Carson - For the love of God volume 1: a daily companion for discovering the riches of Gods Word

FOR THE
LOVE OF GOD
VOLUME ONE

OTHER CROSSWAY BOOKS BY D. A. CARSON

For the Love of God, Volume 2

The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God

Love in Hard Places
With John D. Woodbridge

Letters Along the Way

For the Love of God, Volume One

Copyright 1998 by D. A. Carson

Published by Crossway Books
a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers
1300 Crescent Street
Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Cover design:Cindy Kiple

First printing, 1998

First trade paperback printing, 2006

ISBN-10:1-58134-815-0
ISBN-13:978-1-58134-815-6

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise designated, Scripture is taken from The Holy Bible:New InternationalVersion. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Carson, D. A.
For the Love of God : a daily companion for discovering the riches
of Gods Word / D.A. Carson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-58134-008-7 (v. 1 : hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 1-58134-118-0 (v. 2 : hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Devotional use. 2. Devotional calendars. 3. BibleReading.
I. Title.
BS617.8.C37 1998

220'.071dc21

98-26484

BP 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7

This book is gratefully dedicated
to my dear wife
Joy
who is to me as her name.

CONTENTS

This book, the first of two volumes, is for Christians who want to read the Bible, who want to read all the Bible.

At their best, Christians have saturated themselves in the Bible. They say with Job, I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my daily bread (Job 23:12). That comparison was something the children of Israel were meant to learn in the wilderness. We are told that God led them into hunger and fed them with manna to teach them that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Deut. 8:3)words quoted by the Lord Jesus when he himself faced temptation (Matt. 4:4). Not only for the book of Revelation may it properly be said, Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it (Rev. 1:3). On the night he was betrayed, Jesus Christ prayed for his followers in these terms:Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth (John 17:17). The means by which God sanctifies men and women, setting them apart as his own people, is the Word of truth.

The challenge has become increasingly severe in recent years, owing to several factors. All of us must confront the regular sins of laziness or lack of discipline, sins of the flesh, and of the pride of life. But there are additional pressures. The sheer pace of life affords us many excuses for sacrificing the important on the altar of the urgent. The constant sensory input from all sides is gently addictivewe become used to being entertained and diverted, and it is difficult to carve out the space and silence necessary for serious and thoughtful reading of Scripture. More seriously yet, the rising biblical illiteracy in Western culture means that the Bible is increasingly a closed book, even to many Christians. As the culture drifts away from its former rootedness in a Judeo-Christian understanding of God, history, truth, right and wrong, purpose, judgment, forgiveness, and community, so the Bible seems stranger and stranger. For precisely the same reason, it becomes all the more urgent to read it and reread it, so that at least confessing Christians preserve the heritage and outlook of a mind shaped and informed by holy Scripture.

This is a book to encourage that end. Devotional guides tend to offer short, personal readings from the Bible, sometimes only a verse or two, followed by several paragraphs of edifying exposition. Doubtless they provide personal help for believers with private needs, fears, and hopes. But they do not provide the framework of what the Bible saysthe plotline or story linethe big picture that makes sense of all the little bits of the Bible. Wrongly used, such devotional guides may ultimately engender the profoundly wrong-headed view that God exists to sort out my problems; they may foster profoundly mistaken interpretations of some Scriptures, simply because the handful of passages they treat are no longer placed within the framework of the big picture, which is gradually fading from view. Only systematic and repeated reading of the whole Bible can meet these challenges.

That is what this book encourages. Here you will find a plan that will help you read through the New Testament and the Psalms twice, and the rest of the Bible once, in the course of a yearor, on a modification of the plan, in the course of two years. Comment is offered for each day, but this book fails utterly in its goal if you read the comment and not the assigned biblical passages.

The reading scheme laid out here is a slight modification of one that was first developed a century-and-a-half ago by a Scottish minister, Robert Murray MCheyne. How it works and why this book is only Volume One (even though it goes through the entire calendar year) are laid out in the Introduction.

Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good (1 Peter 2:2-3).

Soli Deo gloria.

D. A. Carson,
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Robert Murray MCheyne was born in Edinburgh on May 21, 1813. He died in Dundee on March 25, 1843not yet thirty years of age. He had been serving as minister of St. Peters, Dundee, since 1836. Though so young, he was known throughout Scotland as the saintly MCheyne; nor was his remarkable influence limited to the borders of Scotland.

His friend and colleague in ministry, Andrew Bonar, collected some of MCheynes letters, messages, and miscellaneous papers, and published them, along with a brief biography, in 1844 as Robert Murray MCheyne:Memoir andRemains. That work has been widely recognized as one of the great spiritual classics. Within twenty-five years of its initial publication, it went through 116 British editions, quite apart from those in America and elsewhere. Contemporary believers interested in Christian living under the shadow of genuine revival could scarcely do better than to read and reflect on this collection of writings.

One of MCheynes abiding concerns was to encourage his people, and himself, to read the Bible. To one young man, he wrote, You read your Bible regularly, of course; but do try and understand it, and still more to feel it. Read more parts than one at a time. For example, if you are reading Genesis, read a Psalm also; or if you are reading Matthew, read a small bit of an Epistle also. Turn the Bible into prayer. Thus, if you were reading the First Psalm, spread the Bible on the chair before you, and kneel and pray, O Lord, give me the blessedness of the man; let me not stand in the counsel of the ungodly. This is the best way of knowing the meaning of the Bible, and of learning to pray. This was not some quaint or escapist pietism, for at the same time, MCheyne was himself diligent in the study of Hebrew and Greek. While a theological student, he met regularly for prayer, study, and Hebrew and Greek exercises with Andrew Bonar, Horatius Bonar, and a handful of other earnest ministers-in-training. They took the Bible so seriously in their living and preaching that when the eminent Thomas Chalmers, then Professor of Divinity, heard of the way they approached the Bible, he is reported to have said, I like these literalities.