A passionate commitment to the study of God’s Word will change your life. Choosing to actively devote yourself to reading, believing, and obeying His Word might be a challenge, but it’s a challenge that results in the development of those deeper roots and lasting fruit we like to talk about here in the orchard.
Those roots and that fruit find their origin in a consistent practice of engaging with the Word of God. Engaging involves more than simply reading scripture, it calls for a commitment to digging in, mining out, and then walking out the truth found in this sacred book.
An active devotion to God’s Word flows from your personal time with God into everything you do. As Eugene Peterson says in Eat This Book, “This text is not words to be studied in the quiet preserves of a library, but a voice to be believed and loved and adored in workplace and playground, on the streets and in the kitchen.” The results should show up in how you live, work, and interact with others.The thought of this kind of devotion can be overwhelming. It can feel difficult to accomplish and far out of reach. It’s available though, and it happens like most things in this Christian walk: step by step, day by day, and prayer by prayer as we allow the Spirit to lead us through the process.
Keys to cultivating and sustaining this kind of active devotion can be found in one of my favorite passages of Scripture, Psalm 119. It’s a long one, but it’s well worth taking the time to study it and begin examining what it looks like to live actively devoted to the Word. Carve out some time to read through it this week. Take note of the ways we can cultivate an active devotion to the Word, then take note of the benefits of maintaining that devotion. Pray through each passage as you keep this admonition from James in mind:
But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves.
James 1:22 NLT
My prayer for you is that your devotion to the Word will cause you to read it daily, study it deeply, meditate on it diligently, obey it determinedly, pray it deliberately, speak it decisively, share it dutifully, and live it daringly.
This post includes excerpts from my portion of Devoted, an Eight-Week Bible Study by The Women of King’s Park. Ladies, I encourage you to purchase the study and watch the accompanying videos. Please leave a comment if you do!
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