We started this year by talking about the function of God’s Word in our lives. We read God’s Word to see God’s character, to meet Him, experience Him, draw near to Him and follow Him. God’s Word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path as Psalm 119 says but it is also so much more; it is the revelation not of what God has done or how people have responded, the written Word is the revelation of the Living Word. God has chosen to make Himself known to us through the Holy Spirit’s work in and through the Word of God. II Timothy 3:16 tells us that “all Scripture is God-breathed”. II Peter 2 says “But know this first of all, that no prophesy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophesy [of Scripture, remember this is the focus] was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” The same Holy Spirit that inspired men to prophesy and write the Word of God lives in us and works in the world to inspire us to read, understand, interpret and obey the Word of God. God has chosen to make Himself known to us through His Word, I’ve said before and I will continue to say, I don’t believe anyone in our culture can have a mature, wise, faithful and obedient relationship with God apart from being devoted to the Word of God.
We studied Deuteronomy at length, God’s call to Moses in chapter 3 to command, encourage and strengthen Joshua to prepare him to lead the people into the Promised Land. This calling was for Moses to share with Joshua everything that God had spoken to him, to build Joshua up by revealing God’s character through God’s Word. This led Moses to then command all of Israel, in one of the most important passages of all the Scriptures, in Deuteronomy 6: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Jesus repeated these words when He was asked “what is the first or greatest commandment.” The amazing thing we learned is that the very next verses actually tell us the key to loving God with all our heart, soul and strength . . . “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.” The key to loving God, to obeying God, to following Jesus and glorifying Jesus so that men can be redeemed is the presence, the deep abiding foundation of His Word being hidden in our hearts. Dr. Robert Smith recently said that we don’t need to simply memorize the Scripture we need to internalize it, I believe he was expressing what God had expressed through Moses in Deuteronomy 6, that the Word of God is not simply a tool, a story, a roadmap, a way to live or even a love letter; it is the very breathe of life, the power of God and the literal and literary revelation of who God is, not just who He wants to be to you and I, but who He actually is. He is united, holy, good, loving, faithful, fierce, mighty, wonderful and terrible, righteous and true, overwhelmingly big and perfectly personal. He is our Father, He is God, He is the uncreated One, He is the One who was and is and is to come, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End and He makes Himself known in all of His eternal glory to each and every one of us through the Holy Spirit’s work in and through His Word. You can meet God anywhere, and we all have stories of how God interrupted our lives to make Himself known to us, but we come to know God in intimacy and wonder through His Word, through the timeless, living, breathing, unchanging and yet ever evolving and relevant Word of God. This Word is not just supposed to sit in front of us, it was written, given and protected for thousands of years so that it would be in us.
We have let God’s Word lead us through many things this year. We have learned to have conversations that surround His Word, that start and end with the Word speaking to us and through us. We have studied fellowship, a devotion to our relationship with God and with each other that begins with a devotion to God’s Word. We have studied the person of the Holy Spirit, how His key works in our lives are to remind us of Jesus’ words and to use those words to glorify Jesus to us and through us so that men might be redeemed. Today we are going to finish the year where we started it, with God’s Word as our focus. I want to take a very popular, some might even call it common verse and share it in its context, in the midst of all that was happening in the moment that it was first spoken and my prayer is that we will all see that in the midst of our brightest and darkest moments the truth remains simple, what is in our hearts comes out when our we are pressed and sometimes we are pressed just so that the contents of our heart can be tested and when necessary changed. Hiding God’s Word in our hearts isn’t just a wise or poetic statement, it’s an actual requirement if we are going to withstand all that we hope to never have to go through but we can’t possibly avoid if we are going to live in a world broken by sin. The truth I hope to show us today is that where we live does not have to determine how we respond, we can live in a broken place and yet still live lives that are unbreakable, all this is determined by what fills our hearts and how dependent upon God’s Word we are willing to be.