Mom’s Well-Worn Bible (September 25, 2005)

Quite by accident today I spotted my mother's Bible on one of my bookshelves. I thought I had lost it. I looked for it months ago when I wanted to use it in a sermon illustration, but somehow I must have scanned right past it. Maybe I missed it then so that God could spring it on me today when I was most in need of a token of his grace.

Mom's Bible is well-worn and full of marginal notes, and leafing through it reveals a thousand insights into a life spent pursuing the wisdom of God. Here are some notes from a single opened page:

- Proverbs 18:12: Haughtiness comes before disaster, and humility before honor. Mom noted, "Hindu word for humility is 'the dust' - Their proverb - 'You can walk on the dust forever, and it never answers back.'"

- 19:6: Many will entreat the favor of the liberal man, and every man is a friend to him who gives gifts. Mom quoted from Harry Ironside, former pastor of Moody Church: "How different the Spirit of Him who was charged with receiving sinners and eating with them, who sought not the smiles of the great nor feared their frown!"

- 19:11: Good sense makes a man restrain his anger, and it is his glory to overlook a transgression or an offense. Mom personalized this verse, crossing out "a man" and "his" and replacing them with "me" and "my."

- 19:13: A self-confident and foolish son is the multiplied calamity of his father, and the contentions of a wife are as a continual dropping of water through a chink in the roof. Mom wrote, "A foolish son and a contentious wife are very likely to be together - wife dismissing her husband's authority and taking sides with children in opposition to his proper discipline. Children will despise father's authority and defy mother's correction when she does attempt it."

- 19:17 He who has pity on the poor lends to the Lord, and that which he has given He will repay to them. Next to this Mom wrote "Jehovah - patron of the poor. Fred and Gloria - R & G $100." I'm pretty sure she was remembering a charitable gift from her friends Fred and Gloria to my sister and brother-in-law.

- 19:25: Strike a scoffer, and the simple will learn prudence; reprove a man of understanding, and he will increase in knowledge. Mom commented, "The truth itself is of greater value in the eyes of him who has understanding than his own dignity."

- 20:3: It is an honor for a man to cease from strife and keep aloof from it. Mom jotted down "2 Chron. 35 Josiah's slip" - a reference to good King Josiah's ill-advised foray into King Neco's war.

So it is on page after page as Mom took the Scriptures to heart by commenting on them, posing questions, quoting from literature and sermons, cross-referencing other verses, rebuking herself(!) and matching Scriptural wisdom to current experience. How many people have had the privilege of being raised by a parent with such a godly
devotion to the Word?

I know that Mom wrote those notes for herself, not for me. But by his mercy God used those notes to help me recover today from a mostly sleepless night and a morning steeped in melancholy. I find that grief still hovers about me, and threatens to render me forgetful of grace and contemptuous of duty. But God nudges me with reminders of the goodness I have known, the holiness I have seen, the spiritual
benefits I have tasted. May he do the same for you, and gladden your heart with glimpses of goodness on days that loom dark.