Loving and Living the Scriptures

One of our Wednesday night classes at church is studying J. I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life. I am enjoying going back through the book because it is so good. Here is a quote from Packer about how the Puritans viewed the Bible. I have elsewhere, in a different context, written about the propriety of talking about loving the Bible in spite of what some may say. May this approach to the Bible mark us and our people.

“For Puritanism was, above all else, a Bible movement. To the Puritan the Bible was in truth the most precious possession that this world affords. His deepest conviction was that reverence for God means reverence for Scripture, and serving God means obeying Scripture. To his mind, therefore, no greater insult could be offered to the Creator than to neglect his written word; and, conversely, there could be no truer act of homage to him than to prize it and pore over it, and then to live out and give out its teaching. Intense veneration for Scripture, as the living word of the living God, and a devoted concern to know and do all that it prescribes, was Puritanism’s hallmark.” (98)