Do you do scripture abbreviations? Most of us do, I’m sure. We start by finding a verse that means the world and everything to us, and we adopt it as our motto. We quote it often, and it brings us joy or encouragement. It reminds us that God has spoken in our lives, and his Word is the last word on the subject, in whatever situation we find ourselves.
Someone has commented that we are not really “Word people”, but “favorite Word people”. We have our favorite scriptures that we know by heart, we quote them over and over again for ourselves and for our family or friends; we know them so well, in fact, that we can repeat them without looking for them. We can even spend so much time without looking for them that, finally, we are no longer citing them, but we are letting them down. It seems to us that we are simplifying them, getting to the point, so to speak, but in reality, we are simply misquoting the Word.
Example: Romans 10:17 says, “So faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” That’s pretty simple, right? Many of us who have come through the “Word and Faith” tradition have that verse embroidered on our pajamas. We could quote him in dreams. It is our mantra. But because we know it so well, we keep finding shorter ways to say it: We start with “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word.” Soon, however, it is “Faith comes by hearing the Word.” Eventually, we get to “Faith comes by the Word.” But does it?
Even if you didn’t know from experience, you would know by looking at those verses grammatically that we are dealing with a two-step process. Let’s look at the two steps: First, we are told that faith comes by hearing. We are then told that hearing comes by the Word of God. You see it?
It may be helpful to turn the verse upside down, for study purposes only. You see, faith is the end result of the process; the Word is the beginning. The Word of God, if handled correctly, will produce an ear in us. Our spiritual ears will open or tune in to hear his voice as we expose them to the Word. So the Word of God produces a keen sense of spiritual hearing, and hearing produces faith in us. It is a two-step process, one that “Faith comes by the Word” does not do justice to.
Many years ago, I was visiting a friend’s apartment and noticed a magazine, open and folded, on the coffee table. It was positioned in such a way that I could only see the page on the right, which was just a page of text; I realized as I looked that it was the beginning of an article. Simple curiosity prompted me to pick it up and start reading. After no more than half a dozen sentences, I thought, this sounds like CS Lewis. I opened the magazine and looked at the opposite page, and sure enough, there was a picture of Mr. Lewis; it was an article he had written years before, reprinted in this magazine.
I started reading CS Lewis when I was a teenager and I think I’ve read just about everything he wrote on the subject of Christianity. I used to joke that if Lewis called me on the phone, I would recognize his voice. And indeed, here I was, looking at a purely anonymous magazine article and almost instantly recognizing the voice of someone whose writing style and “voice” were as familiar to me as my own face in a mirror.
As we expose ourselves to God’s word, we tune our spiritual ears to His voice. Reading and rereading the Word imprints its character and nature on us; he acquaints us with his “style,” so to speak. Then, when the Holy Ghost speaks directly to our spirit, we can instantly recognize that this is no random thought generated by my own mind, this is the voice of God, as familiar to our spiritual ear as the voice of an old friend on the telephone. And when that happens, guess what? Faith is coming!
This is the best part; this is the part i have been building. Faith is coming! If you follow this two-step process to its natural end, faith will come. Has to; we have the Word of God in him! Faith cannot be left behind when we immerse ourselves in the Word; must come
This is a technique that I learned years ago and I put it into practice from time to time; it never fails to produce an abundance of faith in me. I will choose a portion of Scripture, for example, Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, and read it cover to cover every day for a month. You’d be surprised how much you can learn by doing this.
If you wanted to learn, say, math, you could enroll in a course at your local high school. There they gave you two things: a book and a teacher. They don’t hand you a book and expect you to teach yourself, nor do they expect you to learn from lectures alone. God is the same way; He gives us a book and a teacher. When I got ready to read the book of Galatians, I expected the Holy Spirit to appear. (He did.) He is, after all, the Spirit of Truth, sent to guide me into all truth. So I had my Book, and my Teacher, and I enrolled in the University of the Holy Spirit in Galatians. Would you believe that at the end of the month you knew something about Galatians? And would you believe that faith came? I bet he did!
Do you want more faith? Do you want a deeper and closer relationship with the Lord? Would you like God to speak directly to your spirit, just like he did to Paul, Jeremiah, or David? Then you need to be available to Him. Reserve a time for prayer and then put your face in the Book until the Master appears. He will not let you down.
april, 2008
David L. Henderson