How sweet is God's word!
Do we read the Bible regularly using the Bible Companion ? If we do not read the Bible daily then we will lose our fellowship with God. We will never find true happiness without this fellowship and contact with Him each day. Only from the Bible can we find out about God and the way He thinks. The centre of God's purpose is the life, death and resurrection of His Son Jesus and the only possible way we know that these things happened is from the Bible.
According to the whole of Psalm 119, the word of God is the central thing in the lives of any believer. It is the source of our conscience- otherwise we would not have any way of feeling bad about sin, as we would not know right from wrong. Also, our duty is to bring others to God. Romans. 10:17 says that "faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God". So unless we have the word of God in our hearts we can never take God to another person, because they can only hear the Gospel from us if we are teaching them the word of God.
So for all these reasons we understand why Jesus confirmed that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God (Mt. 4:4). We are born as new babies by our baptisms, and so after that there is a very great need to feed and it is the word of God which is to be our food (1 Pet. 1:25; 2:2). It is like the manna which the people of Israel ate in the wilderness. Without this feeding each day, we will die, we will lose our ability to walk with God, we will die spiritually in the wilderness of the world. We are told in Lev. 5:17 that ignorance does not save us from being guilty of sin, so it is important for us that we know what is the truth and what are the commands of God, and so this is why we should be reading the Bible every day. David says that the word of God makes the simple wise, and we are all simple in that we do not know what is the right way to live before God without being enlightened by Him.
The word of God is called the "sword of the spirit" in Eph. 6:17, this is the weapon which David says he used to fight against his persecutors. The word of God is like a knife that is living and active, as we read in Hebrews(4:12). So the word of God is the power of God, this is how He wants to work in our lives. If we refuse to read His word, then we will not have access to this great power. It will pass us by. Also, we cannot just use the word of God occasionally, we must have regular contact with it, this is the way that we will be changed as people. Remember that the first of all sins was a disobedience to the word of God. "Sin is lawlessness" (1 Jn. 3:4), so all sin is a form of disregarding the word or law of God. Jesus was the word of God turned into flesh, so He is our great example. It was because He loved the word of God so much that He could say that He always did those things which pleased the Father (Jn. 8:29).
Bro Gennady (Poltava, Ukraine)
