It’s amazing how alive the Word of God is. And apparently, how alive and real it can be in any of our lives is up to us! We decide to what level we allow the Word of God to penetrate our hearts and move in our spirits. While it’s possible to remain completely untouched by merely ‘reading’ passages from the Bible; if you meditate, dwell on and think about God’s Word a lot — it can spring up alive in you and start working in you. And what’s to be surprised in that? The Word IS God anyway. It’s that God (the Word) then that we’ve been spending time with that births the work of the Spirit in our lives.
It’s what’s been happening to me. I’ve been studying the book of Job for a while now and I’m really not sure when I’ll be done (if you can ever be ‘done’). I haven’t got past Job 22: 21-30 yet. I just can’t get past it. As in, I literally find it impossible to read further. I’ve been reading, re-reading, saying out loud, saying in my thoughts, thinking, re-thinking and reading phrase by phrase these 9 verses for a few days now. As I’ve been doing that, I’ve seen God start to literally bring alive these words in my life and start cutting through my flesh and dealing with my heart using these very words. I’m finding myself in situations where these words are challenged and where they’re made relevant. It’s supernatural how God’s Word can become a fire in your bones and consume you till you are purified.
My previous post was about Job 22:24,25 about “assigning your nuggets to the dust, your gold of Ophir to the rocks”. Today, the Lord has been speaking to me through Job 22:22, 23. The verses say: “Accept instruction from His mouth and lay up His words in your heart. If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored; if you remove wickedness from your tent…”
The first part of this portion talks of two aspects — accepting His instruction & laying up His words in our heart — both of which are prerequisites to intimacy with God. Both speak of a relationship with the Word of God, that most Christians today don’t really have. My whole understanding of God’s Word and the relationship I have with it has been changing lately. My conventional attitude towards His Word has been challenged.
As Christians with easy access to the Bible, we’ve become so comfortable just reading it and receiving a little encouragement from it. The Bible is a good read generally speaking too and so for the most, it does leave one with a good uplifted feel. It is easy to be satisfied with that ‘feeling’. But do we have a relationship with the Word of God? Do we accept the instruction that comes from God through it? Do we lay up the Word of God in our hearts? Do we allow the Word to penetrate, change, rearrange and rework us? If not, we’re doing it wrong. Have you wondered why we give so much importance and weight to words that come forth from prophets or men of God and hang on to those words and run after them; but at the same time, don’t pursue the Bible — God’s very spoken Word straight from His heart, inspired by His Holy Spirit? Something we can ask ourselves today: Are we laying up His Word in our hearts?
The latter part of this portion is also challenging. Especially the words “if you remove wickedness from your tent…”. God’s been wrecking me with this phrase: “remove wickedness from your tent”.
Tents are private spaces not public areas. Tents represent solitude, privacy and confinement. This has been God’s constant challenge to me through this phrase: “What are you doing in your private, personal and confined moments?” We’re such great Christians and lovable people in public spaces. Our smiles are big, our hearts are large, our giving is elaborate, our hugs are long, our speech is filtered, our actions are careful and our reactions are measured. But, God doesn't seem to care about that if there’s wickedness in our tents. If there is sin in our private lives, in the confines of our rooms, in our secluded moments and in times of solitude. He wants the wickedness gone from the secret place. He seeks righteousness in the lonely hours. Our second question to ourselves today can be this: Is there wickedness in my tent?
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