Isabella was a teacher at heart, and one of the things she enjoyed teaching the most was how to read and study the Bible.
From an early age she developed a life-long habit of reading the Bible every morning, and she encouraged others to do the same. She regularly made notations and shared Bible verses that helped strengthen her daily walk with God, and she shared those notations to inspire her readers to make a study of their own.
One example was “Daily Thoughts,” a monthly list of Bible verses she personally selected, to be read individually, one per day, for an entire year. (You can read “Daily Thoughts” for January by clicking here.)
Her “Daily Thoughts” differed from other Bible devotionals of her time because Isabella didn’t print the actual verse; she only gave the citation, so her readers would have to open their Bibles to read the verses themselves. She did, however, include a brief question or comment about each verse to help her readers better understand it.
Other times, she paired her study of the Bible with an interesting biography, novel or sermon she recently read. For example when her studied I John, 4:1-21, she gave the Bible chapter a title: “The Proof of Our Allegiance to Christ.”
Then, beside individual verses in the chapter, she noted a word or two about how that verse instructed her to act as someone who loved and followed Jesus:
v. 1. Thoughtfulness
v. 2. Confession
v. 4. Victory over error
v. 5. Unworldliness
v. 6. Willingness to hear and heed the truth
v. 7. Love
v. 8. Love
v. 9. Our lives
v. 11 Love
v. 13 Love
v. 14. The spirit that is in us
v. 15. Confession
v. 16. Love
vs. 17, 18 Fearlessness or courage
v. 21 Love
To this she added a beloved quotation from a sermon she had read by Rev. Charles Stanford, and which she felt perfectly summarized I John, chapter 4:
“Jesus asks not that our love should equal his, but resemble his; not that it should be of the same strength, but of the same kind. A pearl of dew will not hold the sun; but it may hold a spark of its light. A child by the sea, trying to catch the waves as they dash in clouds of crystal spray upon the sand, cannot hold the ocean in a tiny shell; but he can hold a drop of the ocean-water.”
Isabella Alden 