To Encourage You

Deuteronomy 6:4-9 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 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.”

I remember the moment so clearly. I was visiting a woman who had formerly attended the same church as I do. She was in a nursing home and had been there for some time.  She had pretty much given up on life and was waiting to die and go be with her husband who had died a couple years earlier.  Her life consisted of lying in bed day after day.  As I entered her room, she asked me this question: “What is there to talk about?”  And the truth is, I was caught flat-footed and had no good answer.  In retrospect, I should have been ready for this moment, for you see, every believer should always have something to talk about. 

The fact of the matter is, “out of the abundance of the heart (the) mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).   As the passage above from Deuteronomy 6 tells us, we should love the Lord with all our soul and all our might, and part of that love is a love for the things He has said to us.  Do you realize how much better God’s words are than our own?  Do you realize that His words are life-giving, comforting, encouraging, peace-giving, and full of hope like nothing else on the face of the earth? Do you recognize the wisdom of what He has told us? Do you understand that God’s words are more precious than gold (Psalm 19:10) and more critical to our life than “our necessary food” (Job 23:12)? It is precisely because God loves us that He has urged us to feed on His Word, to fill our minds with it, to meditate on it, and talk about it all the time. 

Listen to God’s instructions to Joshua as he was about to launch into his extraordinary role as Moses’ successor in leading the nation of Israel: “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success” (Joshua 1:8). 

Of all the millions of books that are available in this world to read, the Bible is, by far, the best for us.  In its pages we find “everything we need for life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3).  It is because God knows this that He has commanded us to immerse ourself in what He has told us, and to talk about it all the time. It should be a topic of our conversations within our families, among our friends, with those in our workplace, with the strangers that may cross our path, and with those lying on their deathbed, like the friend I mentioned above. 

But what is our natural tendency?  It’s surely not this.  We should listen to ourselves and think about what we talk about.  Speaking for myself, so often I am quick to talk about the weather, my family, my hobbies, what I’ve been up to, my problems, that sort of thing. But if I am honest, too often the Word of God as a topic pales in comparison. But it shouldn’t be that way.  As believers, we have the opportunity like no one else to speak Truth into this world and to share what God has said about everything that matters. It is what we should be doing, for God has commanded us to be about this. He knows that it is His Words that are best for us and best for each and every person whose life we are privileged to touch.  It’s a command, because we need to be told.  It’s a supernatural thing, not a natural tendency, so it is something we should be praying about and then seeking opportunity to put into practice each and every day. As the psalmist prayed, so should we ask God, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer” (Psalm 19:14).  And a sure way to do this is to make the Word of God the thing about which we meditate and speak about the most.