Grace For The Journey

The Bible says in Jeremiah 15:16, “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight.”

When I ask members of our congregation, “What does the Bible mean to you?” their true answer is easy to discern, no matter what they might say –

The Bible means as much to you

As the amount of time

You spend in it.

It really is that simple.  Think about others things in your life.  The more you like something – a special food, a favorite recreation activity, an important relationship – the more time you spend engaging with it.  Well, the same is true for the Word of God.

Think about the above verse for a moment.  What do you think the Word of God meant to the prophet Jeremiah?  Jeremiah was on what I call a “Divine Diet.”  He feasted on the Word of God; and when God’s Word is your food, it becomes your joy and your heart’s delight.

What have you been feasting on lately?  How much time do you spend in God’s Word each day?

How has the Word of God

Been shaping and

Sharpening your life?

I think we would agree that Jesus knew the Word of God better than anyone . . . spoke the Word of God better than anyone . . . and lived out the truths of the Word of God better than anyone.  When Jesus in John 4:34, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work,” . . .

He was making it perfectly clear

Just how important

The Scriptures were to Him.

As God, Jesus was the Word of God.  But as a man, He needed to study, meditate on, and pray through the Word of God in order to know and do the will of God.  And what was true for Jesus then is true for you and me today.

Because the Word of God

Is both living and active (Hebrews 4:12),

The more we come to it,

The more alive we are made to it,

And the more active

We become in living it out.

When we are on a Divine Diet of both the Old and the New Testaments, we become more sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit, more in-tune to the purpose and desire of God, and we are increasingly strengthened to follow wherever He is leading us.

Remember, after Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested, He used the Word of God to defeat the devil.  In Matthew 4:4 the Bible records Jesus saying, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

So . . . how’s your diet?  Are you getting all the nourishment you need to be all God is calling you to be?  Remember . . .

God wrote the Bible

So we would read it

. . . And the Book

We don’t read

Won’t help!

One last thought:

This is the only diet in the world

Where you can eat all you want,

Whenever you want,

And all you will ever gain

Is a heart filled

With satisfaction and joy!

This is God’s Word For Today … This Is Grace For The Journey

Rest and Rejoice in this eternal truth!

Pastor Terry

Ephesians 4:7 – “But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.”

Hebrews 4:16 – “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”