Seven Consequences of Ignoring God’s Word
By Joe McKeever
“But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in that law doth he meditate day and night” (Ps. 1:2).
The Lord never intended for his Word to collect dust on a table in your back bedroom. People paid for your right to own a Bible in your own language with their very lives. What are you doing about that?
Christians who own numerous Bibles which they rarely open are thumbing their noses at the saints of old who paid the ultimate price. This hard-won treasure lies buried under the dust and detritus of your life.
The Lord’s plan calls for his people to live and breathe his word, to read it and receive it inwardly and to think about it regularly and practice it. He intended it to become part of the very marrow of their bones.
Digest it. Assimilate it. Live it. And meditate upon it continually. He even told people to “Eat this book.”
Several times throughout biblical history, God told his faithful prophet to consume the book containing his words (Jer. 15:16; Ezek. 2:3; 3:1–3; Rev. 10:9).
The idea was to get his Word inside, to digest it as surely as one takes in meat and vegetables for nourishment and sustenance, and to grow thereby.
Job said, “I have esteemed the words of his mouth more than my necessary food” (Job 23:12). Our Lord said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4, quoting from Deut. 8:3).
The image of taking in food and having it become part of your being is an apt metaphor for God’s children receiving the Word and assimilating it into our lives.
Man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Moses said it, Jesus quoted it, and no one has improved on that statement since.
Sadly, too few Christians are living that truth today. The typical evangelical Christian—in this country especially—has numerous Bibles but rarely takes one down to read.
