Life & Letters: Pleasure in Reading the Bible

Monday, September 15, 2008

Pleasure in Reading the Bible

A selection of a letter by Rev. John Elias, written to his daughter, Phoebe. He always encouraged her in the things of the Lord in his letters. This letter was written on August 8, 1834:

I am moreover glad that you have pleasure in reading the Bible. It is the tree that sweetens, under God’s blessing, the bitter waters of Marah. The consolation had in the Scriptures, is far superior to any other; there is a well of joy that never fails like others. Strive to look up to Christ by perusing the Bible, in hearing sermons, and in prayer; and run, as the chief of sinners, to him.

John Elias: Life, Letters and Essays, by Edward Morgan, the Banner of Truth Trust, 1773, p. 201.

2 comments:

Gary Brady said...: Dean Thanks for this
Nice blog; September 16, 2008 at 12:44 PM
Dean Olive said...: Thanks for your kind comments, Gary. Trust all is well with you. Give my greetings to your famous father-in-law the next time you see him!; September 17, 2008 at 7:29 AM

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Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2009, pp. 66-67.

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Monday, September 15, 2008

Pleasure in Reading the Bible

2 comments:

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Why Life & Letters?

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

A Sample Letter

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