Responding to God’s Word: Part 5 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have. I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body, because I know that I will soon put it aside, as our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. And I will make every effort to see that after my departure you will always be able to remember these things.

2 Peter 1:12-15

Transcript

Good morning. Each weekday morning at this time we start the day by opening up the Bible and seeing what God has to say to us, and I think if you do this every day, you find that so often God has something to say personally to you in your own heart.

And I want to encourage you, if you’re finding that to be the case, to expand on it, to have your own personal time in God’s word each day and allow Him to shape your life. We’re talking all this week about God’s word and the place it has in our lives and how God wants to use it in our lives and the attitude we need to have as we come to His word.

Peter in 2 Peter in the New Testament in chapter 1 tells us he’s going to constantly remind us of the truths that are in God’s word, and don’t we need that? We so quickly forget these spiritual principles that help us and change our lives and put us right in the path God has designed for us. These things are not just things that you can take and leave, and maybe they’re true or maybe they’re not or they’re true for whoever believes them.

They are truths.

Peter says these aren’t myths. We ourselves were there with Jesus. We wrote down the things He said. We wrote down the experiences we had with Him, and you should really pay attention to it, like you would to a lamp if you were in a very dark place, because God’s word has that place of importance in your life. And listen to how he ends the chapter, he says,

Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by God’s Holy Spirit.

God is the one speaking to you from His word.

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Here’s the thing, no prophecy of scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. It’s not just, oh, I can use something I heard from the Bible or something I heard from this other source, and whatever I believe in is what’s going to be true. Whatever I make of it is what will create reality for me. Now it’s true how you perceive things affect how they influence you a lot of times, don’t they? But that’s not the same as saying what is truth.

The fact that you may have heard something or you may like something and so you think that’s truth doesn’t shape who God actually is. There is actually a real God who was there long before you were.

That means He shaped you, but you don’t get to shape Him. He is there in His nature as who He is. And so your job is to study His Word, to come to understand Him for who He is, because you have to deal with Him on His terms and on His level because He is who He is, as it goes on to say, no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And so as you come to God’s word, the Bible, recognize this. This isn’t just some people’s thoughts about God.

God Himself is speaking to you through His word, the Bible. Study the Bible. Get to know it. See how things you’re reading now connect to things in other parts of the Bible. Grow in your understanding because this is the book of life.

This is the book that describes God’s plan for humanity, how God designed us, what went wrong, what we can do to see things be restored in our life, to how God designed them to be, and how we can get to know God Himself and see Him actively involved in our personal lives. Do not neglect the role of God’s Word in your life. If you put it front and center.

You won’t be sorry.

I’m John North.

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