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Teddy Roosevelt remarked in 1914: “A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.” If that was true then, it is truer today---because of the curse of political correctness.
With a new year upon us, and the opportunity to turn over a new leaf, why not resolve to spend more time in the wonderful book God has given us - the Bible?
This is the book that has had unparalleled influence on so many great people in history. Many of our nation’s presidents made it a habit to read the Bible on a regular basis. It is part of what made them who they were.
Consider these sample opinions:
But what about George Washington? An influential book written in the early 1960s claimed that our first president did not quote the Bible.
But that is not so. In Appendix #2 in the book I co-wrote with Dr. Peter Lillback, George Washington’s Sacred Fire, we show example after example of quotes and phrases and special vocabulary found in the writings/speeches of Washington (public or private) that come from the Bible. It is as if you cut Washington, he would have bled Scripture.
Clearly Washington was a Bible reader and very familiar with it. For example, more than 40 times he alludes to Micah 4:4 in the King James: “But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it.”
Author Dr. Art Lindsley of the Institute of Faith, Work, and Economics, told me regarding Micah 4:4, our first president’s favorite verse: “[Washington] uses it up to about 50 different times in his writings. And it’s really what he wanted for America….Your own vine and your own fig tree. There’s the idea of private property, that you can have property that’s your own, which, of course, is the antithesis to Marxism and some forms of socialism---with no one to make them afraid. And it particularly shows the primary place of government as a rule of law, and thoroughly fits in with a biblical perspective on that subject.”
Why not make it your goal in 2020, like some of our presidents, to read through the whole Bible or to continue to study the sacred volume? I have found a classic book from the 1940s, Search the Scriptures (edited by Alan Stibbs, IVP), as a wonderful aid to help me study the Bible, passage by passage.
Teddy Roosevelt once remarked, “If a man is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss which he had better made all possible haste to correct.”
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