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You may think it is awkward English to title this chapter “The Life Way to Take the Word,” but I want to suggest some ways for you to get more life from your reading of the Word. I do not say “The Living Way...” because sometimes living connotes excitement or loudness rather than life. Before we consider how the Word can bring us into life, we will answer some questions based on the previous chapter.
Question: I have been considering the context of the verse, “Abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thes. 5:22, KJV). From the verse before and the verse after, it seems that if our behavior is proper, God will sanctify us wholly and preserve us blameless. Is this the case, or is it that the sanctifying life within results in a high standard of behavior?
Answer: Sanctification is surely a matter of life, but both sanctification and life will keep us away from all negative things. The young people especially need to be familiar with 1 Thessalonians 5:22. For your own safeguard you need to avoid all appearance of evil. Do not think that you are too spiritual to be affected. Run away from anything that bears the appearance of evil. Just a quick glance can stain your thoughts. For the sake of others and for your own sake, you must be careful; behind every appearance of evil, evil is lurking. Even after fifty years of seeking to walk in the Spirit, I still have no confidence in my flesh; it could still do any kind of evil.
In north China around 1928 there was a strong Pentecostal movement. Some of those who experienced the filling of the Spirit felt that they no longer had any flesh and could not sin; men and women began to live together. The resulting fornication brought such shame to the Lord’s name that for a long time afterward the gospel had no entry among the people there. Do you see how the appearance of evil leads to evil?
Do not think that you are being religious to practice a holy life. Our mentality can so easily be under the subtle usurping of the enemy. For the years I have been in this country, I have stressed that Christ is in opposition to religion. Now the enemy has come in and twisted my words. Some are saying that it is religious to read the Bible and pray at a regular time every day. Some say that coming into a meeting quietly is religious. Some have stopped meeting regularly on the Lord’s Day so as not to be religious.
What is religion? It is any kind of worship or service to God without Christ. If in a meeting you are silent with Christ, you are not religious. If in a meeting you are shouting without Christ, you are religious. Neither silence nor shouting is right, and neither is wrong. The question is whether Christ is in what you are doing. Not to have regular church meetings is a deception of the enemy.
Do not have confidence in people; truth is our center. Even if the apostle Paul were to come and contradict his writings in the New Testament, we would have to reject him (see Gal. 1:8-9). If I were to propose that you worship idols, you would have to refuse and cast me out. We must stand for the truth and not regard any man’s person.
Question: Is it good to kneel down to pray?
Answer: Ephesians 3:14 says, “I bow my knees unto the Father,” indicating that there was something heavy on Paul’s heart, and he was not praying in a light way. If you are heavily burdened and want to kneel down, and your environment allows it, go ahead. If not, there is no need to make kneeling a formal legality.
Question: If we have to choose between corporate morning watch and a private time with the Lord, how should we decide?
Answer: Corporate morning watch is helpful, but a private time is more crucial to your personal contact with the Lord. How you choose depends upon your need. The elders can also make a decision in this regard, but you are not obliged to follow it.
Question: I’d like to know how to deal with inward things like pride.
Answer: You deal with this in the same way as the outward matters. Whenever you sense something sinful, you should repent, confess to the Lord, and get cleansed. Also, by getting into the Word, the killing factor it contains will smite your pride. If you take in the word, the word will become the Spirit to show you your pride and then to live out Christ instead of pride.
Question: What about our failure to obey? You said that the only way we could touch the Lord’s life was by obedience.
Answer: Today the Lord as the Spirit is merciful and gracious. Like air and water, wherever He finds a narrow crack, He slips in. Even if you are only slightly obedient, the Spirit comes. Are any of us completely obedient to the Spirit? No. But we all enjoy Him to some extent. The amount depends upon the degree of our obedience. The more we obey the Spirit, the more we enjoy Him.
Question: When we come to contact the Lord, how do we empty ourselves of all our busy thoughts?
Answer: The best way to set your mind on the spirit (Rom. 8:6) is to get into the Word; this will release you from your distracting, disturbing thoughts.
Question: As a new Christian and the mother of four children, I would like to know how much scriptural teaching I should impose on them and how much I should insist on their behaving properly.
Answer: This is a very practical matter. As human beings, we fell and thus need the Lord’s salvation. After the fall, God came in to restrict man. For example, God imposed restrictions on the woman because the fall had come in through her (Gen. 3:16); this restriction was actually a protection. In human society today, chaos would prevail were it not for the restraints of ethical teachings, the police, and the law courts. These have been ordained by God to limit the fallen race. Since our families are part of the fallen race, we as parents must exercise God’s ordination to restrict our children by ethical teachings, regulations, and discipline. For proper human living in your home, you must teach your children to behave properly by honoring their parents, caring for their brothers and sisters, respecting their neighbors, and not stealing.
Do not say that ethical teachings are apart from Christ and therefore worthless. The necessities of our human existence are one thing; the experiences of Christ, another. For our human living we must buy groceries, do laundry, lock our doors to prevent burglaries, be careful about fire, open and close windows, and cook and eat. Besides taking care of these earthly matters, we are also learning to experience Christ. These are two different areas; both are needed.
Question: Does 1 Thessalonians 5:22 also apply to corporate housing? The neighbors have cause to wonder what is going on in a young couple’s house, if the husband is at work and there are brothers coming and going while the wife is there by herself.
Answer: It is better for the single brothers to live by themselves in a brothers’ house and for the young single sisters to have a sisters’ house. This is not only for the sake of appearance but also as a safeguard of morality. One of the reasons for the divorce and fornication that are so prevalent today is that there is not the proper separation between men and women. The first charge I was given when I came out to serve the Lord at the age of twenty-seven was to always have a third party present when talking with a sister for any length of time. Practicing this has been a protection to me.
We have the example of the Lord Jesus in this regard. He spoke with Nicodemus privately at night (John 3:1-2), but when He spoke to the Samaritan woman (4:6-7), it was under the sun in the open air. Had the situations been reversed, even the disciples might have had a question. (The Lord was about thirty-one or thirty-two at that time.)
The flesh is still prevailing, even in us older people. To keep a proper separation between the sexes is a needed protection. In former days young girls would always be chaperoned when they went out; today the intermingling of young men and women, which has become common even in college dormitories, is an invitation to immorality. Nothing defiles you in the presence of God like fornication. I exhort you to protect yourself from this by maintaining a separation. The young sisters should have a third party present when they are out with a young man. We must learn to keep our vessel clean and honorable before the Lord (1 Thes. 4:3-7).
Question: The appearance of evil is so apparent wherever we turn. Even when I go on the campus, I sense a spiritual leak in myself after a short time there.
Answer: Before you go into such a situation, you must be clear that you are going there just for the gospel’s sake, for no other purpose. Then you must be in prayer for the Lord to cover and safeguard you.
Question: Sometimes we are not willing to obey what the Lord touches in us; this unwillingness may persist for three or four years. How can we handle this situation?
Answer: In Revelation 3:8 the Lord told the church in Philadelphia that they had a little power. The Lord does not require too much of us. We just have to be faithful to what we are able to do. There is no room for us to be proud, because none of us is wholly obedient to the Lord. Realizing we are so weak, we keep looking to Him for His mercy and grace.
Obedience is a matter of practice. Your obedience will increase by your being obedient. Just obey insofar as you are able, looking to Him for His help.
Question: What should I do if my parents invite me to do something that has the appearance of evil?
Answer: Try to get their sympathy. Tell them that you are a Christian and that you love the Lord.
Question: What about praying for others?
Answer: Everyone who contacts the Lord normally and properly will have some burden to pray for others, not in a religious way but under the living guidance of the Lord. If you love the Lord and live by Him, surely a burden to pray for others will come to you. Pray according to this inner burden.
“How sweet are Your words to my taste! / Sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Psa. 119:103). Whenever we come to the Word, it would be good to pray, “Lord, grant me a sweet taste for Your Word. Make it so precious to me.” When we come to the Word, we come not only with our mind and with our eyes but also with our heart. Taste is related to the heart. We need a heart that loves and appreciates the Lord’s precious Word.
After I was saved, I found the Bible so sweet. I went to bed reading the Word and left the Bible beside my pillow. Upon awaking in the morning, I would pick up my still-open Bible and continue reading where I had left off. If we have this taste for the Word, surely it will bring us life.
“All Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16). Just as the nature of a table is wood, so the nature of the word in the Bible is the divine breath. If you consider the Word as only letters on a page, you will use only your mentality in reading it. But because it is God’s breath, we must breathe it in. How do we do this? By praying. When we are taking in the Word for nourishment, we need to pray over the words we read. We should use the very words of the Bible to pray; our prayer will turn the printed matter into breath. The verses, in other words, become spirit to us.
But how can we say that 2 Timothy 3:16 tells us the Scripture is for breathing? Does not the rest of the verse say, “and profitable for teaching, for conviction, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”? Is instruction breathing? Is correction breathing? Is conviction breathing? To argue this way shows blindness. If you use only your mentality when you study the Word, you may read that it is “profitable for...correction” and feel that you do need to be corrected and convicted for your attitude toward your wife. This is not the life way to take the Word.
Rather than exercising your mentality, exercise your praying spirit. Do not bring in your thought. Do not interpret. Do not explain. Do not even pray for the Lord to help you to understand the verse. Just breathe all the words into your being. “O Lord, profitable for teaching, for conviction, for correction. Lord, for instruction in righteousness.” Eventually, the verse will be wrought into you as a life supply. Because the nature of the word is divine breath, when you breathe it in, it becomes life to you. “The words which I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (John 6:63). The words become spirit and life through your prayer, through your breathing.
Matthew 4:4 makes it clear that the Bible is good for food: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out through the mouth of God.” So does Jeremiah 15:16: “Your words were found and I ate them, / And Your word became to me / The gladness and joy of my heart, / For I am called by Your name, / O Jehovah, God of hosts.” How can we eat God’s words? To eat is to take food into us and digest it so that it becomes part of us. To eat God’s words is to take them in by prayer while exercising our whole being to enjoy them. This verse in Jeremiah says that the word “became to me / The gladness and joy of my heart.” We must keep pray-reading the Word till it becomes our enjoyment and rejoicing; then we have eaten it.
In 1 Peter 2:2 the word is referred to as milk: “As newborn babes, long for the guileless milk of the word in order that by it you may grow unto salvation.” The portions of the Bible that are easy for us to take in are milk. They are also called “the good word” (Heb. 6:5) and the word of grace (Acts 14:3; 20:32). When we read some parts of the Word, we feel like a child enjoying a refreshing glass of milk. Other portions of the Word, though, have more weight to them; taking them in is like eating a steak. These weightier portions are referred to in Hebrews as solid food (5:12) and as the word of righteousness (v. 13). When we can receive them, they give us the weight of maturity.
These, then, are the life ways to take the word: taste it, breathe it, eat it, drink it as milk, and take it in as solid food.
Notice how the word is described in Isaiah 55:10-11: “Just as the rain comes down / And the snow from heaven, / And does not return there, / Until it waters the earth / And makes it bear and sprout forth, / That it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater; / So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; / It will not return to Me vainly, / But it will accomplish what I delight in, / And it will prosper in the matter to which I have sent it.” The word is likened to rain in summer and snow in winter, watering us to produce the seed for fruit-bearing and the bread for our satisfaction. This is a marvelous picture of our experience in taking the word.
“I have written to you, fathers, because you know Him who is from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God abides in you and you have overcome the evil one” (1 John 2:14). This word that makes us strong and able to overcome the wicked one is no longer only external; it is the word of God abiding in us. This means that we have taken it into us by breathing, by praying, by eating, and by digesting. It is now the word in our life experience, not just the word in knowledge.
“Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth” (John 17:17). How does the word of God sanctify us? We are sanctified not by teaching but by being saturated with the very element conveyed in the word. That element is the Lord Himself, the essence of the Spirit. As we are daily in the Word, the word gets into us and saturates us subjectively and dispositionally with the divine essence.
The word of God even brings health to our body. Proverbs 4:20-22 says, “My son, be attentive to my words; / Incline your ear to my sayings. / Do not let them depart from your sight; / Keep them in the midst of your heart. / For they are life to those who find them, / And healing to all their flesh.” How can God’s word make us physically healthy? Illness is often caused by anxiety or anger. If people are made happy, their sickness often disappears. When we get into the Word, joy comes in to heal. The word kills the bothering things and brings in resurrection. Then we can eat and digest our food well, and our body becomes healthy.
“Receive the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which Spirit is the word of God, by means of all prayer and petition, praying at every time in spirit” (Eph. 6:17-18). How can we receive the word “by means of all prayer and petition”? It is by pray-reading the Word according to its content. If we are reading concerning abiding, our prayer must be concerning abiding; if the word is concerning righteousness, our prayer should be about righteousness. All prayer means different kinds of prayer according to the portion of the Word we are reading. Whenever we can make time, we should practice this way of receiving the word by praying. Then we shall be fully built up, not only spiritually but also physically.
It becomes apparent when you read the New Testament that its roots are in the Old Testament. The New is both a continuation and an interpretation of the Old. Without Hebrews, for example, how could you understand Leviticus? Galatians also is actually a cooked and digested part of the Old Testament.
To understand the Bible, then, we need to be thoroughly acquainted with both the Old and New Testaments. In addition, we need the benefit of what so many saints in the past have researched in the Word. When I was young, I spent many hours going from one used bookstore to another, trying to find helpful, but often rare, books. Reading them was of great help to me.
The fruit of all this research is now available to you in simple form — the Life-study messages. How appreciative I would have been fifty years ago if they had been available to me! This is why I urge you to get into the Life-study messages. You will be well nourished if you get into the book of Hebrews, for example, using the sixty-nine Life-study messages as a guide to your study and research. Find time every day, maybe a half hour or so, and you can probably cover the whole book of Hebrews in a month. Like a camel about to make a long journey through the desert, you will store a great deal of nourishment within you and so be helped to grow.
