Day 26

God’s Word is not just information for our minds; it is food for the soul.

‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ (MATTHEW 4:4)

When Bill Clinton was running for President for the first time, he was quizzed by a journalist about his time as a student at Oxford: ‘Did you smoke marijuana at Oxford?’ And he famously answered, ‘Yes, but I didn’t inhale.’

When you read the Word of God, you need to inhale deeply. There’s no substitute to reading it, meditating on it and understanding it. Colossians 3:16 says, ‘Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.’ It is the rich inhaling of the Word of God that through reading it and singing it (says Paul) it dwells deeply within us. C.H. Spurgeon once said of someone, ‘His blood is Bibline. If you cut him anywhere Scripture pours out.’

Our knowledge of God, and therefore our enjoyment of God, is from the revelation He gives of Himself. We find that in Scripture, and supremely in Christ, whom we also know through Scripture. We cannot therefore bypass the necessity of meeting with Him in His Word.

Something very wonderful happened in the New Testament: ‘The Word became flesh.’