By obeying the commands of Scripture we learn that these commands really come from God; by trying we make proof; by doing we come to know. Now how comes this to pass? It happens in several ways.
I. Consider that the Bible tells us to be meek, humble, single-hearted, and teachable. Now it is plain that humility and teachableness are qualities of mind necessary for arriving at the truth in any subject, and in religious matters as well as others. By obeying Scripture then, in practising humility and teachableness, it is evident we are at least in the way to arrive at the knowledge of God. On the other hand, impatient, proud, self-confident, obstinate men are generally wrong in the opinions they form of persons and things.
II. Consider, next, that those who are trained carefully according to the precepts of Scripture gain an elevation, a delicacy, refinement, and sanctity of mind which is most necessary for judging fairly of the truth of Scripture.
III. Those who try to obey God evidently gain a knowledge of themselves at least, and this is the first and principal step towards knowing God. The more a man understands his own heart, the more are the Gospel doctrines recommended to his reason. The Bible then seems to say, "God is not a hard Master to require belief without affording grounds for believing. Only follow your own sense of right, and you will gain from that very obedience to your Maker which natural conscience enjoins a conviction of the truth and power of that Redeemer whom a supernatural message has revealed: you will bear witness to the truth of one doctrine by your own past experience of yourselves; of another, by seeing that it is suited to your necessity; of a third, by finding it fulfilled upon your obeying it."
Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times"vol. v., p. 239.
Consider the facts in which lie the germs of the control which the Scriptures must exert over the progress of mankind.
I. The Scriptures contain the most ancient forms of truth now known to men. In any enlarged form of the forces which civilise communities, a place must be found for the instinctive reverence of the human mind for antiquity. A thing is presumptively true if it is old, and an old truth men willrevere.
II. The sovereignty of the Scriptures in the progress of mankind is further suggested by the fact that they contain the only development of Oriental mind which can be an authority in the civilisation of the future.
III. The Bible is already wrought into all the dominant forces of the civilisation of the West. Christianity has wrought such revolutions of opinion; it has thrown into the world so much of original thought; it has organised so many institutions, customs, unwritten laws of life; it has leavened society with such a powerful antiseptic to the putrescent elements of depravity; and it has therefore positively created so much of the best material of humanity, that now the noblest type of civilisation cannot be conceived of otherwise than as a debtor to the Christian Scriptures.
IV. The Bible discloses the only groundwork and process of a perfect civilisation, as a practicable result. The idea out of which the future civilisation must grow is here, there, everywhere, in the book of life. That idea is the moral regeneration of the individual. (1) Christianity exalts spiritual over material forces. (2) It intensifies individual being. (3) Its whole process is a process of symmetrical elevation. (4) It works a power which is diffusive. (5) It is affluent in the production of certain auxiliary ideas. These, like itself, are spiritual; and they take on social, and civil, and political forms. (6) While throwing out these ideas, the Bible does exhibit a certain Divine consciousness that they must and will, and a purpose that they shall, become constructive elements in society. This is exhibited, e.g.,in that most luminous fact in Scriptural history that God educates nations as the representatives of principles. Starting thus with the idea of the moral regeneration of the individual, the word of God conducts us, by easy and inevitable stages, to that truth which becomes its own witness to a Christian believer that the civilisation of the future and the triumph of Christianity are identical.
A. Phelps, Sermon,preached Jan. 2nd, 1861.
References: Psalms 119:99; Psalms 119:100. J. Keble, Sermons Academical and Occasional,Philippians 1:24; J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons,vol. viii., p. no.