Bottles of A1 sauce always say, “Shake well.” Sometimes the bottles are more explicit:

We’ve spent the past two days talking about the importance of seeing scripture not just as the written word of God but as the living word of God. The word through which the Holy Spirit speaks today. Bob, is that important? To paraphrase from the A1 bottle, “Yeah, it’s important.”

Eugene Peterson, whom we quoted yesterday, explains why as he continues:

[A satanic subversion] unobtrusively disengages our imagination from God’s word and gets us to think of it as something wonderful in print, at the same time that it dulls any awareness that it is spoken by a living God. It has been an enormously successful strategy: millions of people use the Bible in which they so devoutly believe to condemn people whom they do not approve; millions more read the word of God daily and within ten minutes are speaking words to spouses, neighbors, children, and colleagues that are contemptuous, irritable, manipulative, and misleading. How does this happen? …The Enemy has subverted the spoken word into an ink word. The moment that happens, the imagination atrophies, and living words flatten into book words. No matter that the words are believed to be true, they are not voiced words – Spirit-voiced and faith-heard – and so are not answered. They go through the minds of readers like water through a pipe. – Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder, quoted in The Word of God with Power by Jack R. Taylor, pages 59 and 60.

Powerful…and scary. “They go through the minds of readers like water through a pipe.” I pray that we will all hear the living word, not just read the written word.

So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. (Romans 10.17, NKJV, emphasis mine)

But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'” (Matthew 4.4, NKJV)