“You are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of the human heart.” (2 Corinthians 3:3) These words written by the Apostle Paul were His ingrained belief that when the Word of God truly gets into a man, there is no mistaking it. The Word of God becomes part of the man just as much as the man’s heart, eyes, and lungs.
Unfortunately, we have many people today who have been in church for many years listening to the Word being preached and taught, yet the Word is not “in” them. The Word of God needs to be fully digested and absorbed into the bloodstream of our flesh and spirit. If your life (every aspect thereof) were inspected by a jury of your peers for true biblical content, what would be found? Would there be enough evidence for others to call you “a letter from Christ”? If others are not being challenged to be Christlike by your total life, how can you be considered such a letter?
The Bible has been handed down through the generations. It lives on and always will. The truth’s found in God’s Word are timeless and have proven to be constant and factual in every generation. We are to feed on His Word (the Holy Scriptures) and to absorb them into our very nature. God uses other people to speak His word into our lives. This also means you and I have a responsibility to learn, digest, and absorb the truths of scripture into our lives that we may also instruct others.
We cannot make the Word come alive for others. God’s Word is always alive. As believers we must take caution not to drain it of life with our diluted boredom and mediocrity. I fear this mediocrity has become commonplace and the norm in the lives of many, which comes from the ways they have been taught.
In my first book, Teaching That Bears Fruit I wrote of the teaching techniques of Jesus and how He (the Living, breathing, walking Word of God) changed the world. He trained and taught His Apostles by His living and then left them to turn the world upside down – and they did! You and I have those same techniques and skills at our disposal. Perhaps we only need to get back to those basics of Christ.
Jesus used the means of the day to get His message out. God has given us many more avenues of delivery with technology and instant world-wide communication. If we are as Paul wrote, “…a letter from God,” what is stopping us from turning the world upside down for Christ?
Let it not be said of us that our teaching, our living, demonstrated God’s word boring and useless or antiquated. God’s Word is a Living Word and when absorbed within His people, it will become a living letter to our neighbors, coworkers, and the world around us. What is your needed first step in greater absorption of the Living Word? How will you act on that step this week?
