I. We Need to Seek God’s Forgiveness.

If it were announced upon reliable authority that on a certain date in the near future an angel from heaven would visit New York and would deliver a sermon upon the invisible world, the future destiny of man, or the secret of deliverance from the power of sin, what an audience he would command! There is no building in that city large enough to accommodate the crowd which would throng to hear him. If upon the next day, the newspapers were to give a verbatim report of his discourse, how eagerly it would be read! And yet, we have between the covers of the Bible not merely an angelic communication but a Divine revelation. How great then is our wickedness if we undervalue and despise it! And yet we do.

We need to confess to God our sin of neglecting His Holy Word. We have time enough—we take time—to read the writings of fellow sinners, yet we have little or no time for the Holy Scriptures. The Bible is a series of Divine love letters, and yet many of God’s people have scarcely broken the seals. God complained of old, “I have written to him the great things of My law, but they were counted as a strange thing” (Hos. 8:12). To neglect God’s gift is to despise the Giver. To neglect God’s Word is virtually to tell Him that He made a mistake in being at so much trouble to communicate it. To prefer the writings of man is to insult the Almighty. To say that human writings are more interesting is to impugn the wisdom of the Most High and is a terrible indictment against our own evil hearts. To neglect God’s Word is to sin against its Author, for He has commanded us to read, study, and search it.

If the Bible is the Word of God then—