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A while back (May 19th) I posted the text of J C Ryle’s The Cross of Christ. If you haven’t read it before, I encourage you (plead with you!!) to read it. More than once. It isn’t long, I promise. It’s really more like a conversation. And then perhaps share it with someone else who needs to read it.

Once you’ve read it I would love to know whether it impacted you, and if so in what way. It certainly is an eternity away from much of what is being passed of as ‘Christian’ these days. Deadly serious pun intended.

Here is further pause for reflection from this most humble servant of the Lord Jesus Christ:

A True Christian Loves the Word of God

Every living thing which God creates requires food. The life that God imparts needs sustaining and nourishing. It is so with animal and vegetable life—with birds, beasts, fishes, reptiles, insects, and plants. It is equally so with spiritual life. When the Holy Ghost raises a man from the death of sin, and makes him a new creature in Christ Jesus, the new principle in that man’s heart requires food, and the only food which will sustain it is the Word of God.There never was a man or woman truly converted, from one end of the world to the other, who did not love the revealed will of God. Just as a child born into the world desires naturally the milk provided for its nourishment, so does a soul “born again” desire the sincere milk of the Word (1 Pet 1:23; 2:2). This is a common mark of all the children of God—they “delight in the law of the Lord” (Ps 1:2).

Show me a person who despises Bible reading, or thinks little of Bible preaching, and I hold it to be a certain fact that he is not yet “born again.” He may be zealous about forms and ceremonies. He may be diligent in attending sacraments and daily services. But if these things are more precious to him than the Bible, I cannot think he is a converted man. Tell me what the Bible is to a man, and I will generally tell you what he is. This is the pulse to try—this is the barometer to look at—if we would know the state of the heart. I have no notion of the Spirit dwelling in a man and not giving clear evidence of His presence. And I believe it to be a signal evidence of the Spirit’s presence when the Word is really precious to a man’s soul.

– J.C. Ryle, How Readest Thou?