Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Immersion in God’s Word

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:
And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:
And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.
And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.
Deut. 6:4-9

This is the grand introduction to the final exhortation Moses gave the Israelites before they went into the promised land. He gives an impassioned imperative for them to love the Lord God and to keep His commands in sight in every aspect of life.

What strikes me here today is not so much the exhortation to love God, but something we might usually speed over: the call to keep our minds dwelling on God's word.

Our greatest danger is getting distracted, or preoccupied with other things. The pressures of life are very urgent in today's world. Not only that, we have the constant noise of entertainment and marketing all around us. We cannot avoid it; we need to be able to "block" it out, if you will.

I can imagine there were certain distractions in the desert, and more were coming with the new Promised Land before them, ready for planting, harvesting and building. But today, there are manifold more, I think. The marketing and advertising research gurus have estimated we are bombarded with somewhere between two to three thousand marketing messages a day! Imagine that. We need to make sure we get our best message, and the one with the most staying power, from God.

That's why God, through Moses, tells us to keep God's commands in our heart. Why we should make them an important part of our conversations, and keep them before our eyes. I think the practical idea here is for us to keep God's word in the midst of our imagination and most forward thoughts.

So with that in mind, here's some questions for ourselves:

Do we firstly, read the Bible, regularly? A few minutes a day still can keep it available in our minds. Hey, guys! If you think your life is too busy, then put it where you know you can grab it for a few minutes. Yes, that's right; the top of the toilet tank is not unbecoming for a copy of the Bible, if your intention is to make it available, IMO.

Do we memorize verses? We all can memorize phone numbers, passwords and such. We certainly can memorize a verse that God wants us to make a part of our lives. Making God's word available in our hearts allows Him to bring it back to us when we need it.

Do we meditate on God's word? God made a point blank promise that if we make it a habit to meditate on his word we will be successful and prosper in all we do, in God's eyes anyway. And that's what matters.

To follow these points and thus fulfill what the Lord wants us to do here takes effort and time. It need be only a few minutes out of every busy day. But it is our key, or at least it is my key, to staying in victorious fellowship with God.

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