What happens if you stop studying, will you no longer be approved, will your ability to rightly divide the Word of God lessen, will it still be possible for you to give an account of your faith if you spend less time over time in the Scriptures?
What good does it do to hide His Word in your heart if you do not apply it in your daily life, if you do not offer it to all that will listen?
“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” (Gal. 6:9)
Reading a part of the Scriptures each day is not difficult work, it is not hard to find at least a few minutes out of even a busy day to do so, but it can become quite easy to believe ourselves to be confident enough of His truths to not need to do so each day.
The mind of Christ that is within us spends much more time contemplating the will and Word of God than our eyes do gazing upon His written Word, and this can have both a positive and negative effect upon us if we are not careful. A callousness, so to speak, of the heart that believes we know enough about justification, sanctification and glorification. The way we lead others to His truths, of how we are to approach situations in our lives, both in the temporal and the eternal, the earthly and the Spiritual. We can, to a certain degree, fulfill Romans 1:22 in our lives.
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,”
Hypocrites are born this way my friends, and those hypocrites do fulfill 2nd Timothy 3:5.
“Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.”
The moment that you begin to believe that opening the Word of God to study to show yourself approved is no longer necessary in your life is the moment you have lost the desire to seek His face.
Head knowledge is not heart knowledge.
“And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful.” (Mark 4:19)
This is what draws us away, this is what turns one who thought at first that His Word was life, to one who believes they have found all they need for life and sees no reason to continue further in the pursuit of God, they have found all of Him they think they need to get by.
It isn’t that they know everything, even they will admit that, but they think the foundational matters are all that really matter, not realizing that the wood, hay and stubble they are laying upon that foundation will not last.
The Almighty will not be used as a reason to attain anything, He is the reason, and when you believe you have found Him, or at least enough of Him to satisfy your desires, then your desire was never Him in the first place.
Like the man that wanted to purchase with money the power of the Holy Spirit, far too many believe they have enough of Him to get by, to prove to themselves, and to others a faith that is really not in their heart, but only in their head.
“Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” (John 17:17)
Think of all this in these terms, you may know God, but does He know you?
As I have put in these letters many times, ask nearly anyone if they believe in God and you will receive some form of an answer in the affirmative, ask them who they say Jesus Christ is, and you will hear, if you listen, the truth of who it is they say they serve.
An endless, never-ending search, that is what seeking the face of God means. Not just reading, not just studying His Word, not just hiding it in your heart, or contemplating Him continually, but a continuous journey of seeking His face for His glory, and that without end.
“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” (Psalm 42:1)
