An ultimate stored item…the Word of God in your heart!
John Havener December 26th, 2008
Last Year as we entered the New Year, our Pastor challenged us to read the Bible through in the coming year. My beloved wife and I bought a Chronological Bible and started. We finished up on Christmas Eve. We enjoyed the CB’s arrangement of the Biblical Books and reading the New Living Translation for the first time. I won’t trouble you with our reactions to various portions of Scripture, but I can sincerely say we appreciated our Pastor’s challenge and were very enriched by reading through. I wonder if we appreciate how privileged we are to have the written Scriptures, and the huge price that was paid by our spiritual ancestors so that we could have it in our hands. Bibles galore are available and in many fine translations…But do we have the Word of God in our hearts…Bible stories down in there in accurate detail, Special verses and sections committed to memory? What would you do if you had no outward Bible to look to and draw comfort and hope from?
It is from God’s Word, “hidden in the heart,” that the Holy Spirit selects the Living, faith-inspiring Scripture to become a Rhema word to us and others (So says W.E.Vine, the great GREEK Scholar.) And from the stored Word can flow life-giving ministry although no Bibles are allowed in a situation. Consider this testimony from a veteran Christian worker in India,”Storyteller Ashesa (was) holding up a charred page from a Bible that he picked out of the ashes of a church that was burned in the Orissa riots.
During August and September extremist Hindu groups offered money, food and alcohol to mobs to kill Christians and destroy their homes in the eastern India state of Orissa. Now 50,000 believers are homeless, ten thousand of them surviving in primitive government relief camps. Sixty believers were killed and close to 90 men are still reported missing and may be dead in the forest.
In the midst of this turmoil the storytellers are proving that a Bible hidden in a storyteller’s heart cannot be burned or taken away. Even though they can’t carry their printed Bibles because of the danger, they have continued to go out sharing God’s Word as usual.”
In fast moving disasters, in situations of oppression and persecution, you may not have the time or opportunity to consult an outward, written Bible. Do you have any Word of God accurately stored in your hearts…what a huge difference it may make to you and those around you. In closing, I believe it is a characteristic of the spirit of Antichrist to try to keep the Word of Scripture from God’s people, or if it is found in their possession, to make them pay severely. In a worst case scenario, do you have the Word in your heart? Now let me challenge you to begin 2009 with some memory of key portions of God’s Word, the Bible.
This Word hidden in the heart; that which is alive because the Word came to life; is the most important part of our Christianity. It divides soul and spirit and gives a great sense of what is true and what isn’t. Faith tested is the proved faith and it is true – how many in blessed circumstances now – would endure such persecution as Orissa has and come out shinning for our Lord!
Where else shall shall we turn but to Him who has the words of eternal life? This morning, I was challenged again by the WORD to put away “worrying about tomorrow”out of Matt. 6. Even though that word is well memorized and hidden in my heart, it was good to SEE it in print again,to read it out loud to myself so that my ears could hear it again, to meditate upon its meaning and implications in my life. I have hope that since we have been challenged to again read through the bible,that we will let it “examine us ” to see if we are living in the FAITH.