Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father remind us and call us back to His Word. Give us a hunger for your Word, Father. I want to want your Word more. I am not hungry enough. I want to grow up and mature more and more in your Spirit, that I would be less easily satisfied with a few meager minutes here and there. But instead I want to sit with you Word, Father. I want to dig deeply and consider deeply and obey with delight. Father, in the name of your Son Jesus, and by the Spirit, He who lives within us, please enrich my relationship with the Bible. Amen!
Your Morning Song: "Great Are You Lord" by All Sons & Daughters
Your Morning Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:6-9, 8:3, (see Matt. 4:4)
And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
...
Have you ever forgotten that you can eat food? Forgotten that it tastes good and that that rumbling you feel in your stomach means you need to go have some?
Barring jokes about workaholics and parents of very young children, let's all answer with the expected, "no." The touch, taste, and smell of food, along with our body giving us unmistakable cues (aka hunger), means that food is a constant thing in our day to day lives, sustaining our bodies from one day into the next.
As God's kids, do we hunger for His Word in the same way? I used to struggle with guilt over not reading the Bible. But as I have grown up and matured as a Christian, I've found that the guilt has faded and instead it has been replaced with what we truly ought to be feeling.
Hunger.
Let's be clear. If you are one of God's kids and you're not reading the Bible, you should feel guilty. And then you should say sorry to your Heavenly Father, guided by the Spirit, in the name of Jesus. And then, as you are forgiven, the guilt MUST go. And then we are left with...
Hunger.
To be helpful, a lack of daily hunger for God's Word, a lack of hunger-pangs in the soul for that which feeds the soul, is a sign of a lack of Godly maturity. If we don't hunger for God's Word, then we have gotten used to not reading/eating.
We ought to stop occasionally, and both privately and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, check ourselves. Are we reading the Bible? If so, why? If not, why not? And if not, do we notice the lack?
So many of our struggles and troubles and issues in life arise from our unhealthy, emaciated, starving relationship with the Bible, God's good, sustaining, better-than-bread Word to us. And for the struggles and troubles and issues of life that are not because of this, the Bible has what we need.
And so we ought to bring it into all places and all spaces. Not weirdly or forcing it, but embracing the Bible until it is so deeply a part of how we do life that we can't help ourselves. We want to talk about it throughout our day. We will sit and answer and ask questions of our kids about the Bible. It will be such a sustaining, vital part of our lives that it might as well be carved all over our houses, written on our foreheads, worn on our hands, and carved into the hearts of and minds of our children.
There is no food, no nutrient, no vegetable as powerful to sustain us as the Bible. And there is nowhere in our lives where it ought not to be.
What is one thing we can do about this? Check your habits when it comes to the Bible, or lack thereof. And make some changes. Eat some more. Carve it into places in your life it has not previously been (I am not advocating bathroom graffiti).
Perhaps one other thing? When was the last time you tried to memorize some verses? How wonderful would it be if you had a loaf of the best bread that would regenerate with every bite you took?
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