By D. Brandt Berg
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“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away.”—Matthew 24:35
The Word of God is the most powerful truth on earth.—Words that contain the very spirit and life of God Himself.1 The Word is the spiritual spark of God that ignites us with His life, light, and power.
Reading, absorbing, and following the Word of God is one of the most important things you can do to build your relationship with the Lord. It’s the Word that keeps you in tune with God and helps you to keep going God’s way. It was only when Adam and Eve quit listening to God’s Word that they got in trouble.2 When you listen to God and His Word, He always tells you the truth, and if you obey His truth, you’ll be happy and fruitful.3
Faith in the Word of God is such a vitally important principle. That’s what this entire era and age of grace is built on, faith in His Word. “For without faith, it is impossible to please God,” and “faith cometh by hearing the Word of God.”4
Although He is a “very present help in trouble” who will “never leave nor forsake us,”5He deliberately remains largely hidden and unseen behind the veil of the spirit realm. Therefore He expects us, His children, to “walk by faith, not by sight.”6
Most of the time the Lord seems to let us more or less fend for ourselves with very little direct, visible, or audible intervention from Him or His angelic agents. He does not give us a whole lot of help in the form of openly visible supernatural assistance from the spirit world. Instead, He leaves a lot up to us, and He expects us to gain the spiritual strength and faith that we need from His Word.
He wants us to eagerly absorb His Word for ourselves, and thereby gain the faith that we need to meet the needs and confront the situations which we continually face. This is why God’s Word is so important. It is the primary means by which we receive God’s communication and are made aware of His will, and thereby receive the faith and strength to carry on for Him in this life.
Where is the first place we look to find the will of God? The Word of God. His Word is the known, sure, absolute, revealed will of God. So even if you never receive a revelation, you never hear a voice, you never receive a prophecy, you never have the gift of knowledge or the gift of wisdom, you never have discernment, you never have healing, you never have miracles or any other gifts of the Spirit,7 if you will just heed and follow His Word, you’ll accomplish a whole lot for the Lord.
The Bible is the most wonderful, supernatural, miraculous, amazing, marvelous book in the whole world. It tells you where we came from, how we got here, why we’re here, how to survive while here, how to be happy while here, and how to love and have happiness, joy, and peace forever.
Regardless of all the criticism, skepticism and lies that its opponents may hurl at it, we know without a doubt that the Bible is true because we know its author. That’s something nobody can disprove. Perhaps before you were introduced to the author, before you met the Lord, you did not care much about the Bible and did not know whether it was true or not. Maybe you never read it or did not even believe in it. But now that you have found Jesus and have received Him into your own heart, you know His Word is true, because you know He would not lie to you or tell you anything that was not right.
“Treasures new and old” (Matthew 13:52)
God has given His people the major basic information that they have needed from the very beginning. Then He’s given more and more as history went on, until by and by, a few hundred years before Jesus came, He began to really tell the prophets what was going to happen. And then when Jesus came, with His apostles and the early church, He really gave more details. All the time God has been giving more information and more details needed by man.
There are a lot of folks who think, “Well, the Bible’s enough; that’s all we need. God has not spoken since then. He does not speak or talk anymore. He just shut up after He gave the book of Revelation to John, and we’re not supposed to get anything else from God anymore.”
Thank God, He’s not a silent God who shut up when the Bible was finished 2,000 years ago. He’s a living God, a talking God, and He still speaks and has been speaking ever since then.—Talking to His people and His prophets and His children down through the ages, ever since the days of Jesus and His apostles and the early church. He’s still alive and He still talks today.
Soul food
Jesus said, “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.”8 His Word is the very life of God. That’s what gives us spiritual life and food and nourishment and strength and health. This is why a good wholesome balanced diet of His Word is essential if you wish to grow and stay close to Him.
Jesus Himself is called “The Word” in the Bible.9 Jesus is the Word, the Spirit and the life, and you have to have a dose of Him every day, a good feeding and feasting and drinking, if you’re going to grow and stay healthy spiritually. Just as you have to eat in order to have physical strength, you have to feed from the Word, drink of the Word, to have spiritual strength.
“As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby.”10 That’s a picture of a baby who must have its mother’s milk in order to live. Without receiving nourishment from the good, wholesome, nourishing, encouraging and feeding truth of God’s Word, you will starve and eventually die spiritually.
You have got to feed your soul or you will never grow up spiritually, you will never fully mature, and you will stay a spiritual infant or babe because you haven’t properly fed from the milk of His Word. Christians who neglect the Word grow weaker and weaker until they’re defeated by the world. They have neglected their only hope of victory—the life, light, strength and power of the Word.
When you’re spiritually weak, it’s often because you haven’t really been strengthened by the Word, filled up with the Word, and baptized with the Word, and feasted on the Word. The Word has not been your life and strength and health as it should have been. If you get so busy with a little here and a little there that you don’t even have time for the Word of God, I’ll tell you, you can crack up that way. The minute you start crowding the Word out of your life, you are getting too busy.
You can’t just let things slide and get so busy with other things that you neglect your inspiration, the spiritual food and nourishment that you need from the Word. I know lots of times I would really get down if I didn’t feed on God’s Word.
But if you sincerely seek the Lord as you hungrily read His Word, He will speak to you through it. And the more dearly you begin to love His Word and the more you study it and feed from it, the more you will grow spiritually and the more you will find that God can speak to you loudly and clearly and directly through His written Word.
When the Holy Spirit quickens a passage or verse to you, applying it to your own personal situation, it brings the Word to life. The Lord will bring His Word to life and give you things personally, answers to your problems and prayers, as you read His Word. When He applies it to a situation, it suddenly becomes alive. It’s no longer just mere words anymore, or words that just run through your head, but all of a sudden it hits your heart and you really get the point. “The entrance of Thy Word giveth light; it giveth understanding to the simple.”11
The great prophet Jeremiah said, “I found Thy Words and did eat them, and Thy Word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart.”12 Job said, “I have esteemed the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.”13
Jesus said, “One thing is needful, and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall never be taken away from her.”14 What is the “good part” that Mary chose? She sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to His words. Resting in the Lord and sitting at His feet and hearing from Him and His Word is so necessary. God’s Word is just that important.
Compiled from the writings of David Brandt Berg, originally published November 1988. Adapted and republished December 2014. Read by Simon Peterson. Copyright@tfi
Footnotes:
1 John 4:24.
2 See Genesis 3.
3 See John 15:11; 13:17.
4 Hebrews 11:6; Romans 10:17.
5 Psalm 46:1; Hebrews 13:5.
6 2 Corinthians 5:7.
7 1 Corinthians 12:8–10.
8 John 6:63.
9 Revelation 19:13; John 1:1,14.
10 1 Peter 2:2.
11 Psalm 119:130.
12 Jeremiah 15:16.
13 Job 23:12.
14 Luke 10:42.
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