Growing Your Relationship with God Through Reading the Bible: Pt. 1 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. As we head into this week, I want to help you grow closer to God. Each weekday morning at this time, we open the Bible and listen to God.

Time with God is so foundational to everything about your relationship with Him. It’s how you grow closer to Him.

And all this week I want to talk with you about growing closer to God through His Word, the Bible. The Bible is called the Word of God – in the Bible. It’s the way God speaks to you, and I want to help you understand today why spending time in God’s Word may be the most important practise you can develop in your Christian life.

Let me just read you a few verses out of Psalm 119, and if you want to meditate this week at any time, think more deeply about spending time in God’s Word and its value in your life, I encourage you to take time and read Psalm 119. You need to carve out some time because there are a lot of verses in this chapter, but I just want to now read to you one paragraph starting in verse 9.

Here’s what the psalmist says.

How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word. With my whole heart, I seek you. Let me not wander from your commandments. I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.

Blessed are You, O Lord. Teach me your statutes with my lips. I declare all the rules of your mouth in the way of your testimonies. I delight as much as in all riches.

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I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes. I will not forget your word.

Well, what a great paragraph on the significance of spending time with God in His Word.

Here’s some of the reasons why spending time in His Word may be the most important practise you can develop in your Christian life.

Number one, it’s how you come to understand God.

It’s His word because he’s speaking. He’s revealing Himself. He’s letting you get to know Him.

You know, we so often come to life and the circumstances of our lives with such a wrong picture of what God is like. Something difficult happens in our lives and we automatically think, oh, God doesn’t love me. What, what have I done wrong that God’s getting back at me? Well, that’s such a wrong understanding of God. How would you know that?

Only by spending time in His Word, where He reveals to you what He’s like, and you can read all these stories of people in the Bible who followed God, loved God, difficult things came into their lives. It was a part of God’s plan.

And it changes your understanding of what God is like. So many times, all we think about, all we hear at Bible studies, sometimes even from church, is this mamby pamby view of God, where God is the politically correct God who only ever says what makes you feel good.

And there’s nothing challenging or painful about a relationship with God. Well, that’s not the God of the Bible. How will you know what God is like through the Bible?

Secondly, God’s Word is how God speaks to you personally about your life.

God speaks right into your life, and so often as you open the Bible in your daily time with Him, things come out of your Bible reading and you’re like, how in the world could I have just happened to land on this verse today.

How in the world did John North know to speak on this in the morning devotions? I mean, God is speaking to me personally. Well, that’s what he does through His Word.

Third, the truth of God’s Word transforms you.

By the renewing of your mind. As it changes the way you understand yourself, the way you understand God, as you start to think about the value of spiritual things more than material things, it changes your life. It changes the way you interact with people. The Bible is your only sure guide to living your life. Don’t miss out on what God wants to do in your life through His Word.

I’m John North.