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Every Word that Comes from the Mouth of God

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By Beth White

Right now, I’m reading a book about interacting with kids. It’s called When Children Love to Learn, and it’s a collection of thoughts shared by different people who have taught children in some capacity. My personal reason for reading the book is to gain inspiration as I try to homeschool and parent well. Going through it, though, I found something that I thought related to us as students of the Lord.

                In one chapter, author Susan Schaeffer Macaulay explains that a well-meaning teacher will often ruin a lesson for their student. Worried that a story in itself is not enough, they will either provide their own interpretation or present the kids with a neat moral. She says, “We do all children a massive disservice when we ‘chew’ over the material and ‘spit the pulp’ out for them. People reject the secondhand results of someone else’s efforts. No . . . let the children remember because they took it in themselves. Let them think their own thoughts about it. Let them respond.”

                Reading this, I thought about how we as adults are also constantly force-fed somebody else’s thoughts about the Bible. We listen to our favorite podcasts, we read a devotional crafted specifically for us by someone going through the same stage of life, or we do a Bible study. But do we ever just read the Bible?

                It’s easier to read about the Bible than it is to read the Bible itself, but that is the one thing above all else that we need to be doing. Trust in your ability to hear from the Lord. He is not a tricky God, and He doesn’t make himself hard to find. In fact, what Jesus says is that “everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:8).

                You don’t need somebody else to prechew the Lord’s words for you and pass along what they think is the main point. You, like a child, have a working mind and a heart capable of responding to the Holy Spirit’s touch. Get your nourishment directly from the source. If you are interested in learning from others, that’s great; there are some good teachers who have important things to say. But please don’t neglect the simple practice of reading through the actual Bible, with prayer. Allow God to surprise you as you seek His face directly and invite the Holy Spirit to be your teacher.

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Becoming a Fruitful Disciple

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By Beth White

Just before Jesus went meekly to his death, He gave His loved ones this insight: “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples” (John 15:8).

We tend to struggle with these words. We think, “Ok, fruit is what He wants, so fruit is what I had better get.” But I believe that the Lord is far less concerned with the fruit we bear than with the roots of our tree and what we allow to nourish and water them.

Fruit is the product of something that starts much deeper, something unseen. That’s why bearing fruit proves that we are His disciples; the fruit cannot be borne unless we are connected to the True Vine (John 15:5).

When you and I read Galatians 5:22-23, we may feel convicted that the fruit of the Spirit is not flourishing abundantly in our lives. We may realize that we’re not very patient, for example, so we begin to pray for patience. While that is a good place to start, the fact is that we don’t gain patience by praying for patience. We grow patient by seeking the Lord first and trusting Him to lead us in the way we should go. The same may be said for all of the fruits of the Spirit. We allow the Lord to refine, or prune, our hearts, and the fruit begins to grow.

If we’re not bearing fruit, we don’t need to get fruit. We need to water our roots! Jeremiah 17:7-8 says, “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”

How do we tap our roots in to that source of everlasting water? Begin with prayer. It is the Lord who does the work; we must ask Him to do it in us. To read our Bibles daily is also essential, because through the Word of God we know God. Then, as we hear His words and do them, abiding in Him, we are conformed more and more to His image—we bear fruit.

It’s spelled out for us in 2 Peter 1:5-8: “Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Take Him at his Word. There is much to be sacrificed if we are to live in this way, as His disciples, but He has promised that we will bear fruit.

Because our Father is patient, we should be too. Our job is simple obedience; it is His to determine the variety of fruit and its growth. We must say, “Look, Lord! My heart is a fertile garden with soft soil. I will water it with your words of life; grow in it what you will.”

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Dwelling in the Shelter of the Most High

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By Beth White

One thing the Lord has been at work teaching me over the past two years is that I can trust his word absolutely. Psalm 9:10 declares, “Those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.”

The Bible often talks about seeking safety from the troubles of the world in a fortress. We choose which fortress we dwell in: it can be God Himself (impenetrable, unshakeable), or it can be an imaginary cardboard castle. Jesus says that the way to build ourselves a real, solid house of refuge is to take His words to heart and obey them (Matthew 7:24). If we are not asking God to move in our hearts and help us live by all that Jesus says, then we are building a sloppy structure that may seem just fine while the sun is shining but will invite death and destruction when a hurricane comes.

For example, Jesus teaches in plain language that we are not to resist an evil person but in meekness accept what God brings about (Matthew 5:38-42). If I nod my head when I read that in my Bible but then go out into the world and defend my property and fight for my own personal rights, then I am trusting in earthly wisdom. The wisdom of the world says, “God loves me, so of course he wouldn’t want me to endure suffering at the hands of an evil person.” The wisdom of the world leads me to fight for myself, whereas the Bible encourages me that it is the Lord who fights for me (Deuteronomy 3:22; 2 Chronicles 20; Psalm 37). It is essential that we reject worldly wisdom. It is the stuff of cardboard fortresses.

Hope is found in Proverbs 3:5, which reminds me to trust in the Lord with all my heart and lean not on my own understanding. Looking around at my circumstances leads to grumbling and a puny faith. As a worshiper of the living God, I believe that my days are in His hands. I believe that there is eternal blessing to be gained by walking in obedience to His words, and I believe that it is harmful to act counter to God’s word because of a perceived outcome. Let us never forget that looking forward to eternity with our Heavenly Father, we have cause to rejoice over our suffering here on Earth (Matthew 5:11-12; 1 Peter 5:9-10; Hebrews 10:34).

I wonder if we have any inkling of the magnitude of the blessing we reject when we refuse to humble ourselves before our Master. What intimate communion could be ours but is not because we have never yet forsaken our own understanding and wholeheartedly embraced the Lord’s teachings?

Jesus’s words are offensive to our flesh, but He says, “Blessed is the one who is not offended by me” (Matthew 11:6). We overcome our flesh through prayer and submission to a God that we can trust as good. In Him, we can turn from the inferior comforts of the world to find the true, unshakeable comfort that he promises.

If it feels impossible to accept ideas that seem to go against our own concept of goodness and justice, we must pray to the God who freely bestows wisdom on all who ask. The things of God are not the same as the things of man, and we are naturally blind to his ways until He opens our eyes. But open our eyes He will, if that is our heart’s true desire. Resting in faith is not the same as doing nothing. It is spiritual warfare. It requires the discipline of prayer and a knowledge of who our Father is and what He wants from us. It takes a willingness to lay down our own desires and plans for our life and joyfully accept whatever He has in store for us. It is the knowledge that when we see a problem, an uncertainty, or an injustice, the first thing we need to do is get on our knees and ask for His wisdom and strength.

Trusting in the Lord does not look like doing nothing; it looks like doing nothing that He did not first call us to. Hebrews 10:23 says, “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.” To dwell in the shelter of the Most High, to abide in the shadow of the Almighty, we MUST hold fast without wavering. Believe that He is faithful, and rest in Him. It is the only true rest that can be found.

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The Lord Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want

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By Beth White

“Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you’” (Psalm 16:1).

There is great beauty in these words of David. What freedom he must have felt, acknowledging that his goodness, his well-being, his very life were the Lord’s to worry over and not his own.

Of course in David’s time, Jesus had not yet spoken the Sermon on the Mount; God’s people had never heard their Savior, in the flesh, lovingly explain the reason why striving to care for yourself is a fruitless endeavor. “For the Gentiles seek after all these things,” He reminded them, “and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:32-33). But David knew the ways of his good Father. He trusted, with the simplicity of a man unstained by the world (James 1:27), that his God carried him as a man carries his son (Deuteronomy 1:31).

Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. That’s it. Before anything else. Before deciding what good needs to be done in the world or which party deserves our vote or what on earth we’re going to do with our kids all day every day now that school is remaining closed: seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. Life gets a whole lot simpler when we think of it that way.

Our Shepherd is with us. We must train ourselves to hear His voice. The temptations of the world hold no power over the one who dwells deeply with his Lord, secure in the knowledge that He guides his steps. Unfortunately, the world speaks louder, and it requires a great deal of discipline to quiet ourselves and seek the guidance of our Master. How easy it is to go about our day trusting in our own knowledge of right and wrong, thinking that we are the masters of our own lives. How difficult it is to find the time to drink from the Living Water that gives wisdom and righteousness. But we must beware of forgetting who the Lord is. Psalm 50 warns, “These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.” We must take seriously the deceitfulness of our own hearts (Jeremiah 17:9).

Let us cry out with David, “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth!” (Psalm 86:11). When we despise the world with all its worry and shame, we find rest. Take comfort; your Father sees you. He remembers you. You may wish to achieve a desired result; He sees beyond the surface and works toward something infinitely better. Seek His kingdom and His righteousness, and you will find yourself transformed.

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