No doubt you do. But if you'll look
back at God's prescription, you'll find it doesn't say anything about
"knowing" the Bible. It says, attend to the Word.
When you attend to something, you
give your attention to it. You make it top priority. You set aside other things
so you can focus on it. When a nurse is attending to a patient, she constantly
looks after him. She doesn't just leave him lying alone in his hospital room
while she goes shopping. If someone asks her about her patient, she doesn't
feel it's sufficient to say, "Oh, yes. I know him."
In the same way, if you're attending
to the Word, you won't leave it lying unopened on the coffee table all day. You
won't spend your day focusing your attention on other things.
On the
contrary, you'll do what Proverbs
4 says to do. You'll continually incline your ear to
God's Word.
Inclining your ear includes more than
just putting your physical ears in a position to hear the Word being preached
(although that, in itself, is very important). It also requires you to actively
engage with God's Word, to believe it and obey it.
In fact, The
Amplified Bible translates Proverbs
4:20, this way: "My son, attend to my words; consent
and submit to my sayings." Submitting to the Word means making
adjustments in your life. Say, for example, you hear the Word in Philippians 4:4 that you are
to "rejoice in the Lord always." If you've been doing a lot of
griping and complaining, you'll have to change in order to submit to that Word.
You'll have to repent and alter your behavior.
Take as Directed
In
addition to inclining your ear to the Word of God, the Proverbs
4 prescription also says you must keep it before your
eyes and not let it depart from your sight. In Matthew
6:22-23, Jesus reveals why that's so important. He says,
"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy
whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body
shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness,
how great is that darkness!"
Your eyes are the gateway to your
body. If your eye (or your attention) is on the darkness, or the sickness that
is in your body, there will be no light to expel it. If, however, the eyes of
your heart are trained strictly on the Word, your whole body will eventually be
filled with light, and healing will be the result.
Granted, it isn't easy to keep your
attention centered on the Word like that. It takes real effort and commitment.
It may require getting up a little earlier in the morning or turning off the
television at night. But I urge you to do whatever it takes to take God's
medicine exactly as directed.
It won't work any other
way!
That really shouldn't be so
surprising. After all, we wouldn't expect natural medication to work for us if
we didn't take it as prescribed.
No rational person would set a bottle
of pills on the night stand and expect those pills to heal them. No one would
call the doctor and say, "Hey, doc! These pills don't work. I've carried
them with me everywhere I go--I keep them in the car with me, I set them on my
desk at work, I even have them next to me when I sleep at night--but I don't
feel any better."
That would be ridiculous. Yet,
spiritually speaking, some people do it all the time. They cry and pray and beg
God to heal them, all the while ignoring the medicine He's provided. (They
might take a quick dose on Sunday when they go to church, but the rest of the
week they don't take time for the Word at all!)
Why do people who love God and
believe the Bible act that way? I think it's because they don't understand how
putting the Word in their heart can affect their physical bodies. They don't
see how something spiritual can change something natural.
If you'll read the Bible, however,
you'll see that spiritual power has been affecting this physical world ever
since time began. In fact, it was spiritual power released in the form of God's
Word that brought this natural world into existence in the first place.
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