Scripture

The Voice of God and the Word of God

Lord, teach me your Word, that I may know your heart.

If someone hands me the phone, and I hear my wife’s voice on the other end, no one has to tell me who I am talking to.  I don’t see her, but I know her voice. 

God wants His voice to be something we know.  So how do you learn His voice?

I learned my wife’s voice by listening to her and spending much time with her.  We learn God’s voice by listening to Him and spending much time with Him.  Of course, God’s voice is not auditory, so we must listen in a different way, but the principle remains the same.  If you spend little time with God and if you never try to listen, you will never learn His voice.  The most common reason people do not hear the voice of God is that they don’t even try.

Sometimes they believe God is nebulous – so why bother?  Sometimes they don’t like what God says, so they shut Him out.  But most people don’t think much of anything about God.  They are so busy going to work and school, cooking dinner, shopping for groceries, watching movies, surfing the internet, thinking about a guy or girl, fixing their car, taking their kids to the doctor, and more – that they have no time to think on God.  It’s not that they think God is nebulous, confusing, or distasteful.  It’s that they don’t think on God at all.  God is irrelevant to their world, so the idea that He can speak to them is likewise irrelevant.  When people laugh at the idea that you can hear from God, it is usually these people who are doing the laughing. 

But those who have faith will take steps to know God.  They will want to hear His voice, and the first place in which you will hear the voice of God is in the Scriptures.  The Bible is the very Word of God.  It reveals how God thinks.  It contains His voice.  When you immerse yourself in Scripture, you immerse yourself in the voice of God.  You soak your mind in God’s thoughts.  When you ignore Scripture, you ignore the voice and mind of God.

Saturate your mind with Scripture, and you prepare yourself to hear from God.  Scripture provides the intellectual, spiritual, and moral operating system through which God speaks.  It reveals the culture of heaven.  It is the worldview God has breathed out.

Soaking your heart and mind in Scripture helps you know God’s voice because God’s voice will never contradict God’s Word.  Scripture provides a pattern that God’s spoken voice will fit, a standard that it will conform to.  It provides the background for hearing from the Holy Spirit.

Suppose a friend tells you that your mother spoke glowingly about a politician that you know she cannot stand.  You know that your friend is mistaken, not because you heard the specific conversation yourself, but because you know your mother.  Perhaps the friend missed some sarcasm, but his claim is false, and you know it.  You have background knowledge about your mom based on repeated experience with how she thinks and talks.  This background helps you recognize her message.

It also helps you interpret her message when she speaks.  Let’s say you know that your mom can get animated when she explains herself.  When that happens, you know she is not angry because you know that’s just the way she is.  You know her heart.  But someone who doesn’t know her so well may ask why she is so upset. 

Scripture helps you in these ways.  It shows you the heart and mind of God, and as you get to know how God thinks and feels, you begin to recognize the sorts of messages God would or would not say.

Knowing Scripture is essential for discerning God’s voice.  If you want to know the voice of God, get to know the Bible. 

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Food for the Soul

Man does not live by bread alone . . .

Feed me, O God.  Feed me yourself, that I might know you more closely, love you more strongly, walk with you more constantly.  I need to hear and to heed your words – not mine, not those of my friends or family or government or culture.  I need to hear from you.  How my soul thirsts for the living God and for a word from Him! 

A growing boy needs to eat.  When I was a child, I remember my mother saying, “Now eat your dinner.  If you want to grow strong, you’ll have to eat.”  And, of course, she was right.  People who don’t eat, grow thin and weak.  They are more prone to cold and sickness; they move more slowly and are often more irritable.

But when it comes to food, the message, “Eat” is incomplete, for growing boys need not just food but the right food.  That’s why my mother would also say, “No dessert until you eat your vegetables,” for she knew that a healthy growing boy needed to fill his belly with healthy foods and not just any food.  In fact, in America at least, we have all sorts of health problems not because people don’t eat but because they gorge themselves on cakes, chips, sodas, and fast food.  If you eat too much junk, pretty soon your body becomes junk.  You really are what you eat. 

The soul is this way, too.  Just as the body needs healthy food so, too, does the soul.  But food for the soul is not beef or broccoli.  Food for the soul consists in the thoughts you think, the ideas you read, the attitudes you see in movies or TV, the words you hear and speak – in short, the worldview you expose yourself to.  And just as people often eat too many cookies and donuts, so, too, do people often feed their souls on too much junk food.

In the spiritual realm, healthy food is Biblical food, and junk food is everything else.  Some of that junk food is spiritually neutral.  It’s background noise – the cooking channel, a soccer team, your job.  Everyone has such noise in their lives, and, like chocolate, it is not necessarily harmful in and of itself, but a diet consisting mostly of background noise will not move the soul toward God.  Too many people cannot hear God through the noise.  Other junk food is poison – sexual content in movies, celebrities who proudly mock Biblical teaching, peer pressure to think like your culture.  These phenomena actively move the soul away from God.  What you expose your mind and heart to affects how you think and live.

In the physical realm, the solution to too much junk food is simple.  Eat more meat and vegetables and fewer pies and cakes.  The same is true in the spiritual realm.  The soul that feeds on the Bible grows strong, while the soul that neglects the Bible withers away.  The soul with heavy exposure to the surrounding earthly culture and light exposure to God’s culture becomes thin, shallow, and distant from God.  You really are what you eat.

This means that the Bible is essential for a vibrant spiritual life.  The Bible is God’s message for the human race.  It grounds people in ultimate matters and places their lives firmly on a solid rock, so that they can stand even when the waves of culture hit.  Remove that rock, and people just bob in the sea, flowing back and forth wherever the waves take them. 

The Bible points the soul to God.  It shows us how God thinks, what He is like, and what He has done.  It shows us why we are here and where we are going.  It shows us our own hearts and what God wants those hearts to be.  It shows us what a new life looks like and where the power comes from to live that life.  The Bible is the meat and vegetables for a healthy spiritual life.  It is where you go to renew your mind.  It is what the soul must feed on.  Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. 

Most souls, however, do not consume the Bible, and a majority of souls that identify as Christian do not consume the Bible.  I don’t mean that none of them ever reads the Bible at all.  I mean that most people in the church pay such scant attention to the Bible that they might as well not read it.  The lack of Biblical content in the average “Christian” is staggering.  Most people who identify as Christians spend minimal (if any) time each day feeding on the Bible but hours a day on social media, viewing movies, or listening to pop music.  In other words, they feed on junk food.  And their consumption shows.  They have difficulty standing against the culture they feed on, and their walk with God is shallow.   They feed their souls large amounts of donuts and cupcakes every day but rarely eat healthy.  

They don’t know how God thinks because they don’t take the time to find out.  They grow weak, fat and spoiled, and they hurt themselves and the church. 

If you want to walk with God, you have to set time daily to get to know what He has said in Scripture . . . to meditate on it from the heart . . . to yield your soul to its authority.  If you have access to the Bible and choose to ignore it, you cripple your soul. 

But if you devote yourself to it, you have something substantial to build your life on, for it will point you to Christ.  You are what you eat.  Even in the soul.

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What Does the Bible Say?

I sat on a student panel tasked with investigating the morality of abortion.  It was the 1970s, and I was in high school and had not yet made up my mind on the issue.  As the panel discussed the various arguments flying around the culture, one student asked a question that hit me like a bucket of water.

“What does the Bible say?”

I was just beginning my Christian life, and I didn’t know what the Bible said, but somehow I knew that if the Bible addressed abortion, that student’s question was the key to this issue.  Not everyone on the panel may have ascribed authority to the Bible, but I knew that as a Christian I had to. 

Authority comes in many varieties, and people give different levels of authority to different types of authorities.  Appeals to science, to reason, to freedom, to economics, to emotion, to culture, to government, to Scripture are like sergeants, captains, colonels, and generals in an army.  They all have a measure of authority at times, but they cannot all have the same level of authority.  Some authorities must outrank others. 

Now I knew that if I was to follow Jesus, the Bible had to be commander in chief when it spoke.  I knew that if the entire culture lined up on one side and the Bible lined up on the other, I would have to fall where the Bible was. 

This principle – the pre-eminence of Scripture – is a hallmark of Christian thinking and flows from the nature of Scripture.  If the Bible is God’s Word, it must be pre-eminent.  If it is not pre-eminent to you, you do not treat it as God’s Word. 

Unfortunately, for most people of every culture the Bible is not pre-eminent.  When it comes to thinking about God, human nature, sin, faith, heaven, hell, spiritual matters or moral issues, most people give priority to something other than the Bible.  It may be their upbringing, their culture, their friends, social media, a professor or popular teacher, Hollywood, a political party, or their own desires.  Many people say they honor the Bible as an authority, and they may give it a measure of credence, but they still dishonor it when they fail to give it priority.  They may honor it as a soldier honors a sergeant.  The problem is that Scripture is commander in chief and not a mere sergeant.  You dishonor the commander in chief when you treat him as a sergeant. 

The church in the West thinks more like the West than it does like the New Testament.  We have let the culture define love and followed it.  We have let the culture define equality and believed it.  We have let the culture tell us that it is arrogant to think God has provided only one way.  We have adopted cultural ways of thinking about sexuality.  We have adopted cultural thinking about human identity.  Many of us do not believe we are fallen, or if we confess that we are, we often think that our sin is not that egregious.  We wonder why God would condemn us for such “minor” transgressions as lust or anger, especially when the anger is justified. 

Some of us speak, as the culture does, as if political activism is the ultimate answer to our problems.  Others speak, as the culture does, as if racism is the sin above all sins.  We can forgive an adulterer perhaps, but we can’t forgive a racist.  Some follow the culture by saying that the husband is not the head of the wife.  Others follow the culture by saying that a person’s sexual identity defines him or her.  Others follow the culture by thinking they can be independent from the body of Christ.  They don’t need to commit to a church.  Or so they think.  Many follow the culture by adopting a consumer mindset when it comes to their local church.  They think the church exists to feed them and not that they exist to serve the church.  We are good at meeting our needs.  That’s the culture.  But we won’t die to self.  That’s Scripture.

We have bought into what social media tells us.  We have bought into what our friends say.  We have bought into what we see on Netflix.  We have bought into what our favorite political party says.  We have bought into the culture, and in doing so, we have abandoned Scripture.  We have ignored the commander in chief and listened to a sergeant. 

One of the marks of a thriving faith is that the Bible trumps the culture.  Your culture (whatever it is) is hostile to what Scripture says, and it wants to draw you away.  Different cultures do this in different ways, but all cultures do this.  If you give priority to your culture, you lose spiritual authority and power, your faith grows limp, and you begin to live like everyone else. 

One of the keys to living a Christian life is listening to the right authority.  When you listen to Scripture above all other authorities, you thrive.  When you listen to other authorities above Scripture, you wither.

If you want to know what you listen to most, look at your free time.  How much of your time do you spend in the Scriptures, in prayer and in seeking God, versus how much do you spend on social media, watching movies, listening to music, or otherwise absorbing your culture?  Where you most engage your mind is where your highest authority is.  If you spend 10 minutes of your free time each day reading Scripture and two hours absorbing your culture, then you are giving your culture priority, and your faith will suffer.  If you want to make God’s Word a priority in your life, make it priority in your time.  You are always feeding your mind.  The question is ­­– what are you feeding it?

Posted by mdemchsak in Discipleship, Scripture, 0 comments