A Personal Reason: The Power Of The Bible

Let’s suppose you were stranded on a street, a dimly lit street in Los Angeles, late at evening in riot-torn Los Angeles. Your car had a flat tire and you were sitting there wondering what you were going to do next, and about a dozen young men come out of the building next door and they see your plight, and they begin marching toward you. What difference would it make to your disposition if you knew that they were on their way home from a Bible study? I think even an atheist would feel better if he knew that.

Today I’m speaking on the topic of the power of the Word of God. As you know, this is the last in a series of messages entitled Seven Reasons Why You Can Trust the Bible. We talked about a logical reason, a historical reason, a prophetic reason, a Christological reason, a scientific reason, a providential reason. And now we get to a personal reason, namely the power of the Word of God. There’s no book like it.

Here’s a young man, riding along in a train, brought up in a Christian family, and even savingly believing on Christ, but in anger toward God, taking his brand new Bible and throwing it out of the window of the train as far as he could fling it. Weeks later he comes back in repentance, knowing that he had done wrong and desecrated God’s Word, and he’s looking for where he threw his Bible and discovers that it was found by a young man in that community who took it and read it and had been converted by it. And so here he is with a brother in Christ as a result of the Word of God.

There’s no other book like that. There is none except the Bible. The Bible is called light. “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” You’re walking along and the Ten Commandments are like ten lanterns that guard the ditch. “Don’t slip into the ditch! Here they are! Stay on the path.”

The Word of God! Jeremiah says, “‘Is not my word like as a fire?’ says the Lord.” It’s like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces. It takes hard hearts who, when they understand the love and the compassion and the mercy of God, in desperation come to Him, and their hard heart is made soft by the power of the Word of God. It is a seed that falls into the ground, and when it begins to grow it becomes so strong that it cracks the concrete. It is a sword, as we shall see in a moment. The Word of God is all that and more. Would you be surprised if I were to tell you that the Word of God actually has some of the characteristics of God, and does what God does? It does what God does.

I want you to take your Bibles and turn to Psalm 19 for a moment where we have a great Psalm on God’s two great books—His book of nature, and His book of revelation, the Bible. Psalm 19 begins by saying: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” And if you were here for the [my prior] messages you know I preached a message on the scientific reason why we believe the Bible is the Word of God, and I referred to this passage along with many others.

But I want you to notice that in addition to the book of nature where we go out and say, “The heavens declare the glory of God,” there is another book, and we pick that up in verse 7. This is the book of the law now. And the difference is this. Nature may tell us that God is powerful, but nature cannot tell us that God loves us. It cannot talk about the mercy of God and the forgiveness of God, but language, which is much more precise, can tell us exactly what God is like. We may not understand it all, but at least we know what the text tries to communicate.

And now I want you to notice this carefully. Maybe you have a pen in your hand. You can underline six descriptive adjectives which refer to the Bible, but which also are characteristic of God. Let me be very clear that the Bible is not God. We do not bow before the Bible, but the Bible is the voice of God. And there are some things that may be said about God that cannot be said about the Bible, but there are some things said about the Bible which can also be predicated of God. They describe the Word, and they describe the Living Word, Christ, the incarnate Word—both!

Look at this. You’ll notice it says in verse 7: “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving (converting or restoring) the soul.” The law of the Lord is perfect, and God is perfect. He is perfection, too, and notice what the power of the Word does. It restores the soul. It brings us back to God. It ministers to our spirit as to whom we are. It touches us at the deepest level of human need. In fact, it not only restores us; it gives us life.

James says, “Of his own will he begat us through the word of truth,” and you remember in 1 Peter 1 the Scripture says, “We are born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the Word of God which lives and abides forever.”

I speak today to some of you (I hope the majority of you) who are saved. You know that your name is written in heaven. You’ve come to assurance of eternal life. How did God do that miracle? He did it through the Word, empowered by the Spirit of God, but He did it through the Word, through the message of this book. That’s what God does. It grants life.

So notice that the law of the Lord is perfect. You’ll notice it also says it is sure. There’s a second word for you to underline. It is sure. That means it is dependable. We sing Great Is Thy Faithfulness. Is God dependable? Yes! “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.” Therefore, I will not fear what men will do unto me. There is that sense of dependability upon God that we know that He is always there and His promises are going to be with us. Well, that’s what the text says about the Word of God. Is is sure, making wise the simple.

Now, sometimes when we talk about the simple, that is a derogatory term, but in the text that’s not what it means. It means simple people are people who tend to go astray, people who tend to make unwise decisions. Is not that true of all of us? Are we not simple in that sense that we just sometimes don’t know what to do, and we seek wisdom? Well, there it is in the Word. “The commandment of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.”

Next word in verse 8! “The precepts of the Lord are right.” In Hebrew, that word right is the same word from which we get righteousness. Isn’t God always right? Yes, God is right. He sets the standard, and when we begin to see God’s standard, and we begin to see reality as it is, we discover that there is rejoicing in the heart.

The next word, also in verse 8: “It is pure, enlightening the eyes.” What could be more pure than God? The Scripture says that God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. Interestingly, evil spirits, which are sometimes called demons in the New Testament, are always spoken of as unclean spirits, because they are the opposite of God. God is purity. God is whiter than the snow. God is the one who sets the standard of righteousness, and holiness, and the Word of God is pure, the text says, enlightening the eyes, enabling us to see reality as it really is. It’s like buying a suit and you want to walk outside so that you can see it in the sunlight, because artificial lights sometimes give it a wrong impression. They dilute the color. They give a shade that is not true. God is the true shade, the true color.

Then notice another word. It says clean. It says in verse 9, “The fear of the Lord is clean.” Now, you might think, “Well, why does it say the fear of the Lord?” That is another synonym for the Word of God, because it says in the book of Deuteronomy, “I am giving you this law so that you might fear the Lord all the days of your life.”

Sometimes, by the way, you find preachers who like to say, “Well, it doesn’t mean we’re scared of God. It just means that we revere Him.” Well, I don’t know whether or not that can be proven biblically. It seems to me that God wants to make sure that people are afraid to disobey. And there’s nothing wrong with being afraid of God, especially if you are about to do something that He does not like. It’s good to be afraid of Him. And the text says that the fear of the Lord, which is a synonym for the Word of God here, is (What does it say?) clean. It is clean. God is clean and pure, enduring forever.

And then one more word in verse 9, the last part of the verse! It is true. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous all together.” And God is true. And Jesus said, “Thy word is truth.” Now, don’t miss my point. Do you notice how that the character of God and the character of Scripture are really one and the same? What the Bible says about itself it can say about God Himself.

No wonder the Psalmist goes on to say (verse 10), “More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold.” I challenge you to go to Wall Street and preach that, and people will be laughed at. Or you can go down to LaSalle Street here in Chicago, the great banking industry, and say, “I found something more precious than gold, yea than fine gold, and it’s the Scriptures.” Could you imagine how that would go over in today’s society? But it’s because our values are totally reversed. The price tags have been rearranged. That’s why, because it’s sweeter also than honey and the drippings of a honeycomb.

I have to pause here because many of us, when we read the Old Testament with its harshness, we say to ourselves, you know, “How could anyone have loved God’s law back then?” How could anyone have loved the Word before you have the book of Romans, and before you have John (the Gospel of John), and before you have 1 Peter with all those lovely promises? How could people in the Old Testament have enjoyed the Word? Well, all that David had here was the Old Testament. And he says, “I find God’s Word (God’s law) sweet—sweeter than the honeycomb.”

Think this through. What food is to the body, and we need food in order to live, the Bible is to the soul. And just like we are fed by a balanced diet physically, so we need to be fed by a balanced diet spiritually, and it’s all there in the Word of God. For example, the Word of God is meat. That’s what it says in the book of Hebrews. It says, “I have fed you with milk, but now I am going to feed you meat.” It is also, as I mentioned, milk. “As new born babes desire the sincere milk of the Word…” So you have milk. You have meat. You have bread. “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” And then if you want something to put on your bread, you have some honey for the bread. And you have all that you need to nourish you and to strengthen you, and to restore and to refresh your soul. It is all in the Word of God.

Spurgeon, the great preacher of the last century, said, “Why, this book has wrestled with me. It has smitten me. It has comforted me. It has smiled on me, frowned on me, clasped my hand, warmed my heart. It weeps with me, it sings with me, it whispers to me, it preaches to me, it maps my way and it guides my goings, all within the Word of God.” Remember Jeremiah? He said, “Thy words were found and I did eat of them and they became unto me the joy and the rejoicing of my heart, for I am called by thy name, oh Lord of hosts.”

But you see, friends, today, with all of our computers and with all of our television sets, and with all of the input that we receive from the world, our appetite is so diluted that oftentimes the Word means nothing to us, and what we need to do is to understand that the appetite needs to be developed by use and by dependence upon the living and the true God. Is it any wonder that the Psalm ends by talking about the great power of the Word to examine us? It says: “Moreover, (verse 11) by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.”

And preserving us from sin! Verses 12 and 13: “Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me!” All of those willful sins that we commit! How are we going to be kept back from them through the Word of God? “Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression.” And it ends with a prayer: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock (strength) and my redeemer.”

Now, I could have concentrated in more detail on these last verses, but I chose not to do so because I want to turn to another passage. But before we do that, do you understand how clearly the Bible shows that the character of the Word is actually a character of God?

Now, what I’d like you to do is to turn to the book of Hebrews for a moment where we shall see that the power of the Word is actually the power of God. Hebrews 4: The character of the Word is the character of God, and the power of the Word is the power of God.

Chapter 4 opens. It says: “Therefore, let us fear lest the promise remains of entering into its rest, and any of you should seem to come short of it.” And then it says, “For indeed, we have had good news preached to us just as they also, but the word they heard did not profit them because it was not mixed with faith in them that heard it.” In other words, the Word of God doesn’t automatically do all of these miracles. It has to be mixed with faith. There has to be a receptive heart, which the Word itself, by the way, is also able to create and does create. And if it did not, our hearts would not be open to God.

But now it’s in this context he goes on to say in verses 11-13: “Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall through following the same examples of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and is able to judge the thoughts and the intention of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from his sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.”

What a passage of Scripture! Now notice it says that the Word of God is living. King James says quick, and people may think that it is fast. No, quick is the old English word for alive. The Word of God is alive and it is active. It is not a static message because behind the message comes the very word and the authority and the power of God.

I read about an old preacher who used to do street preaching, and he took his hat and put a Bible under the hat, and then in order to get attention would say to people, “It’s alive, it’s alive,” and point toward the hat. And everybody would say, “Is there a rabbit in it? What’s under his hat?” And then he lifted it up and there was a Bible. It was kind of hokey, I think, but he made a point. He made a point! He’s alive. He is active.

And then notice now what it does. It cuts us open. It is sharper than any two-edged sword. When a surgeon has an operation that he performs, he uses a knife. But notice that the Word of God is sharper than a knife first of all, but it cuts both ways. Wherever it lands, it cuts. Not just in one direction! It is a sword with two edges, and you’ll notice it says, “It is sharper…” Here we have the language of dissection. The Greek word is very clear here. It means to cut, to dissect. Piercing, as far as division of soul and spirit! The idea is going right through the soul and through the spirit—all the way through. And may I simply interpret it this way? It does not mean that it divides the soul and the spirit, as if to say they are intertwined and it has to divide them. Rather the idea is that it goes through the soul and it goes through the spirit, just like the joints and marrow do not have to be separated, as the text goes on to say here in a poetic way to emphasize with imagery the power of the Word of God, because the joints and the marrow are not even really together. But rather it goes through the joints, and it goes through the marrow.

We might say that the Word of God cuts through to the bone. It dissects every single part of us. And the text says it is able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the heart. That word thoughts in Greek means ideas that come to us that we meditate on. A good word would be reflections of the heart, things that we think about when we are going along the expressway, the thoughts that we have about different people, the anger that arises within our hearts or our reflections, as we come to church, about things that happened to us this past week, or things that are going to happen in the future. And also the intentions of the heart—what we intend to do, the things that we would like to do but can’t, all of the musings of the mind and the heart the Word of God sits in judgment upon and discerns moment by moment, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It’s all there.

Now, why is this so important? It’s because you and I are born sinners. We are born sinners and as a result of that, we are born with a defense mechanism, and there are some people whose mechanism is more finely tuned than others, and we do not want anything to penetrate across our radar. We don’t! And we can see it more clearly in people who are addicts, like alcoholics who oftentimes build up such a defense system that they cannot be at fault. Everyone has to be at fault. No one can find out what they are going through. Everybody in the family has to lie for them. There’s a whole network that is built up to protect this citadel, to protect people from knowing who that individual really is.

But you know, that’s true of all of us. And we do it through rationalizations. We do it through avoidance. We are people who want to protect ourselves, and will not allow anyone in behind the armor, including God. And what the Word of God does is it cuts through. It goes right under our radar system. It cuts right through and it lays us bare. It sees the whole thing. In fact, that’s the second point I’d like to draw from the passage. I’ve emphasized just a moment ago that the Word of God cuts us open, but it also lays us bare. The imagery of an operating room continues. Notice! “And there is no creature hidden from his sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” And this is now talking about Christ.

Here’s the point. Do you notice how closely verse 12 is united to verse 13? It is the Word of God, you see, that cuts us open. And it lays us bare, and we’re being laid bare by the Word, which is by God—by Christ—to whom we must give an account. That’s what the text actually says here.

So here we have an autopsy being performed, and everything is laid out—every cell, every thought, every intention, every dream, every hoped-for moment, every sin, every carefully concealed iniquity. It’s all there. It’s all laid out, and there you have a tumor, and there you have disease. And there are cells that obviously are affected by the disease. And over here you have a spine that is crooked. And here you have some bones that are out of joint. And here lies the heart with all of its aspirations. And the Scripture says that there is nothing that is hidden from His sight. All of it is naked and open unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. And listen to me carefully. What a person is lying there on God’s table is what he really is, and nothing more. That’s it! Wow!

Now, how does God do this? How does He dissect us this way? Well, you see, it’s through the Word that we begin to see God. You see, up until that time we only see others. One of our defense mechanisms is always to find somebody else who is worse than we are. And I’ll tell you something. That is not hard to do. If you want to find somebody who is worse than you, just look around. Just take a moment. Just look at the person who is sitting next to you, and the person who is behind you. I’ll give you a minute to do that. It’s easy. All that you have to do is to look around. There is somebody who is worse than you are. It could well be that it’s somebody you had breakfast with this morning, somebody you had an argument with in the car as you came over. They’re worse than you are. There’s no question about it so you are comfortable here in church—very comfortable, too comfortable.

Listen, when the Word of God penetrates us, when we are laid bare, there is no one to whom we can compare ourselves. All that there is in the operating room is us and God. That’s it! “And all things are bare and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do,” and every single scintilla of thought, dividing the soul with all of its soulish ideas, some of which are mixed motives, dividing it, the Spirit separating it, finding out all of the wrong motives that are mixed with good motives, and the whole site, as it is, laid bare before God, and that’s it! How does He do it? The Word of God!

Listen, Freud wasn’t wrong about everything. And when he said there is beneath us a subterranean part of us, I don’t know whether or not he would use the word evil, but it’s there. There are some serpents that lie coiled on the floor of every one of our hearts. There is fungus that grows up like in a dark, deep cellar with all of its darkness and its dampness, and suddenly the light comes. And when the light shines like the light of the sun, it’s all there, and there’s no place to hide and there’s no place to run, and there’s nobody who can possibly give you shelter. It’s just you and God. That’s it! Wow! And the Word of God does it.

A man who occupied this pulpit for 9-1/2 years who had a great ministry (and there are at least a few of you here who remember him) is Dr. Alan Redpath. He preached here at the church for 9-1/2 years, and he always emphasized yieldedness and the filling of the Spirit, and sometimes he chided the congregation quite harshly, as I’ve been told, about the fact that they should just get with the program, get yielded, get sanctified. And all of us preachers we do that. And then God gave Dr. Redpath a stroke. And I remember an article he wrote after that, which I wasn’t able to lay my hands on this week. If any of you have it, I’d really like to get it because it was absolutely breathtaking.

But I remember the essence of it was this. He said that when he was recovering there in the hospital, every sin that he thought he had long since given up suddenly rose up in his heart, including envy and anger and lust and self-will and rebellion and unthankfulness. He said that it was just an absolutely awful sight. Awful! And then he said there in the hospital, “I concluded something I never fully understood before, that the only good thing about Alan Redpath is Jesus Christ.” That’s the only good thing about him.

People sometimes say to me, “Well, Pastor, what is God doing in your life these days?” Well, I’ll tell you one of the things He’s doing. I would like to learn that the only good thing about Erwin Lutzer is Jesus Christ. And I’d like to learn that before I get a stroke personally. And I’d like to learn that before I am told that I have terminal cancer. That’s what God is teaching us. And you know, the more holy you get, it is not that you are unaware of your sinfulness. The more sanctified you become, the more helpless, the more desperate you become before God, because the more snakes and evil and desires and wrong motives and the whole bit, it all comes to the surface, and then you have no means by which you can rationalize it.

You see, if Alan Redpath were not a Christian, he’d have been able to handle that very naturally and say, “Well, that’s just a normal part of being human,” but you can’t do that in the presence of God. The Word of God came to life in his heart, and he realized something. And by the way, in the early 80s I had him come here and speak at the church. And some of you may remember that sermon, too. I’ll never forget it. He apologized to this congregation for having preached a number of sermons (And he actually gave the number. He figured out about the number of sermons he had preached from this pulpit, and he said that he preached sermons) that he himself did not live up to.

Well, you know, all of us as preachers have to confess at that point. Of course, I have preached messages I have not lived up to. All of us have done that. But you see, what we need to do, folks, is we need to see ourselves in this text in verse 13, that the Word of God comes and demolishes all rationalizations, all sense of image, and it leaves us absolutely bare, and there’s nothing to cling to because we have been smitten by God. And He takes His knife with unerring accuracy and goes through the whole thing. And listen. The spiritual development that you will make as a Christian is directly dependent upon your willingness to be honest in the presence of God about what He sees when He cuts you open. If you are still hiding, the grace of God does not enter those closed doors.

Now, you say, “Well, please don’t leave us here.” No, I don’t intend to. I don’t intend to. God’s Word cuts us open. It lays us bare but it also heals us. It says in Deuteronomy, a lovely text… I found it only this morning so that gives you an idea of how recent these messages sometimes get. (chuckles) But I found it only this morning in a commentary. I’ve not see it before. It says: “I am the Lord who kills and makes alive. I am the Lord who wounds. And I am the Lord who heals.”

I said, “Lord, thank You for that text. Thank You!” Why? It’s because God doesn’t just wound us and then leave us along the side of the road bleeding. It is His intention to bind up our wounds. But you see, most of us say, “Lord, don’t cut me. I want chemotherapy, but don’t touch me with a knife. I want vitamins. I’ll take all the vitamins, Lord, you’ll give me. I’ll go to church as often as you want. If that’s a vitamin, I’ll take it, but don’t you dare begin to cut.” God says, “Do you know why I’m going to cut you? It’s because the deeper I cut you, the deeper your experience of repentance will be, and the deeper the experience of repentance, the more thorough My work can be in your heart.” So God just goes on cutting whether we like it or not. He goes on cutting and we are stripped bare.

Listen! Do you know what He does? He comes along and He offers us forgiveness. You see, the answer is not to run from God, because He knows us so thoroughly in a horrifying way. No, no, no! We come to Him. In fact, here in Hebrews it says in verse 14: “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.” Verse 16: “Let us therefore draw near with confidence to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help in time of need.” No, just because the Word of God cuts you like this, don’t run from the one who is able to heal you, because the one who cuts is the one who heals. How does He do it? He offers us forgiveness, and in that forgiveness He wants humility and brokenness.

“How blessed are they whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” A whole ugly mess cleansed away! He comes into the cellar of our experience and He takes care of the fungus on the walls by scrubbing them clean. He offers us forgiveness. He, of course, helps us. “The Lord is my helper.” And we come to Him as that. He restrains us from evil. “Thy Word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.”

How do we deal with all of the lusts and the desires of the heart? Jesus said these words: “Now you are clean through the Word that I have spoken unto you, and wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” How in the world are you going to keep pure in a society that is so impure, that majors in impurity? “By taking heed thereto according to Thy Word.” The Word of God, memorized, hid in the heart! The Word of God meditated upon becomes to us what we need in order to thread our way through a society that is so overwhelmingly committed to sin. And so there He is. There He is! He forgives us. He helps us. He restrains us. He prospers us. Psalm 1 says the person who meditates in the law of God shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of living water, which brings forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatever he does prospers. He comforts us—Psalm 145. The Scripture says that He heals the brokenhearted and He binds up their wounds. It is all in the Word of God.

Now, how do we experience His transforming power? How do we get changed from the inside out? Well, what we need to do is to pay attention to the Book, because listen carefully. The attention that you pay to God can be directly measured by the attention that you pay to His book. If you, week by week, blow off the Word of God, you’re blowing off God. Let us at least be clear. And as a result of that, what we need to do is to bring ourselves into submission to this Word, and it needs to become a part of us. We need to eat it, as Jeremiah did, so that it becomes a part of our system, so that it becomes to us the joy and the rejoicing of our heart. All that we need is in His book. Don’t miss where we’ve been and what we’ve done. The Word of God has the characteristics of God. The Word of God has the power of God.

Let me give you a very brief suggestion. First of all, meditation! Meditation! It’s not enough to read the Bible. I know that we say, you know, that a chapter a day keeps the devil away. Well, a chapter a day will keep the devil away if you remember what the chapter is all about. But, you know, you read a chapter, and like D. L. Moody says, you know, when he was hoeing potatoes, he always had to put a stick in where he hoed because when he came back he had no idea where he had ended. And that’s the way we are, too.

So what we do is we concentrate and we say, “Lord, I will not put Your Word down until You have given me a thought, an idea, an assurance, a promise for today.” For example, last night before I went to bed (I’ve been reading the book of Acts, a chapter a night, just before I drop off to sleep), I was reading Acts chapter 5, and I had a tendency to put the Bible down. But I said, “I still do not have my thought,” so I reread it until I had the thought for the night, because that’s the way the Word of God lodges in our mind. The best way to meditate is to memorize, but if you can’t memorize, at least meditate. Don’t put the Word down until you have been ministered to. That’s first of all—meditation.

Secondly is, of course, confession, the dealing with sin that the Holy Spirit of God points out through the Word. And then always, and here’s the “biggie” now, submission. “Lord, I allow your Word to sit in judgment of me. Whatever you reveal to me by your grace, I will submit to.” What happens is the Word of God begins to be all that we need within our hearts. Do we need guidance? Oh God, how we need guidance. “Thy Word is a light unto my path, and a lamp unto my feet” and it guides me.

Do I need the comfort? Do I need all that the Lord has given to me? The answer is yes. Do I need to know how to go to heaven? Yes! It’s in the Word.

I conclude with the words of John Wesley: “I am a creature of day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. A few months hence I am no more seen. I drop into an unchangeable eternity. I want to know one thing—the way to heaven. God Himself has condescended to teach the way. He has written it down in a book. Oh give me that book. At any price, give me that book.”

Friends, you have one, don’t you? Become a lover of God’s book, and you’ll be a lover of God.

Let us pray.

Father, we marvel at what You say about Your Word. We marvel, Lord, at the fact that it is so, so much like You are, pure and light, sure—all of the attributes that are attributed to it. Father, we marvel at the fact that it has such power to penetrate, to get past all of our defenses, all of our rationalizations, all of the screens that we put up that we say, “He will never get through to me. God will never, never get through to me.” Father, You can separate all of that, and You can demolish it.

We ask, Lord, for a spirit of submission, for a spirit of meditation, yieldedness to Your Holy Word. We thank You, Father, that is has been proven again and again and again that it is indeed Your power. Help us to love it, to believe it, to live it, to memorize it, and to represent You well in the process. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.