Articles
Our Responsibility to God’s Word (1)
Our Responsibility to God’s Word (1)
Greg King
The blessings and benefits of God’s word require that we accept certain responsibilities and disciplines. The Bible is not some sort of good luck charm. We do not benefit from the Word by just being near it. We will not absorb the Word of God by the process of osmosis. So what must I do with the Word?
I must meditate on it. David says in Psalm 119:97-99), “O how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day. 98 Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, For they are ever mine. 99 I have more insight than all my teachers, For Your testimonies are my meditation.” I am responsible to study the word. I must spend time in thought pondering the ways of God and His desire for my life. Spending time with the Word of God is vital to my spiritual life. The commentator Matthew Henry says of these verses: “He not only read the book of the law, but digested what he read in his thoughts, and was delivered into it as into a mold: it was his meditation not only in the night, when he was silent and solitary, and had nothing else to do, but in the day, when he was full of business and company; nay, and all the day; some good thoughts were interwoven with his common thoughts, so full was he of the word of God.”
I must Obey it. David goes on to say, 100 “I understand more than the aged, Because I have observedYour precepts. 101 I have restrained my feet from every evil way, That I may keep Your word.” The word of God is to be lived and obeyed not just known. Perhaps you’ve known people who brag about having read the Bible through several times and yet remain immoral and drenched in false doctrine. There is a desperate need to meditate with a view to conforming to what the Word directs us to do. John 7:17 says, “If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself.
Are you meditating on and obeying God’s word?
