Study God's word if you want to go further…

Simon Cooper
November 12, 2011

These are my thoughts as I am preparing for part 2 of our 43LG series on 'God's word: what? why? and How?':

God's word is like a map that helps us find our way around the world we live in. It allows us to firstly clarify where we have reached to. It also challenges us to explore new heights, and discover new vistas.

The tension I want us to feel today: your desire to want to experience the blessings of God are in contradiction to your willingness to go deeper into studying his word. It becomes a question of motive…..

….When you get impatient with the instructions for your new TV, or the IKEA bunk bed, or the recipe in the cook book, or the help tips on your new computer game, and you glance over them in a rush, what happens? You only use 20% of the functional capacity of the tv, the bed has to be deconstructed 30 mins in, you don't know if the dish is meant to taste the way it does, and your guess is, it probably is meant to taste different, your ability to win at the game is limited, you are handicapped.

It is the same with our life journey and getting to where we need to be. If you set out not having studied the map you will find yourself constantly coming back to the start or going round in circles.

Even if we did study, if we fail to keep checking the map along the way, we will also find that the marriage gets stuck, the job goes sour, the kids become a problem, and the finances become a pressure.

This invisible bar that many of us have reached in aspects of our life that we cannot seem to jump over, requires intervention from God's word, his concepts that bring solutions and creative ideas that we have not yet become one with. Everyone has a bar somewhere they have decided to not jump over, or lower for convenience.

If we became a community that made the study of God's word a significant priority of our interaction, our daily schedule, a context through which we made decisions, through which we communicated, etc, then we would find that bar getting raised (rather than lowered), that journey getting unstuck.

I know some of you are thinking: what does that mean to study like that? How do we/I actually do it? Where? When?

But when we look at the word's of creation, the fall, the word's of restoration, and salvation, and say to ourselves:

"How does my marriage reflect what is taught in the section on dual characteristics, how could my conversations come to resemble more what is taught about the principle of give and take action, rather than about what is taught about the fourth fallen nature, how could my weekly schedule be changed to respond to father's words on tithing my time…"

then we experience God's word as a living entity, an authentic map that I come to value and use, rather than frame on the wall as one does an antique.

And when this study is done in fellowship with others, and interspersed with conversation, debate and argument, then we know we must have come to trust and love each other, as a real family does.

But this requires that no one person, regardless of their position, should be allowed to control the agenda…just let God's word determine the agenda and see what happens….