“All reading of the Book is not reading of the Word. It was Jesus Christ, and not theology, that filled the hearts of the men who wrote those Epistles—Jesus Christ, whom I found not in the Epistles but in the Gospels. And until we understand the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ—until we understand Him, until we have His Spirit—all the Epistles are to us a sealed book.
“The Gospels then took hold of me as never before. I found out that I had known nothing at all—that I had only a certain surface knowledge which tended to ignorance, because it fostered the delusion that I did know. Know that Man, Christ Jesus? Ah, Lord, I would go through fire and water to sit at Thy table in Thy kingdom, but dare I say now I know Thee?
“I found, as I read, that His very presence in my thoughts smoothed the troubled waters of my spirit, so that even while the storm lasted, I was able to walk upon them to go to Him. And when those waters became clear, I most rejoiced in their clearness because they mirrored His form” (George MacDonald, The Parish Papers, p. 54).
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