{The Word of God} Part 3: Love the Word
From cover to cover, the Word of God reveals the heart, the character, and the actions of God. We have the great privilege of being able to get to know God through His Word. But I think it goes even further than that. If we want to have a vibrant, life-changing relationship with God, we need to KNOW, LOVE, and LIVE His Word.
This series is intended to equip you to KNOW, LOVE, and LIVE the Word of God. To help you, an everyday woman, put feet to your faith and discover how the Word of God is relevant to your everyday life. And as you are persistent and diligent in knowing, loving, and living the Word, I firmly believe one day you’ll wake up and find yourself in the middle of a REVIVAL.
If you missed the first two parts in this series, you can read them here and here.
I’ve pushed off writing this particular post for a few weeks now. The words just weren’t coming like they normally do. So I didn’t force it. I didn’t let myself feel the pressure of having to produce the content of this post on schedule—because 1) I created the schedule for myself, and 2) forcing something isn’t how I work.
I’ve had a few weeks to sit with the topic of this post in context of our current situation as a people—COVID 19 outbreak and quarantining at home for weeks on end. And I am certain my words are going to be different than I had originally intended for this post about LOVING the Word of God. I feel compelled to share my story, my journey of learning to love the Word of God, rather than walk you through a biblical study of what it means to love the Word.
I don’t have a dramatic before and after salvation story. I grew up in church, in a ministry family even. I’ve never known life without God, without the Bible, without church. I made decisions early on in my young adult life to pursue ministry. I received Bible and ministry training from a couple different programs and graduated from Bible college with my husband. For all of our married life, we have been in ministry in one way or another.
I can’t even tell you how many Bible studies and small groups I have attended—and even lead—over the years. But the truth is: for so much of my life, my Bible sat on a shelf, collecting dust. Yep, even while I was attending Bible school, while I was training to be “in ministry”, and even while I was “in ministry”. My Bible sat, neglected and unread. I can look back at certain times in my life when I did read and study my Bible, but there were far more lengthy periods of time when I did not.
There are plenty of excuses I could cite for not reading my Bible, but they would be just that: excuses. The truth is I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand that reading the Word is more than just something I was “supposed” to do. I didn’t understand that the Bible is actually God revealing to me who He is, what He has done, and how much He loves me. I didn’t understand that the Bible isn’t actually about me, that it is more than an instruction manual for how to live this life well. I didn’t understand how much of a privilege it is to have access to the Word of God, how beautiful and life-giving it actually is. I didn’t understand, really, what this life is all about.
I just didn’t understand.
This brings me to tears now. God’s Word—the Bible—is so very real, so very true, so very vital. It is God revealed to us; God’s very words about who He is! And I treated it so halfheartedly, even selfishly and ignorantly.
Oh, but God! Those are some of my favorite words in the Bible. But God. In his faithfulness and unfailing, never-ending love, He never gave up on me. He never threw His hands up in the air and walked away huffing and puffing about my neglect, avoidance, or anything else. He kept on loving, kept on drawing me to Him, kept on seeing me through the blood and sacrifice of Jesus.
It’s hard to say, but at some point, I realized I was a hypocrite. (Yikes!) Saying one thing, doing another—or not doing it.
This change, this “aha” moment happened well after graduating from Bible college and well into my new season of life as a mom of babies and toddlers. The timing wasn’t easy; it wasn’t convenient. I was changing diaper after diaper all day long. Feeding children, cleaning children, cleaning up after children day in and day out. Any free time I had was spent picking up, cooking, or trying to get just a few minutes to rest. But this is exactly when my renewed desire for the Word of God began, and it began slowly. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I knew it was more important than anything else I could or should do with my time.
I began reading my Bible during the few moments of breakfast I had. I tried waking up early before my children, but I wasn’t always reliable with my wake up time. I had to find a time in my day that I could keep up with, that I could repeat daily—or at least a few times a week. I found what worked for me and stuck with it.
As I stuck with it, I noticed my desire for the Word grew. The more I read, the more I wanted to read—and eventually study!
My children continued to grow. My husband and I both began working at church. We moved houses (a couple times). My children started school. Life kept moving. And for the first time ever, my relationship with God and His Word kept moving right along, too. It became the constant in my life. I had established routines around reading the Word of God that helped me stick with it no matter what was going on. It wasn’t religious. It wasn’t a matter of checking a box. The Word, and what I learned of God, became my very source of life, hope, joy, peace.
This was years, friends. Years. I started so slowly and even haphazardly. But the key was that I kept at it. If I missed a day, a week, even a month, I still came back. Because I knew what was waiting for me—who was waiting for me, with open arms.
I’ve learned how to study the Word, how to share insights, and how to encourage others to do the same. But it all started with the decision to pick up my Bible and begin reading it.
Close to two years ago, I felt an urge from God to dig deeper. I had never read the Bible all the way through—something I actually felt a little embarrassed about after over 20-some years of being a Christian. So that’s what I did. I found a plan and read through the Bible in 1 year plus 1 week.
I’m fully convinced it was that decision to prioritize the Word of God and my relationship with Him that triggered something in me, that sparked a true revival in my life. We’ll talk more about revival at the end of this series...and I can’t wait until we get there!
I can wholeheartedly say that I LOVE the Word of God. Sometimes I even get emotional when I talk about loving the Word, but loving the Word of God is not an emotional thing—not at the root of it. It’s a decision to prefer the Word, to prioritize it. Sure, there are plenty of days I don’t want to sit down and read the Bible, but I choose to do it anyway—even if it’s just a few verses.
Think about the people you love—your husband, your kids, your mom and dad and other family members, your friends. You prefer them, right? They are more important to you than a coworker, a neighbor, the grocery store clerk. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s just the truth. I love my friends and my church family, but my husband and my kids take a much higher priority in my life. I have put them in a higher place.
The same can be done with the Word of God—and our relationship with God, because that’s actually the whole point of reading and knowing the Word: knowing and loving Him. It can occupy the highest place in our lives if we let it. LOVING the Word of God means to put it in the place it deserves in our lives—the highest place.
I’m very careful of using the word “should” in this conversation. It’s not a “should” thing—that’s when it can easily slide over to a religious thing. It’s a “can” thing—something we are invited to do, something we can do. We can put the Word of God first in our lives. We can have a close and intimate relationship with God through His Word. We can if we want to. That’s what it comes down to, right? What we want.
I’m going to sum this up with some words from a book I’ve been reading through called Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves. Sometimes other people’s words are better, and I’m okay with saying that!
“We are made to follow our hearts, to do what we want. . .But if we do not want—if our hearts do not desire—the Lord of life, then we will never choose him. . .We cannot choose what we love, but always love what seems desirable to us. Thus we will only change what we love when something proves itself to be more desirable to us than what we already love. I will, then, always love sin and the world until I truly sense that Christ is better.” (pg. 85, 101)
Friends, Christ is better. The life, the truth, the hope, the reality that is revealed to us through the Word of God is better. Your love for the Word can grow. I believe it WILL grow as you spend more time in it, as you begin to know it. And as your love for the Word of God grows, your love for God grows. The two cannot be separated. For from the beginning of all things, “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).
a couple questions to consider as you work through the idea of LOVING the Word of God:
What are the things in your life that you have allowed to have a higher priority than the Word of God and your relationship with Him?
How can you realistically begin to place the Word in a higher place in your life? What does that mean for you?
In the previous post in this series, we talked about KNOWING the Word—reading and studying it. I do believe LOVING the Word follows a wholehearted step toward KNOWING the Word. Eventually, and rightfully, KNOWING and LOVING the Word lead to what we will be talking about in the next post of this series—LIVING the Word. I love this progression. I can see it continually playing out in my own life—KNOWING, LOVING, and LIVING the Word of God. And I truly hope you can see it playing out in yours. That’s the whole point of this series!
If this has been helpful in any way, can I ask you to share it with your friends? Now more than ever, having a grounded foundation of the Word of God in our lives is vital. And I’m a big supporter of being grounded together with other believers. Let’s all dig in and become women who are actively engaged in knowing, loving, and living God’s Word.
Read the next post in the series here.