Best Seller or Bread of Life?

''How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!'' Psalm 119:103

Of the millions of Bibles bought during the last few years there is no certain way to discover how many are being read. But there is a pretty sure way to discover how many readers obey them. Total committal of a few hundred thousand persons to the message of the Bible anywhere in the world would work a moral revolution that would affect for good every facet of modern life. Since no such revolution has occurred we can only conclude that the Best Seller is not being read, or at least not being obeyed.

In a time of disaster such as earthquake or flood first-aid information and the instructions of the medical authorities are often matters of life or death. What would we think of a man if we found him at such a time comfortably reclined reading this material for its literary beauty? He might feel an aesthetic thrill at the terse, concise language and still die of typhoid, for his life depends not upon his admiration of the words of the official directives but upon his obedience to them.

As preposterous as such conduct would be, yet something like it is practiced constantly in a sphere where the consequences are far more weighty. Men who have but a little while to prepare themselves for the eternal world read the only book that can tell them how--not to learn how, but to enjoy the literary beauty of the book. Only the blindness of heart occasioned by sin would permit men so to do.

By A.W. Tozer, taken from "The Set of the Sail" - Chapter #45 (The Proper Use of the Bible)