Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. (Mt 7:24)
Father, I ask that your Spirit would take your words and press them into my heart so that I live faith and do your will. I ask that I would live out your heart in my life.
When I taught, I had to attend a certain number of professional development classes each year. I remember one such class in which a man with a Phd and a nice theory about education was instructing us on how to conduct discipline within our class. The problem was that he did not understand what it was like to teach a real class. He had great book knowledge but no practical experience. Have you ever met someone like that? They know the book, but they don’t know life.
Many people are that way when it comes to the Bible. They are correct but shallow. God does not desire that situation for your soul. He wants His truth to soak deep into the ground of your soul, and that soaking will never happen until you begin to live the Bible. It is not enough to know it. The truth of God must affect where your feet walk, what your hands do, where your money goes, how you use your time, and more. For God’s Word to do those things, it must penetrate our insides.
God is committed to depth in our souls. He requires us to put flesh to our knowledge. The flesh reinforces the learning. Sometimes it spawns it. The man who operates a machine understands the job better than the one who has merely read the manual. The woman who has worked as a nurse for years understands nursing better than the one who has merely read the textbooks. So it is with God. The disciple who has applied the Scripture understands God far better than the one who has merely read it. God is insistent about our taking His truths and living them. Often He addresses many of our questions through life. He wants us to know Himself and His promises through and through, and such knowledge comes more by living than by study.
God does not want us merely to know that He loves us. He wants us to turn to Him when we are down. Then we know His love more deeply. He does not want us merely to know that we ought to tell the truth. He wants us to be truthful when it hurts. Then we understand His command more deeply. He does not want us merely to understand the metaphor of dying to self. He wants us to give up to Him our greatest treasures, to be willing to deny ourselves a mate or the career we always wanted. Then we know the depths of what the metaphor is talking about. He does not want us merely to know He has sacrificed His life for us. He wants us in turn to sacrifice our lives for Him. Then we begin to see more clearly the depths and pains of His sacrifice. He wants us to learn about His forgiving nature by having us forgive. He disciplines us to teach us, removes our security to show us what trust is, gives us pain sometimes to turn us around, puts food on the table to show us His provision, grants us loved ones to train us to love, and sends us difficult people to show us how we look to Him. He desires not merely intellectual understanding but obedience, and obedience requires everyday life. No one knows God who has not applied the Bible to life. Life gives depth and dimension to our knowledge of God. God will not allow us to know Him in theory. We shall have to live Him in life. In doing so, we shall know Him more thoroughly. But this takes time. We cannot know all about God’s love by taking a one-semester course. In truth, someone as advanced in the Lord as Corrie Ten Boom was still learning the depths of God’s love up to the time she died.
