If you are just checking in today after being away for awhile, I encourage you to start with my previous two posts. I’m working on a three part series about God’s Truthfulness and His work in my life over the past year. This was a talk written for a women’s church series on Jen Wilkin’s book, In His Image. The chapter I am discussing here is “God Most Truthful.”
GOD MOST TRUTHFUL — PART THREE
Wilkin reminds us at the end of the chapter of Ephesians 6:17--that the sword of the Spirit is the Word of God. And, oh, how I can look back on that time of being diagnosed with MS to see how He was sharpening my sword. Parts of the past year have been the darkest of my entire life, as I have dealt with anxiety and depression in ways I never had before—in large part as a result of the severe fatigue I experience from MS and the number of lesions in my brain. Not to mention my very own fallen nature. There were nights I went to bed and told my husband—oh, how happy it would make me if I didn’t wake up in the morning. I did not “feel” the hope you heard me talking about with my MS. What I felt, what I felt and heard screaming at me—crushing me—from every angle, were the lies. But by the power of Christ—He allowed His Word and constant prayer to hold me up. He put friends in my path to speak God’s Word into my life and He put prayer warriors in my life to pray God’s Word. And He put Scripture. TRUTH. We must “fight the lies with the Truth” as Ellie Holcomb so beautifully sings. And oh, how I prayed that TRUTH back to him sometimes minute by minute. Hour by hour. It was no mistake during that time that He had me studying the Psalms of ascent. Amidst the darkness, He continued to reveal His Word at work in my life: “Be still,” He put on my heart, “and know that I am God.”
I could not see the path through the pain, and so He lit the way with His truth. He used my previous experiences with His Word—his revealing of his truthfulness to me—so that I would know and believe in the words He gave me during this incredibly dark time. Though I did not feel it—He helped me to know it. To know to cling to the only truth there is. And there was His Scripture once again. Yet this time—so much more the challenge. “Oh, God, I prayed, your power is made perfect in my weakness.” And it was! Spurgeon says, “It would be more agreeable to flesh and blood to have a speedy answer, but believing souls have learned to be submissive, and to find it good to wait for as well as upon the Lord. Delayed answers often set the heart searching itself, and so lead to contrition and spiritual reformation: deadly blows are thus struck at our corruption, and the chambers of imagery are cleansed. The great danger is lest men should faint, and miss the blessing.”
And so this is the hope we have—His Truthfulness. His Word: “For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son, that whoever should believe in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” His Word is true—we are sinners and Christ died for us on the cross that we might repent and believe and spend forever in heaven with him. Do you believe this, friends? Because the Word is clear. Proverbs 30:5 tells us, “Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.” Have you ever stopped to imagine what it would be like if we did not have this reassurance? In Christ and in His Word? And perhaps there ought to be an urgency tonight to know Scripture. To memorize it. For if He writes it on our hearts and minds and we study it with such fervor and energy then we cannot possibly miss the blessing—perhaps not the blessing we desire, but certainly the Lord’s is always better. Wilkin says, “The Word of God is a weapon, forged to combat forgery. We must know how to handle the Bible rightly, and we must know it as comprehensibly as possible in our lifetime.”
Think of it this way: if our Bibles were taken from us and yet we had spent a lifetime learning it, knowing it, living it, well, then any evil that might desire to strip us of this blessing has no hope. Because it will be written on our hearts and in our minds. May we pray as Beth Moore has so aptly put it, “that the Word of God might be our magnificent obsession.”
And so may I pray as I close: Dear God, Thank you for your Word and that you are a truthful God. May these women know the love of Christ in their hearts. May we know the truth and may the truth set us free. May we know and love the truth in a world teeming with lies. Amen.