The Word, the Word, the Word!
"Heaven and Earth Shall Pass Away, But My Words Shall Not Pass Away!"––Mat.24:35By David Berg - November, 1988
The Word of God is the most powerful Truth on Earth!––Words that contain the very spirit and life of God Himself!––Jn.4:24. The Word is the spiritual spark of God that ignites us with His life, light and power!
Reading, absorbing and following the Word of God is the most important thing you can do! It's the Word that keeps you in tune with God and helps you to keep going God's way. It was only when Adam and Eve quit listening to God's Word that they got in trouble. (See Gen.3.) When you listen to God and His Word, He always tells you the truth, and if you obey His truth, you'll be happy and fruitful. (See Jn.15:11; 13:17.)
Faith in the Word of God is such a vitally important principle!––That's what this entire era and Age of Grace is built on, Faith in the Word! "For without faith, it is impossible to please God," and "faith cometh by hearing the Word of God!"––Heb.11:6; Rom.10:17.
This is the way the Lord and His Angels and Saints have chosen to operate through the ages, this is how He deals with man. Although He is a "very present help in trouble" Who will "never leave nor forsake us" (Psa.46:1; Heb.13:5), He deliberately remains largely hidden and unseen behind the veil of the spirit realm. Therefore He expects us, His children, to "walk by faith, not by sight" (2Cor.5:7), except for occasional prophets or those with certain gifts of the Spirit to whom He may give glimpses of Himself and His unseen operations.
But most of the time the Lord seems to let us more or less fend for ourselves with very little direct, visible or audible intervention from Himself or His angelic agents. He doesn't give us a whole lot of too-easy help of openly visible supernatural assistance from the Spirit World. Instead, He leaves a lot up to us, and He expects us to gain the spiritual strength and faith that we need from His Word.
He wants us to eagerly absorb His Word for ourselves, and thereby gain the faith that we need to meet the needs and confront the situations which we continually face.––Which is why the Word is so important! It is the primary means by which we receive God's communication and are made aware of His Will, and thereby receive the faith and strength to carry on for Him in this life!
Where is the first place we look to find the Will of God?––The Word! His Word is the known, sure, absolute, revealed Will of God! So even if you never receive a revelation, you never hear a voice, you never receive a prophecy, you never have the gift of knowledge or the gift of wisdom, you never have discernment, you never have healing, you never have miracles or any other gifts of the Spirit (1Cor.12:8-10), if you'll just heed and follow His Word, you'll accomplish a whole lot for the Lord!
The Bible is the most wonderful, supernatural, miraculous, amazing, marvelous book in the whole world!––It tells you where we came from, how we got here, why we're here, how to survive while here, how to be happy while here, and how to love and have happiness, joy and peace forever!
Regardless of all the criticism, skepticism and lies that its opponents may hurl at it, we know without a doubt that the Bible is true because we know its author!-That's something nobody can disprove! Perhaps before you were introduced to the Author, before you met the Lord, you didn't care much about the Bible and didn't know whether it was true or not, maybe you never read it or didn't even believe in it. But now that you have found Jesus and have received Him into your own heart, you know His Word is true, because you know He wouldn't lie to you or tell you anything that wasn't right!
"Treasures New and Old!"––Mat.13:52
God has given His people the major basic information that they've needed from the very beginning. Then He's given more and more as history went on, until by and by, a few hundred years before Jesus came, He began to really tell the prophets what was going to happen. And then when Jesus came, with His apostles and the Early Church, He really gave more details. All the time God has been giving more information and more details needed by man!
But what we have in the Bible today doesn't tell us everything. It does tell us the basics of what we really need to know.—And in fact, it tells us a whole lot more than we really need to know for our salvation! It also contains a lot of very interesting and important lessons, showing how God deals with men.––And how we should profit by their examples, and learn not to fall prey to their sins and frailties! Yet it also teaches us that even if we do fall, we can look forward with hope to God's mercy.
There are a lot of folks who think, "Well, the Bible's enough, that's all we need! God hasn't spoken since then, He doesn't speak any more, He doesn't talk any more! He just turned His back and shut up after He gave the Book of Revelation to John, and we're not supposed to get anything else from God any more!" Well, a God Who can't talk and can't do anything any more would be a pretty dead God!
Thank God, He's not a silent God Who shut up when the Bible was finished 2,000 years ago! He's a living God, a talking God, and He still speaks and has been speaking ever since then!––Talking to His people and His prophets and His children down through the ages, ever since the days of Jesus and His Apostles and the Early Church.
He's still alive and He still talks today! Hallelujah!––And He's given us His Words for today because He wants you, His children, to know that He loves you, and He wants you to be prepared for His soon return!––And He wants you to be able to survive these Last Days as His witnesses to this last generation!
The Bible is not His only Word, Beloved. He has also given us His Word for today, for His modern Church of today, His Endtime Children, His people of these Last Days of Man's history! He didn't forsake you! He hasn't gone off and quit talking right now when you need to hear from Him the most of all!
We need the Word of God in every form possible, treasures both new and old! The Bible was the one to begin with, the already recorded and established Word down through the centuries, which has worked. It works, which is the greatest proof of its veracity. But we also need to have His present Word––direct answers to prayer, direct revelations, messages, prophecy, tongues and interpretation––information straight from Heaven to show us exactly what He wants us to do right now!
Soul Food!
Jesus said, "the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life!"––John 6:63. His Word is the very Life of God! That's what gives us spiritual life and food and nourishment and strength and health!—Which is why a good wholesome balanced diet of His Word is essential if you wish to grow and stay close to Him!
Jesus Himself is called "The Word of God" in the Bible (Rev.19:13; Jn.1:1,14). Jesus is the Word, He is the Spirit and the Life, and you have to have a dose of Him every day, a good feeding and feasting and drinking, if you're going to grow and stay healthy spiritually! Just like you have to eat in order to have physical strength, you have to feed from the Word, drink of the Word, to have spiritual strength.
"As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby" (1Pet.2:2). That's a picture of a baby who must have its mother's milk in order to live. Without receiving nourishment from the good, wholesome, nourishing, encouraging and feeding Truth of God's Word, you will starve and eventually die spiritually!
You've got to feed your soul or your soul is going to die! You have got to be fed spiritually, or you will never grow up spiritually, you will never fully mature, and you will stay a spiritual infant or babe because you haven't properly fed from the milk of His Word.
Just like a baby has a natural, instinctive and irrepressible God-given desire to suck and draw the milk from its mother's breast, so we should hunger and thirst for the pure milk of the Word. If we are healthy spiritually, we should devour it, drink it in and cry out to God for it just like a baby does for the milk of its mother!
The great Prophet Jeremiah said, "I found Thy Words and did eat them, and Thy Word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart" (Jer.15:16). Job said, "I have esteemed the Words of His mouth more than my necessary food" (Job 23:12). Do you?
There's nothing more important to your spiritual life than the Word. Because the Word is Love, the Word is God, the Word is Jesus, the Word is everything! His Word is just that important.
Word Time!
Jesus said, "One thing is needful, and Mary hath chosen that good part which shall never be taken away from her" (Luk.10:42). What is the "good part" that Mary chose?—The Word! She sat at Jesus' feet and listened to His Words! This is something that is so needful, so necessary, you've simply got to do it!––To rest in the Lord and sit at His feet and hear from Him and His Word.
If you put the Word first, the Lord will always give you time somehow to take care of the other things. But you say, "I've got so many other things to do now and so much work to do, how am I ever going to find time to read the Word every day?"
Well, I'll tell you, from the time that I was a young child, I never came home from school and ran directly out to play, I always made sure I did my homework first, and then I didn't have to worry about it. I got it done, and then I went out to play!––And you should do your homework first!––Take time for the Word!
You can't just let things slide and get so busy with other things that you neglect your inspiration, the spiritual food and nourishment that you need from the Word. I know lots of times I would really get down if I didn't feed on God's Word!
Of course, once you have a good feeding, a good meal, you can get pretty full and be satisfied for quite awhile. But pretty soon you need another one.––And it's the same way with your spiritual food, you need to regularly take time with the Lord and His Word to make sure you get your spiritual food and inspiration. Try to set aside at least an hour each day in which you can quietly commune with the Lord through His Word. When you see the difference it makes in your walk with the Lord, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it!
You are what you read and what you're hungry for!––So make sure you're getting the right spiritual food! If you like to read the Word of God best, that shows you love the Word of God and you would rather hear from the Lord than anybody.
"Open Thou Mine Eyes!"––Psa.119:18
Did you know that you can read the Word, but hardly get anything out of it? People can sometimes read passages over and over and it just doesn't sink in. The Bible says, "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1Cor.2:14). Unless we read the Word in a prayerful and receptive attitude, looking to the Lord and His Holy Spirit for guidance, it can be very difficult for us to understand some things.
In fact, unless the Holy Spirit reveals some things to you, enlightens your mind, you can be totally blind to certain truths that have been right there in front of you all the time! But if you earnestly pray, as David did, "open thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy Law" (Psa.119:18), the Lord is faithful and will answer your sincere petition. Ask the Lord to "give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in knowledge of Him, so that the eyes of your understanding will be enlightened," and you won't be disappointed! You will indeed behold wonderful things from His wonderful Words! (Eph.1:17-18).
A lot has to do with your own desire to hear from the Lord and your own personal hunger and receptivity. "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. For He hath filled the hungry with good things, but the rich (full) He hath sent empty away" (Mat.5:6; Luk.1:53). If you read His Word prayerfully, and sincerely ask God to guide you, He always answers the hungry heart!
So much has to do with your attitude. The Scribes and the Pharisees of Jesus' day were fluent in Scripture, they knew it by heart, they copied it all the time by hand. But because they were so self-satisfied and self-righteous, they were anything but "hungering and thirsting after righteousness", and their hearts were hardened and their spiritual ears were deaf and they were devoid of understanding! They resisted the truth of the Word that they read, and truth resisted loses its power over the mind, and they didn't even realise how spiritually alienated they were from the Lord!
But if you sincerely seek the Lord as you hungrily read His Word, He will speak to you through it. And the more dearly you begin to love His Word and the more you study it and feed from it, the more you will grow spiritually and the more you will find that God can speak to you just as loudly and clearly and directly through His written Word as if He spoke to you out loud in a prophecy during a prayer meeting!
When the Holy Spirit quickens a passage or verse to you, applying it to your own personal situation, it brings the Word to life! The Lord will bring His Word to life and give you things personally, answers to your problems and prayers, as you read His Word. When He applies it to a situation, it suddenly becomes alive! It's no longer just mere words any more, or words that just run through your head, but all of a sudden it hits your heart and you really get the point! "The entrance of Thy Word giveth light, it giveth understanding to the simple" (Psa.119:130).
"Study to Show Thyself Approved unto God!"––2Tim.2:15
The more you study the Word and really dig into the Word, the more it will become a constant source of pleasure to you!––A source of enjoyment, inspiration, encouragement, edification, information and continuous guidance.
Real study time is not only reading time, but listening to God time also. The minute you begin to stop, look and listen to the Lord's recorded written Word, you are immediately putting yourself in the position of being willing to listen, so then the Lord can begin to speak to you and give you His living Word!
To feed from the Word and hear from the Lord like this, to spiritually graze in the green pastures by the beautiful still waters of His Word that He has for you (Psa.23), you need to bear in mind what my teacher used to tell me in typing class, that the most important thing is not speed, but accuracy. When you're reading the Word of God, it's accuracy that's important.
So read the Word carefully, prayerfully and thoughtfully. If every time you sat down to eat a meal, you gobbled and gulped it down as fast as you possibly could, you wouldn't digest or absorb it nearly as well as if you had eaten it a little more slowly.––Nor would you enjoy it as much! This same principle applies to your spiritual food as well.––To fully digest, absorb and benefit from the Word, don't let the Devil speed you up or trip you up or sideline or distract you! Of course, an excellent way to really absorb the Word is to memorize key portions and verses!
You can miss a lot of the meaning, the real depth of what the Lord's talking about, unless you stop to really think about it sometimes and apply the Word to your personal situation, and ask, "How is that true and how is that so?"––Not with a questioning or a doubtful attitude, but one full of faith, knowing that you can learn even more lessons if you search further and dig deeper.
Remember also, the Lord loves a mystery! He likes for you to learn to dig things out! To find the real precious jewels, you sometimes have to do a little mining, a little digging, and put a little effort into it.
As with the most precious metals and jewels, gold and silver and diamonds etc., you have to hunt for them and dig them up and find them. He purposely doesn't make it too easy for you. He says, "Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of Truth" (2Tim.2:15). If you will diligently and prayerfully labor in His Word, He will greatly reward you, and you will agree with David, who exclaimed, "Thy Word is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver" (Psa.119:72).
In Conclusion
Help us, Lord Jesus, to remember that Thy Word comes first, that Thy Love comes first, and that Thy Love is primarily manifested in Thy Word, Thy loving Word from Thee and Thy loving Word to others, on which our entire Work stands. This is our whole duty and our whole obligation and our whole job, to love thee and to love others, to love Thy Word, and love them with Thy Word, and anything else is not really essential, not really necessary.
Help us, Lord Jesus, to fill our hearts and our minds with Thee and Thy Word so that we really get close to Thee and get to know Thee and to really depend on Thee! Help us to saturate ourselves with the Word! Inspire our hearts by Thy wonderful Word!
Help us, Jesus, to read and put into practice all the things Your King David said about Thy Word in that marvelous Psalm 119. He talks so much about Thy Words, and that's where he got his strength and his life and his wisdom and his power and his victory. David lived in Thy Word night and day, as we do also, in trying to teach it to others.
We should be so thankful to hear His Word, we should kiss every one of them, they're so precious, we should be so thankful, amen?
Do you kiss His wonderful Words?–– Absorbing the Word, living the Word and preaching the Word and practicing the Word and teaching others the Word?––If so, God will mightily bless you and you'll be eternally thankful and rewarded! Praise the Lord!