2 TIMOTHY 3:16 – “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”
THEME OF THE DAY: THE PRECIOUSNESS OF THE BIBLE. Before we go any further in reading today’s nugget, stop, grab our Bibles, hold it before us, stare at it, and realize what we are holding – God’s Holy Word so that we might know Him to love Him. The 19th century preacher and author, Octavius Winslow wrote in his excellent book The Precious Things of God these words about the Bible:
“Everything that is solemn and precious to us as believers is bound up in the fact that the book upon which we ground our hope of the future is what it declares itself to be, the Word of the Lord. The moment our faith in the divinity of the Holy Scriptures is shaken, everything else trembles with it. Its foliage is withered, its flowers are blighted, its springs are embittered, and the entire landscape of the present and future is enshrouded in gloom and doom. The Lord keep you, my reader, from the low views of divine inspiration prevalent in this day! If this foundation is destroyed or even apparently shaken, what else has your immortal soul to build upon but quicksand, every step, passing to eternity, over which sinks our soul deeper and deeper in doubt, darkness, and despair.”
But therein lies the challenge we face as Christians. We don’t question the Bible is the Word of God. We believe it is inspired by Him and is both inerrant and infallible. Yet, we easily find ourselves neglecting the Word of God due to busyness, worldliness, and the weakness of our flesh. The result is a withering spiritual life. Why? Because our life in Christ suffers malnutrition. The Bread of Life, Jesus revealed through the Word of life, is not feeding our starving souls. We are famished and the evidence is joylessness, lack of peace, stress, anxiety, and all the dry external looks as a Christian but no inward reality of the Lord Jesus. So, when busyness leads to neglect of the Bible because we have lost the awe factor in owning a Bible, what should we do to rekindle the desire for God’s Word? Pray and that in two directions . . .
First, we pray for a hunger for God, not to know things about Him, but to hunger and thirst for Him as modeled by David,
“O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1).
God gave us His Word to know Him, and if we are going to be disciplined in the Word, we must remember we go to the Word to get God, to draw near to Christ, to be enamored with His Person. The desire for Him is the first step toward a consistency in the Bible with a sense of awe of the Bible.
Our next prayer comes from the Apostle Peter and takes the desire for God to the desire for the means to know God – His Word . . .
“Therefore, putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation” (1 Peter 2:1-2 -NASB).
We have been blessed to own the Bible. May God restore our sense of awe in having a Bible. It is our greatest gift we will ever receive for it points us to Jesus, our great and glorious Savior.
PRAYER: Father, forgive me when I take for granted and neglect the fact You gave me Your Holy Word.
REFLECTION: To neglect the Bible is to neglect Christ and reveals a lack of desire and hunger to know Him.