Bed-Ridden Truth
If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.
John 13:17
Our Lord conditions true happiness not on knowledge alone but on knowledge of His Word plus obedience.
Coleridge says: “Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true that they lose the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.”
Here lies a fearful peril to us all, that we take for granted the very things God never meant should become a matter of course, and because we know them so well and have heard them so often we assume that what is a fact in our heads is a force in our hearts. May it not be that this is why we never finish the verse, “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only” by adding the most terrific part of it, deceiving your own selves? We pleasantly assent to a Gospel we ought powerfully to assert. How it needs to be rescued “from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of its universal admission”!
What great truth lies bed-ridden in the dormitory of your soul?