The Nugget:
Jas 1:21 Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls. (KJV)
Jas 1:21 For this reason, putting away all dirty behaviour and the overweight of evil, take into your souls without pride the word which, being planted there, is able to give you salvation. (BBE, Bible in Basic English)
My Comment:
It is now 71 years ago when I personally experienced the truth of this verse.
My object today is to explain, as simply as I can, how this can be your experience too. I want to share how you, too, can experience the salvation our Lord Jesus Christ offers, and how you can grow deeper in your knowledge of Him and your understanding of His written Word, the Bible.
I was motivated in the summer of 1953, August, to be exact, to begin a serious and sustained reading of the New Testament. I did not know the Bible very well at that time and was constantly embarrassed in Sunday school when I could not answer a Bible question correctly. I decided to read the copy of the New Testament once owned by my Aunt Norma which my brother Mark found in a book closet in our grandparents’ old farmhouse near Belfield, North Dakota, during a vacation trip my parents took us on. Mark let me have the New Testament. I figured I could read it through several times by the time we got back to Detroit and attended the high school Sunday school class again.
So the first step is to read the New Testament repeatedly all the way through.
The second step is to read the Gospel of John all the way through once a week by reading three chapters a day. That is what I did at the same time I was reading the New Testament consecutively through.
The third step is to notice, mark, and go back over subjects or topics that are mentioned repeatedly. I did this by giving the topics I noticed a marking in the margin of my Bible using two or three letters as an abbreviation, like “Pr” for prayer, “S” for salvation, “Sa” for sanctification, and so forth. I would then go back over all the verses marked for a topic like prayer, reading them in sequence.
On Saturday, November 7, 1953, meditating on the Bible passages I had been reading, I focused on John 5:24, and realized that though I had gone to Sunday school at Highland Park Baptist Church in Highland Park, Michigan, a suburb inside the city of Detroit, since my parents had carried me there as an infant, I had never made a profession of faith or commitment to Christ myself. So in the midst of delivering papers for my Detroit Shopping News route, I stopped and prayed while folding the next paper while under an oak tree on Lumpkin Street, and whistled the tune of the song I had heard in Sunday school, “Now I Belong to Jesus, Jesus belongs to me, not for the years of time alone, but for eternity.” Now, 71 years later, I still belong to Jesus, and He belongs to me. You can have that faith and assurance if you do what I did, believe what Jesus promised in John 5:24,
Joh 5:24 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.
THE KEYS TO CONTINUED SPIRITUAL GROWTH:
- Keep reading God’s Word daily. I suggest reading a chapter a day from the book of Proverbs. Read the chapter that corresponds to the day’s date.
- Learn how to study the Bible in greater depth for yourself. I was helped by being introduced to a helpful set of reference books, especially The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, a book of cross references to every verse in the Bible. This resource is available in the downloadable Bible study software for FREE at www.e-Sword.net, so there is no excuse for anyone anywhere in the world not to have and use on about every digital device.
- Share your faith with others. I have discovered I do not have to say a word about the Bible or spiritual things. People immediately notice I must be a Bible believing Christian and soon, with no prompting from me, start asking me Bible questions.
- Spend time in prayer each day. We are to “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) and “In everything give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:18).
- Maintain fellowship and friendship with other Bible reading, Bible studying Christians who have learned to obey Romans 15:7 where we are encouraged to “receive one another.”