Growing Your Relationship with God Through Reading the Bible: Pt. 4 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning.

All this week we’re talking about growing closer to God and specifically growing closer to God through His Word, the Bible. And really, if you want to get closer to someone and they offer to spend time with you and talk with you, you would be dumb not to do that, wouldn’t you?

Of course you’re going to spend time with them, and we’ve been talking about how if you want to grow closer to God, the Bible has to become central in your life, not just a little peripheral thing for when you go to church and the pastor’s preaching, and you’ve got to find the passage in the Bible, or you’re at your growth group.

No.

Something that’s central in your life really is something that kind of defines your way of thinking.

And that only happens through being constantly in God’s Word, the Bible. Well, we’ve been talking this week about different ways on how to make the Bible central in your life. We saw on Tuesday, spend time with God in His Word each day, and we talked about how to do that. Then Wednesday, how to make the Bible central, renew your mind by memorising verses that speak into your life. We talked about how to do that.

And today, how to make the Bible central in your life.

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Use the Bible when having spiritual conversations with other people.

When the apostle Paul wrote to Timothy in his 2nd letter to Timothy in the New Testament.

He said this to him, preparing him for effective ministry into other people’s lives. He said to him in verse 16 and 17 of chapter 3.

All scripture, that’s the Bible, all scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God, that’s you, Timothy, may be complete and equipped for every good work.

So if you want to have an impact in the lives of other people around you, you need to make God’s Words central in your life. And as you make God’s Words central in your life, the challenge from the Bible today to us is, as you’re growing to know God more through His Word, use the Word when you’re talking to others in spiritual conversations. Have you ever noticed how often Jesus did this?

We might think, well, Jesus was the Son of God, can’t he just speak on his own? Why does he need to quote the Bible? Look, Jesus quotes by memory from more than 70 different chapters of the Bible in just the conversations that are recorded in the Gospels for us. The Bible was a huge part of his communication to others when he was having spiritual conversations.

You know, you have spiritual conversations with people who are just investigating, people who want to know more about Christianity, or people who are searching, people who are looking for God or want to know how to have a relationship with God, and you have spiritual conversations with your Christian friends too. All of these conversations should just be full of you saying, well, you know, the Bible says, and quoting, or just saying, let’s just look at it and opening your Bible on your device or if you’ve got a Bible and just telling them, helping them see what God actually says about things, opening the Bible and reading a verse with someone, or quoting a verse from memory regarding what you’re talking about is so powerful.

Don’t worry about trying to defend the Bible, just put it out there and God will use it in your conversations with people. And you know what, the more that you spend personal time in God’s Word, the more you’re going to see how it applies to issues in your own life or issues in your friends’ lives, and the more you start seeing how the Bible actually relates to your everyday life, the more your way of talking with people will just have in it what comes out of the Bible, and that makes you a person of spiritual impact in the lives of the people around you.

Use the Bible when having spiritual conversations with other people.

I’m John North.

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