Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to help folks experience transformation by showing them how to spend time with God through the Word and prayer. Occasionally, I’ve had men do everything I’ve told them to do: daily time with God, Bible study, and even scripture memory, but “it” doesn’t work. Why?

I’ve always supposed there were two possible causes: one, the person didn’t really have a relationship with God. The Holy Spirit didn’t reside in them, and going through the motions had no effect. The other problem was that the person wasn’t submitting to the authority of the Word. They read it, but they didn’t submit to it, and there was no traction.

Yesterday’s blog on the Living Word offers a third possibility. A person can believe in the authority of the Word but doesn’t believe that God speaks through the Word today. God spoke in the past, it got written down, and that was that. Decades ago, when I first came around The Navigators (1967!), I tried to share the joy of personal time with God with someone very close to me. He didn’t get it. He was stuck for over a week in Psalm 1, where I recommended he start, trying to interpret it, get the full meaning out of it, plumb its depths, but he never heard from God. The Word did not reach him at a heart level. Now, I think I have the language for what happened: my friend didn’t believe God speaks today. For him, the Word was not ALIVE.

Oh, the joys of those who do not follow evil men’s advice, who do not hang around with sinners, scoffing at the things of God. But they delight in doing everything God wants them to, and day and night are always meditating on his laws and thinking about ways to follow him more closely. (Psalm 1.1 – 2, Living Bible)

My friend wasn’t thinking about ways to follow God more closely, he was trying to be sure he understood the text.

I said that God spoke to me about the living Word twice. I shared one of those yesterday. The other was the end of chapter 5 in The Word of God with Power by Jack R. Taylor. Jack has a lengthy quotation from Eugene Peterson’s book Reversed Thunder, 1988, a book I haven’t read. You will remember Eugene Peterson as the translator of The Message, which I quote from time to time. Here are a few snippets of Jack Taylor’s quote, ending his chapter entitled “The Word in the Now.”

As God’s word written (scriptura) the scriptures are a great, but mixed, blessing. They are a blessing because each new generation of Christians has access to the fact that God speaks, the manner of his speaking, the results of his speaking. The scriptures are a mixed blessing because the moment the words are written they are in danger of losing the living resonance of the spoken word and reduced to something to be looked at, studied, interpreted, but not heard personally…

Words, separated from the person who spoke them, can be beautiful just as seashells are beautiful; they can be interesting just as skeletons can be interesting; they can be studied with profit just as fossils can be studied with profit. But apart from the act of listening and responding, they cannot function according to the intent of the speaker…The intent of revelation is not to inform us about God but to involve us with God…Some of Jesus’ sharpest disagreements were with the scribes and Pharisees, the persons in the first century who knew the words of scripture but heard the voice of God not at all…For them the scriptures had become a book to use, not a means by which to listen to God… – Eugene Peterson, quoted in The Word of God with Power by Jack R. Taylor, pages 58 and 59.

There’s more, and it’s too important to leave out, so we’ll continue this tomorrow.

These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock. But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards. (Matthew 7.24 – 27, MSG)