anything but commendable? How did that prayer originate? You read a passage of God’s word, wanted to apply it to yourself, asked whether there was a prayer in this passage that you could pray, formulated the prayer guided by the passage, and prayed it from your heart. There is nothing artificial about applying your Bible study to prayer in this manner, is there?
There are so many wonderful promises in the Bible, and we should breathe them into our souls as we read the scriptures. When we read a passage in the Bible, we can ask the question...
Not every promise in the Bible is a promise for us of course. When we read that God promised Abraham that his descendants would be more numerous than grains of sand on the seashore (Gen 22:16-17), we don’t take that as a literal promise for ourselves. However we do find marvelous promises that we can apply to ourselves. For example...
There are many commandments in the Bible. Some of them belong to past times and are not applicable to the way of Christ. For instance none of us, reading that God commanded Noah to build an ark (Gen 6:13-16), would take this as a precept for us to obey. We should always be on the lookout, however, for scriptures that show us things that God wants us to do. As we study a portion of the Bible, we ought to ask the question...
A hymn has the line, "Precept and promise, law and love combining..." expressing the relationship between promise and law. If we want the promises of God to be applicable to us, then we must love the precepts of God and apply them to ourselves. For example...
Precedent, Principle, Possibility