Feeding on the Word

How Do I Feed On God’s Word?

/ davidsschrock / 3 Comments

aaron-burden-113284-unsplash (1).jpgYesterday, I wrote on the importance of feeding on the Word. Today, let me add another reflection on that theme—namely, what it looks like to actually feed on the Word of God.

Certainly, if God calls us to live upon every Word that proceeds from his mouth (Matthew 4:4), it should not surprise us that he is not silent on what it looks like to feed on his word. Just as the health professionals have protocols for what consists of healthy vital signs, so does Scripture with respect to how to feed on God’s Word.

How do I feed on the Word of God?

In Donald Whitney’s book Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, he takes two chapters to outline “Bible Intake.” In his chapters (summarized here), he includes five ways to feed on God’s Word.

  1. Hear It (cf. Romans 10:17)
  2. Read It (Matthew 19:4)
  3. Study It (cf. Ezra 7:10)
  4. Memorize It (cf. Psalm 119:11)
  5. Meditate On It (cf. Psalm 1:2)

Similarly, but with even more specificity, Psalm 119 gives us at least six ways we can and should feed on the word of God. Continue reading →

Feeding on the Lord: So Much More Than a Metaphor

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breadHunger. It’s one of the most basic of human desires. And in the Bible it is one of the most important concepts related to salvation, faith, and one’s experience with God.

Physically, hunger and our attempts to fill our stomaches are experiences that unite all mankind. While experienced differently in famine-afflicted Africa or affluency-afflicted America, an “empty stomach” is something that speaks to everyone.  We cannot go without food, and thus we search for something to fill us up and give us life.

Spiritually, the language of food, famine, eating, nourishment, and emptiness fills the Bible. From the plethora of fruit trees given to Adam and Eve in the Garden, to the Manna in the wilderness, to the loaves and fishes that Jesus provided for his followers, God has provided physical sustenance. At the same time, food has been a source of destruction—sin entered the world through eating the forbidden fruit; Esau lost his inheritance when he chose stew over his birthright, and Paul says that men ate and drank destruction on themselves when they wrongly ate the Lord’s Supper.

So clearly, food plays a key role in our physical and spiritual pursuit of God. At the same time, Scripture often speaks of eating metaphorically. Psalm 34:8 reads, “Taste and see that the Lord is God.” And Psalm 36:8 says that the children of man “feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.” Apparently, our experience with food—physical bread, meat, and drink—is meant by God to teach us what it means to feed on the Lord and drink from his streams of life.

Still, I suspect that for all we know about food, we may struggle to understand what it means to feed on the Lord. If God is Spirit (John 4:24), then how do we feed on him? And if he is invisible, where do we go to find fullness in him?

Just this last week, I preached a message on feeding on the Lord. My repeated command: Feed on the goodness and grace of God. But how? I can imagine someone saying, “That’s sounds great, but what does that mean?” So here is my answer to that question: What does it mean to feed on the God who is invisible? Continue reading →

Preparing for the Lord’s Supper: Word-Centered Examination Leads to Spirit-Filled Assurance

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light

[This meditation originally posted at our church blog in preparation for the Lord’s Supper].

Who can discern his errors?
Declare me innocent from hidden faults.
Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins;
let them not have dominion over me!
Then I shall be blameless,
and innocent of great transgression.
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 19:12-14 —

The Lord’s Table presumes that sinners will come and feast at a banqueting table of grace. There are none who approach the Table without sin, but neither are there any who rightly assess their sin. Therefore, we need to ask like David did: “Who can discern his errors?” And in turn, let God speak to us through his Word to find the answer. Assurance to approach the Lord’s Table as the Word of God calls to fresh faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Continue reading →

Feeding on the Bible: An Approach to Bible Reading for Those Who Don’t

/ davidsschrock / 5 Comments

bibleThere is a curious condition I have found among many who regularly attend church. I’ll call it personal, spiritual malnutrition. It is the regular pattern of NOT reading the Bible that many in church experience.

I can’t tell you how many times I have sat down with someone who regularly attends church, knows much about the Bible, who expresses love for Jesus and trust in the gospel, but who doesn’t read their Bible. If pressed, they know they should, and often they have tried to read their Bible, but for a variety of reasons, they have not committed to that spiritual discipline.

This is a perilous condition and one that is “curious” because of how central God’s word is in making a Christian.

James 1:18 says, God saves us by his word: “He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” Likewise, 1 Peter 1:23 concurs: “since you have been born again, . . . through the living and abiding word of God.” And Romans 10:17 clarifies the picture that this word-generated life comes through the “hearing of the word.” In other words, anyone who professes to be a Christian must have become such by the Word.

Next, the Scriptures repeatedly speak of God’s Word as life-giving nutriment. Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy 8:3: “Man does not live by bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord” (Matthew 4:4). The Bible is not a trifling thing; it is our life, Moses says (Deuteronomy 32:47). What food is to the body, Scripture is to the soul. A newborn infant cannot live apart from his mother’s milk, and neither can the child of God survive without God’s Word.

And yet, there is a whole category of Christians who survive on secondary sources. A weekly sermon, a favorite iPod preacher, a few memorized verses (usually disjointed from context), a popular book or two, hours of Christian radio, and a variety of other Christian-ish props. But no personal Bible reading.

It is to them (and their pastors) I pen this post. Continue reading →

Joy in the Lord, in the Church, and in the Ministry

/ davidsschrock

joy[Yesterday, I preached my first sermon as pastor of preaching at Occoquan Bible Church. Leading up to that day, here’s what I wrote to our church].

 Not that we lord it over your faith,
but we work with you for your joy,
for you stand firm in your faith.
 – 2 Corinthians 1:24 –

Joy in the Lord

Joy is what pulsated in the Godhead when the world was still an idea (cf. John 17:24–26). And joy is what moved God to create the world. While under no compulsion to create, it was God’s good pleasure to create a world whereby his glory could be displayed and enjoyed.

For the sheer pleasure of it, God created the Manatee and the Milky Way, earthworms and electricity. And in the middle of it all, he made man and woman—the pinnacle of creation (Psalm 8), the acme of his affection. Continue reading →

A Letter to My Church: A Sexual Manifesto on Biblical Holiness

/ davidsschrock

Pastors have a responsibility to teach the whole counsel of God and to help the people of God form a biblical worldview. With this conviction in mind, I will be leading a series on what the Bible says about marriage and sexuality. In preparation for that series, I wrote this letter to our church: ‘A Sexual Manifesto: Embracing the Church’s New Mission.’ Let me know what you think.

If you haven’t noticed, things aren’t the way they used to be.

It wasn’t long ago that the boys’ bathroom was for . . . well, boys. Homecoming queens had to use a razor on their legs (not their face). Marriage was legally defined as the union of a man and woman. And Christians had a place at the table in regards to influencing public policy.

In what seems like the blink of an eye, all of these givens are gone. With more people in Georgia supporting same-sex marriage than opposing it, the once influential Bible Belt is nor more. Christendom as we know it—or should we say, as we knew it—has collapsed. Welcome to the new America.  Continue reading →

The Sweetness and Sacredness of Sundays

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[This post is from our monthly newsletter at Calvary Baptist Church (Seymour, Indiana)].

When God created the heavens and the earth, he spoke light into existence and separated it from the darkness.  On the first day, he called the light “Day” and the darkness “Night.”  From the start, God’s world has run on a schedule.  Like a watchmaker, God spun the earth so that every revolution would take twenty-four hours, and every year would include 365 days, plus six hours.  It seems that in Genesis 1, God’s creation modeled the pattern that men would keep in all generations—six days of labor, one day of rest.

The rest of the Bible depends on this basic structure to frame all that God does with men.  In Exodus 20, God commands Israel to keep the Sabbath holy, saying “On it you shall not do any work, . . . for in the six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

Now, this command to rest was not a call to inactivity or sluggishness.  Rather, it was a call to make time a servant to men, a means by which men would learn to trust the Lord with their time and to know that they needed something more than they could acquire in their weekly schedules.

Since God did not rest because of fatigue, the Sabbath was not just a means of physical recovery for him, or for us.  It had a more Christ-centered purpose.  In fact, it seems that the Sabbath was a gift of joy and fellowship with God.  In other words, it was a holy day of worship, a day to set aside creation and to enjoy the creator. In a world unaffected by sin, this day off would have been needed, but how much more in a world wrought with sin and its effects?!

This was true in the Old Testament, and it is true today.  Only, since Christ’s advent, the meaning and application of the Sabbath has changed to the Lord’s Day.   Thus, as we make application, let us consider three things.

First, the Sabbath day in creation and Israel is a type of Christ. Jesus is the fulfillment of the law and he is the true rest.  Paul calls the Sabbath of Jesus’s substance (Col 2:16-17).  The meaning of this is that in Christ, we who are tempted to work in order to gain security, identity, and standing before God (and men) can now look unto Christ for all three.  In him, we have rest full and free.

Second, Sabbath Day worship has been replaced by Lord’s Day worship. After the resurrection, the New Testament church gathered on the Lord’s Day—the day of his resurrection (Sunday).  Thus, when we gather this Sunday, we announce to the world that Christ is risen and reigning. We do not gather on Sunday because it is the most convenient day for our church; we gather on Sunday because it tells the world that on this day Jesus Christ rose and is now present with us. Just the same, when someone makes a preferential choice to skip church they muffle the testimony of the Lord’s resurrection.

Third, the Lord’s Day is a gift of grace. Sadly, too many Christians obscure the grace of this gift.  The Lord’s Day is not simply a day to recuperate from work in order to return to work.  Your life is more than your vocation!   And it is more than just getting to the next vacation.  The Lord’s Day keeps this in perspective.

Instead of providing physical rest alone, the Lord’s day provides living water for the weary heart. It is a day devoted to the reading, singing, preaching, praying, and discussing of God’s Living Word. If you live on God’s word and not man’s bread, what could be a better gift to you than the promise that for hours this coming Sunday a banqueting feast of God’s word will be prepared before you.

The gift of the Lord’s Day is not merely a reprieve from the world, though it is that; it is a promise that God still speaks.  In a true church that faithfully proclaims the gospel, those who come to hear his voice will never go away disappointed.  This is the grace we need to keep our hearts strong; this is the grace for which your heart longs.  For those who desire God’s grace, gathering with God’s people on the Lord’s Day is a necessary part of life.  It is a day filled with grace for those who are willing to seek it.

Over the next few newsletters, I am going to consider a number of blessings that God gives us on the Lord’s Day and that come from attending church for the right reasons. I hope you will consider these points with me, and that you would share them with the ones who “know the Lord” but who prefer not to worship him in public Sunday by Sunday.  Perhaps together, we can encourage them to taste and see the sweetness and sacredness of Sundays.

For His Glory and your joy,

Pastor David