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Gleanings From The Word

Tag: Devotional

  • Read the Word. Read the Word. Read the Word.

    a marked up well worn bible evidence of someone having read the Word over a long period

    People who know me have heard me say it more than once. Read the Word. Read the Word. Read the Word. I did not pick that phrase because it sounds nice said three times in a row, though it does. 

    I picked it because three things have to happen before Scripture actually does what it was given to do in your life, and missing any one of them will leave you short. 

    You have to read it. You have to come to know it. And you have to understand it. They are not the same thing, and you cannot skip ahead.

    Read the Word

    The first one is the simplest, and the one most easily skipped. You cannot know or understand a book you never open. That sounds obvious until you look honestly at how many weeks can pass between sitting down with it on purpose. 

    The blessed man is the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night, like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in season (Psalm 1:2-3). 

    Notice that fruit follows meditation, not the other way around. Reading is not the finish line. It is the starting one, but you do not get to skip it.

    I have written a whole piece on why and how to actually build this habit, with a reading plan if you need somewhere to start. Why (and how) to read your Bible

    Know the Word

    Reading puts the words in front of you. Knowing is what happens when those words stop being unfamiliar, when you can recognize a passage before you finish the first line, when the story or the command or the promise has become part of how you think. But there is a trap here, and it is an old one. 

    The Pharisees of Jesus’ day knew the Scriptures forward and backward. 

    You search the Scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life, and it is these that testify about Me, and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life (John 5:39-40). 

    They knew the book and missed the Person the book was written to introduce them to.

    I have written before about that exact danger, knowing the Bible the way you know facts, without that knowledge ever becoming the faith it was meant to produce. 

    Knowing the Bible like the back of my hand

    Understand the Word

    Reading gets the words in front of you. Knowing gets them familiar. But understanding is the one piece you cannot manufacture by effort alone, no matter how disciplined you are or how many times you have read it through. 

    A natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14). 

    On the road, after the resurrection, Jesus did not just hand His disciples a clearer outline. He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (Luke 24:45). That opening is still His to give. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him (James 1:5). Understanding is asked for, not earned.

    So the next time you hear me say it, you will know I am not just repeating myself for effect. 

    Read the Word, because you cannot know or understand a book you never open. 

    Read the Word, until the words on the page become a Person you recognize rather than facts you have filed away. 

    Read the Word, and ask the Spirit to open what your own effort never could reach on its own. Three calls, not one repeated. 

    Together they are what carry you from the gospel you believe to the life you are meant to live.

    Hallelu Yah (Praise God)

    Be blessed,

    Kevin

    You might also like “Know the Bible like the back of your hand” and “Hobby horse alert.”

    Some Bible Study helps

    I’m not affiliated with this site but he offers some great Bible study helps

    Another site with some helps

    Access to numerous Bible translations

  • # Right Belief Must Become Right Living

    Recently, I slammed my hand in a door. I’m ashamed to admit that a stream of pre-Christian expletives came out of my lips. By and large, I’ve done a good job of removing those words, but I can still slip. There are times when what I do or say doesn’t align with what I believe or who I profess to be.

    Theologians have two words for this, and you do not need a seminary degree to understand them. Orthodoxy means right belief. Orthopraxy means right living. For most of church history these two words have walked together, because they were never meant to be separated. You cannot claim one and discard the other and still call it biblical Christianity.

    Scripture is not gentle about this. What use is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but has no works? Can that faith save him? Faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself (James 2:14, 17). That is not a suggestion tucked in a side verse. James is asking us to look honestly at whether our lives back up what we say we believe.

    Before this goes somewhere it should not, let me be clear about what this is not saying. We are not saved by our good works. It is by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). Nothing about right living earns you a place at the table. But the very next verse will not let us stop there either. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). The works do not save us. They are what saved people were made for.

    This is where orthopraxy actually shows up, not in grand gestures but in the ordinary texture of a life. It is patience with the person who tests you twice in one day. It is honesty on the tax form nobody is checking. It is showing up for the friend whose crisis is inconvenient for your schedule. James puts it plainly: prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves (James 1:22). A faith that only ever lives in your head has not yet become the faith Scripture is describing.

    There is a warning built into this too, and it cuts the other direction from where we might expect. Jesus said not everyone who says to Me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father. Many will say to Me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles? And then I will declare to them, I never knew you (Matthew 7:21-23). Right belief without right living is not a small inconsistency. Jesus treats it as evidence that something never took root at all.

    So orthodoxy and orthopraxy are not in competition, and they are not optional extras for the especially devoted. They are the two halves of one whole life. Sound doctrine without a changed life is a faith that talks and never walks. A changed life without sound doctrine is a house built on whatever feels right that year. We need both, and Scripture never offers us the choice to pick only one.

    If you have spent more time defending what you believe than living it out this week, that is worth sitting with honestly before God. And if you have been busy doing good without rooting it in the truth of who Christ is and what He has done, that is worth examining too. The way we live matters, not because it earns us anything, but because it is supposed to be the visible proof of what grace has already done.

    I still catch myself in moments like that door slam, where what comes out does not match what I claim to believe. That is not proof grace has failed. It is proof I am still being made new, and that the gap between profession and practice is meant to keep shrinking, not stay the same size forever.

    Hallelu Yah (Praise God)

    Be blessed,

    Kevin

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