Because God is good, any word that He has spoken is good. To love, revere, and respect Him is to rejoice whenever He speaks. “The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart . . . more to be desired are they than gold” (Psalm 19:8,10).
The lives we lead grow out of the thoughts we think. And since our thinking about God is the most basic thinking we do, it’s also the most basic determinant of our behavior. Our character and our conduct are determined by the way we think about God.
The gravity of saying anything untrue about God is such that it would be better to remain silent than to speak in error. And yet, we often speak with shocking carelessness about God, casually tossing around opinions about Him as if it were a game.
Maybe the reason we don’t make any more progress than we do is that we’re content with so little. We pick up a scrap or two of knowledge and we cease our search, when in reality we can know a God whose riches of truth are vast and deep and strong.
If we diligently seek God, we’ll want to narrow the gap between our professed beliefs and our practical beliefs. We’ll sacrifice to LIVE whatever truths we’ve discovered. It’s not enough to believe what is true; we must engage it and make it our own.
We greatly benefit when we think about God. But the greatest good of all is that our minds are lifted out of our little concerns and caught up in the wonder of Someone who existed long before we ever had the need to think of Him.
Our malady was well diagnosed by J. B. Phillips’s famous five words: “Your God is too small.” Until we realize that the self-indulgent “worship” that passes for reverence today is an insult to God, it’s not likely that we’ll seek Him as we should.
Suppose the “God” we worship is not God as He has revealed Himself to be, but God as we have wrongly conceived Him in our own minds. Are we not worshiping a “creature” of our own making, an idolatry all the more dangerous because it is so subtle?
If we neglect the declaration of Himself that God has made, we die. Ultimately, there is no alternative. Jesus could not have said it more clearly: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6).
Like rich, fertile soil, our hearts must be receptive to the word which God intends to plant there. Although marvelous good things can come from God’s word in our hearts, this word can’t even take root in our hearts if they are hardened or unhearing.
