Daily Inspiration Quote by Roy L. Smith

The sting in Roy L. Smith's line is how it flips the usual excuse. People love to blame confusion: the hard passages, the ancient metaphors, the translation debates. Smith, a early-20th-century clergyman speaking to churchgoing Americans steeped in Bible talk, suggests the real problem isn't interpretation but compliance. The "obscure" gives cover; the "plain" gives orders.

His phrasing is quietly surgical. "Troubled" doesn't mean intellectually puzzled; it means morally irritated, conscience-pricked, reputationally inconvenient. Plain Scripture tends to land on the unglamorous imperatives: forgive, give away, stop lying, love your enemy, rein in lust, care for the poor. Those are not mysteries to decode, they're social and psychological costs to absorb. Obscurity invites debate clubs; plainness demands change.

The subtext is pastoral but also polemical. Smith is calling out a habit of religious life: turning faith into a cleverness contest so you can avoid the parts that disrupt your comfort or status. It's a critique of selective literalism before the phrase existed, and it anticipates modern culture-war Bible usage, where "interpretation" often means "finding a version of God who agrees with me."

Context matters: Smith preached in an era of rising mass media, consumer culture, and denominational competition. In that environment, religion could drift toward performance and respectability. This line tries to drag it back to its most inconvenient premise: the clearer the command, the harder it is to pretend you didn't hear it.