I want to invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to the book of Deuteronomy, the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy. It’s the fifth book of the Bible. We’re going to be in Deuteronomy 8:1-3. If you are using one of the Bibles provided in the chairs in front of you, it’s page 152.
While you’re turning there, let me just ask this question, ask for a show of hands. How many of you had a good breakfast this morning? Let me see your hands. Okay, a few of you. Some of you do not believe that breakfast is the meal of champions.
How many of you are planning to have lunch today? Let me see your hands. Okay, that’s almost everybody. I guess if no hands are raised, that means you’re fasting today. If so, good for you.
Most of us are going to eat today, if we have not eaten already, because we do not expect yesterday’s meal to carry us through today. We do not expect the feeding on food that we did last week to give us strength for the next week.
But—you know where I’m going with this—a lot of us treat spiritual food in exactly that way. Many of us feed on God’s word only sporadically, haphazardly, infrequently, and then we wonder why we are spiritually weak.
What I want to do this morning is call us to a renewed devotion, a renewed daily devotion to feeding on the word of God and to communion with the Lord and his word in prayer. And in some ways, this entire six-week series, The Living Word, has been leading up to this message. We’ve been considering for the last six weeks—and today’s the final message in the series—we’ve been considering different aspects of God’s word.
So we began by looking at the God-breathed word, where we really consider the nature and the purpose of Scripture. And then the soul-saving word, the word in relationship to salvation and evangelism, the word we share with others like seed. The life-giving word, so the word in relationship to new birth, to regeneration, our new life in Christ. Then the body-building word, the word that builds up the church, the edification of the church. And then last week was the heart-sanctifying word, so how the word is God’s instrument to sanctify us, to change us, to transform us, to make us more like Jesus. Then today, this final message is the soul-sustaining word.
I think this was one of the messages that was in my mind when I began the series. As I mentioned in the first week, some of this was borne out of my own sense of renewal in recent months, as God has used his word to renew me. And I want to call us this morning, all of us, to a fresh commitment to the word of God.
I want to use this text today, Deuteronomy 8:1-3, especially verse 3, and read this passage to us, and then just ask three questions that we’re going to answer together. Deuteronomy 8, beginning in verse 1. These are the words of Moses. He said,
“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
This is God’s Word.
The main point of this passage is that human beings must live in dependence on God. That’s what this passage is about. This is what God was teaching the children of Israel after he delivered them from bondage in Egypt and, before they went into the Promised Land, for forty years wandering in the wilderness, and God fed them with bread from heaven, which they called manna, which meant, “What is it?” It was this miraculous provision of bread from heaven. This is how God fed his people for these forty years, and it was a vivid object lesson for them, to teach them to live in daily dependence on God.
So the main point of this passage is that God’s people must live in dependence on God, must live in dependence on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
The aim of the message this morning is to persuade you not only that this is true, but also to persuade you and to invite you into a renewed, lifelong practice of dependence on God through daily devotions. That’s what I’m after this morning, and in some ways it’s what I’ve been after the entire series.
Today what I want to do is ask three questions: what, why, and how. Very simple. What is God requiring of us from this passage, what are we talking about when we talk about daily devotions; why should we do it; and then, very practically at the end, how do we go about cultivating this devotional life?
1. What?
So first of all, what? I’ve already given you the main point: God’s people must live in dependence on God. This was the lesson in the wilderness.
You have the story in Exodus 16. They are out of Egypt, they are in the wilderness, the desert, on their way to Mount Sinai, where they will receive God’s law and God’s covenant, and eventually into the Promised Land. The people are complaining of hunger, and so God provides for them. He sends them bread from heaven.
You remember that this bread, this miraculous provision of God, was to be gathered every single day. They would gather two portions on the day before the Sabbath, but then every single day they were to gather this bread, enough for the day. It was a way of teaching them to depend on God every day for their needs.
I think there are three avenues of interpreting and applying that passage. The first is that you and I are to trust in God’s provision. We trust God to provide for our needs. This is the realm of providence, where God in his providence provides for us. And the life of faith is the life of depending on God for that provision. Jesus teaches us this in the Lord’s Prayer when he says that we are to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” It is the life of the Christian to depend on God to meet his or her needs.
The second avenue of application (and this is what we get from the New Testament, specifically from the words of Jesus) is that we are to feed on Christ, who is the living bread. And that really is the gospel application of this passage, and Jesus himself makes that connection in John 6. He said there, after feeding people with the loaves, a miraculous feeding of people with the loaves, he says, “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven, and if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Jesus is the living bread. Jesus is who we depend on for life and for salvation, for all that we need. The gospel is that Jesus is the living bread, has given his life, his flesh for the life of the world. He’s died for us on the cross; died for our sins, been raised from the dead, so that you and I can have eternal life. Jesus is the living bread.
This morning, if you’re here and you’re not a Christian, if you’ve never trusted in Jesus Christ, if you have never eaten this living bread, then today the main call for you is come to Christ, trust in Christ, believe in Jesus Christ, and feed on Jesus Christ, the living bread.
But there is a third legitimate avenue of application of this passage, and it is this: daily dependence on God’s word. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” For centuries, Christians have understood this to be an application of the passage.
So good old Matthew Henry, the Puritan commentator, said that this passage could be applied spiritually. He says, “The word of God, as it is the revelation of God’s will and grace, duly received and entertained by faith, is the food of the soul.” The Word of God is the food of the soul. God’s Word is our food.
One reason why I am preaching this sermon and why I feel so enthusiastic about this is because of my own spiritual renewal in recent months from recovering a vibrancy to my devotional life. Part of that I owe to Stephen Olford, that great British preacher of the twentieth century that I had the privilege of meeting when I was, I think, nineteen or twenty years old.
Stephen Olford wrote a little booklet called, Manna in the Morning, based on this passage. And Olford said that this daily communion, this quiet time with God—that was his word, “the quiet time”—is more than a commendable practice, it is absolutely vital to a life of sustained spirituality, effectiveness, and love. It is a barometer of the Christian life.
So that’s what I’m calling us to this morning: a daily quiet time. Daily devotions. The morning watch, as others have called it. Daily dependence on and communion with God in his word and prayer.
There is a strong biblical basis for this. Even though you don’t find the words “quiet time” in the Bible or the phrase “daily devotions,” there is a strong biblical basis for calling Christians to this. You have it in this passage, I think by implication, “Man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” And the children of Israel were doing this daily as they were receiving the manna. The spiritual lesson is that we daily need to depend on God and his word.
You also have Psalm 1, the very first psalm, which says, “Blessed is this man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and he meditates on the law,” how often? “Day and night.” Day and night. You can’t meditate on the law of the Lord day and night unless you’re daily in the word.
Then you have the example of the Lord Jesus himself. We know from the Gospels that it was his custom to rise early in the morning, to go out for extended times of solitude with God. You have it in Mark 1:35; he rises in the morning and he goes out to pray. We see it in his example when Jesus is tested and tempted in the wilderness for forty days, obviously corresponding to the forty years of temptation of the children of Israel. And as Jesus is tempted by the evil one to turn stones into bread, how does he answer? He quotes this passage. He says, “It is written, ’Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
I was just noticing this about a week ago in my own daily devotions. I was reading in the Gospel of Luke, Luke 23. It’s the death of Jesus, Jesus on the cross. I came to this verse, verse 46, where Jesus cries out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” and then he dies. And it just struck me, the very last thing Jesus said before he died was quoting Scripture. He’s quoting Psalm 31:5, because he had hidden the word in his heart. Jesus lived by the word; Jesus died with God’s word in his mouth. How much more should you and I devote ourselves to living on the word of God?
So that’s the what: daily dependence on God through his word and prayer.
2. Why?
Now, why should we do this? I know a message like this can land with a lot of guilt for those who are not doing it, for those who have tried and have failed. You’ve made the vows, you’ve broken the vows, you had a New Year’s resolution…it’s July, it’s August; the year’s going fast. So what am I doing here? Is this just a guilt trip sermon? No, I don’t want you mainly to feel guilty. If a twinge of guilt just moves you into a fresh engagement with the Lord and repentance, then that’s good. But mostly what I want to do is persuade you that this is the best thing you could ever do for yourself. This is the best thing you could ever do for your Christian life. Committing yourself to this will change your life in immeasurably good ways. I want to convince you that you would be a fool not to do this.
So the second point is all motivation, and I want to give you six reasons, real quickly, six reasons why you should do this. Here, all I really want to do is just remind you of the way the Bible talks about itself, the way the Scriptures picture the Scriptures at work in the life of the Christian. The Bible is very vivid pictorial language, using metaphors and similes, word pictures, to describe the power of God’s word in our lives. So just consider six things quickly.
(1) Number one, God’s Word is bread to sustain us. That’s why we need this. It’s bread to sustain us. You have it in the passage. “Man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” This is what manna pictured.
Or listen to these words from the prophet Jeremiah. He said, “Your words were found and I ate them, and your word became to me the joy and the rejoicing of my heart, for I am called by your name, O Lord God of hosts.”
“I found Your word, it was food for me, and I ate it, and it delighted my heart.” God’s word is food. It is bread to sustain us.
God’s word is often pictured in Scripture as food. It is milk for spiritual babes that will help them grow, and it is solid food for the mature that will also help them grow. And all of us need this daily bread. We need God’s word to sustain our spiritual lives.
Listen to Spurgeon.
“Why is it that we need the word of God? I answer, first, we need it to sustain the life which we have received. As life spiritually depends upon God to give it, so upon God to sustain it. How can we wonder that a man is weak if he does not eat? It is no wonder if Christians find themselves weak in prayer, weak in suffering, weak in action, weak in faith, and weak in love if they neglect to feed upon the word of God.”
If you feel in your spiritual life that you are weak in any of these areas or in anything else, if you find yourself spiritually weak, here’s the answer, here’s the solution: you need the soul-sustaining word of God. You need to feed on God’s word daily in order to find this strength from the Lord.
(2) Number two, we need God’s word because it is water to cleanse us. Jesus is the divine husband who washes his bride with the washing of water with the word (Ephesians 5:26). And Jesus himself said to his disciples, “You are already clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.” God’s Word is the cleansing agent, the cleansing instrument that washes and cleanses our souls. This is how we are cleansed from our defilement.
Listen, it’s not just the act of reading words off a page, it is the appropriation of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ. As we read the word and we feed on the word, we apply it to our hearts and lives, it cleanses us.
When I was a teenager, I worked in a print shop, and it was an old-fashioned print shop where we ran all these machines and I, every day, would come out with ink all over my hands. I mean, this was deep black ink, and ordinary soap would not get the ink off. So in the washroom of this print shop we had this gritty powdered soap called Boraxo. I don’t even know if they make it anymore; it’s called Boraxo. I would go in there and for five minutes I would scrub my hands with Boraxo, and my hands would just be almost red and raw by the time I was done, but it would get the ink out.
That’s what the word of God does, and that’s what you need. You need the gritty word of God rubbed deep into the pores of your soul to cleanse you from sin.
The Word cleanses, the Word sanctifies. It is bread to sustain us, it is water to cleanse us.
(3) It is, number three, a sword to defend us. Ephesians 6, one of the pieces of the armor of God, “take up the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” This is a weapon, and it is a weapon that God gives us for our spiritual battles.
Did you know that you’re at a war? You’re engaged in an ongoing, daily spiritual battle? If you don’t realize that, you’re a prisoner of war. All of us are engaged in some kind of ongoing spiritual warfare against the world, the flesh, and the devil; and we need the word of God to defend us.
This is what Jesus himself used when he was tempted by Satan in the desert. Three times he says, “It is written, it is written, it is written.”
I agree with Stephen Olford, who said that Jesus had probably been meditating on the book of Deuteronomy as he was there in solitude with God in the wilderness, because three times he quotes from the book of Deuteronomy as he engages the enemy.
God’s word is a sword to defend us, and you and I need to use our spiritual sword.
(4) Number four, it is light to direct us if you need guidance. Someone asked me, between the services, a wonderful question. A teenager asked me, “How do you know God’s speaking to you?” What a great question! You know what the answer is? You know by the word of God. God’s word is how we know that God is speaking to us and what God is saying to us.
Psalm 119:105: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” If you want to know God’s will, you will know God’s will as you know God’s word. You can be sure of this, that the Holy Spirit, even as he guides our lives—and I do believe that the Spirit personally gives guidance to us—but he will never guide us in any way that is in conflict with the written word of God. He never will do that. What he does, rather, is he guides us to specifically apply that word to our hearts and lives and situations, and then God in his providence directs our circumstances.
If you want to know God’s will, you need to know God’s word. God’s word is the light to direct us through this veil of darkness in which we are walking.
(5) Then God’s Word is also a treasure to enrich us. Psalm 19 gives us a short little hymn about God’s word.
“The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.”
Then verse 10 says this:
“More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold…”
God’s word is better than gold. God’s word is a treasure. God’s word will make you spiritually rich. It will enrich your life.
An old poet put it like this:
“Holy Bible, book divine,
Precious treasure, thou art mine;
Mine to tell me whence I came,
Mine to teach me what I am;
Mine to tell of joys to come
And the rebel sinner’s doom.
Holy Bible, book divine,
Precious treasure, thou art mine.”
Did you know that God’s word is a treasure? Do you feel it to be a treasure? Have you discovered the wealth of riches that are found in the pages of God’s word?
(6) Then finally, God’s word is like honey to delight us. Also Psalm 19: “More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.” Honey was the sweetest natural substance for eating in the ancient world, and so the psalmist uses this as a picture of the sweetness that we find in God’s word.
You have it again in Psalm 119:103: “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.”
So, along with what we saw last week, if you want a life of joy and of satisfaction and of delight, if you want peace and happiness in your heart and in your soul, you’re going to find it through communion with God in his word and prayer.
Let me just pause for a minute and give you what I think is one of the greatest historical examples of someone who discovered the power of this in his life, and this is the longest quote I’m going to give you in the message. So George Mueller of Bristol was this nineteenth century man who lived in Bristol, England, and he had a vision of what it would be to live a life of faith.
In order to show that God is great and that we can trust him and we can live by faith, he started an orphanage. And he started this orphanage not trying to raise funds by asking people for money, but by praying and asking God to provide.
If you read any of George Mueller’s journals or the biographies, the stories are just amazing. Miraculous provisions. I mean, they would be out of milk, and he’s got all of these orphan boys praying at the breakfast table that God would provide milk, and then ten minutes later there’s a knock on the door because the milkman’s truck broke down—you know, his carriage broke down outside, the milk is all going to spoil; here’s milk for everybody. I mean, story after story after story like that.
But Mueller had to learn how to get his heart in the right place in order to live that way, in order to do all the ministry that God had called him to do. And he describes what he learned in this remarkable passage.
“I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord or how I might glorify the Lord, but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers, I might seek to relieve the distressed. I might in other ways seek to behave myself as it becomes a child of God in this world, and yet, not being happy in the Lord and not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit.”
Now, just pause right there. What Mueller is saying is not that it’s unimportant to do our duty and to obey the Lord. He is saying that you can’t just go through the motions and not have the right heart. You’ve got to get your heart in the right place for all of this to be of any value, all of this to be of any worth.
So the first great priority of his day was to get his soul happy in the Lord. How did he do it?
“Now I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the word of God and the meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed, and that thus, by means of the word of God, while meditating on it, my heart might be brought into experiential communion with the Lord.”
That’s what you need, that’s what I need: experiential communion with the Lord—to know what it is to have God as our friend, God as our Father, Christ as our Savior, the Spirit as our Comforter, and the word of God guiding us in this experiential knowledge of God.
All I’m trying to do right now is give you motivation. Why should you have a daily devotional life? Why should you have a daily quiet time? Because God’s word is bread, God’s word is water, God’s word is a sword. It’s a light, it’s treasure, it’s honey. It will nourish you, it will cleanse you, it will defend you, it will guide you, it will enrich you, it will delight you.
You would be crazy not to do this. We need the word of God. So, I hope you’re persuaded. If not, may the Holy Spirit persuade you.
3. How?
So, number three, how? “How” question.
I want to give you what I think are the three essential ingredients and then a possible method. You don’t have to use the method I use, but I’m going to tell you my method. But the three essential ingredients, these are the three things I think we need on a daily basis. Here they are, three essential ingredients: we need Scripture, meditation, and prayer. It’s those three things together.
(1) Scripture. What that means is that somehow you need to take in the Bible. You need to take in the word of God. It may be reading a chapter, it may be reading several chapters, it may be reading just a few verses. The amount does not matter so much. The important thing is not the portion of what you’re reading. I think it’s great to read through the Bible regularly, and I would commend that to you, but how fast you read through regularly is not as important as getting the Bible in on a daily basis.
Listen, if you cannot read or if you cannot read well or you find it difficult to read, you can listen to the Bible. Get the YouBible app. Put it on your phone. You can listen to the Bible. There are multiple ways for you to get the word into your heart and into your mind.
But I recommend reading if you can. You need to use a translation that you can easily understand. The English Standard Version is good; we use that often in our church. But if you want something that’s even a little easier to understand, read the NIV or even the NLT, the New Living Translation. Those are all good, reputable, strong, faithful translations of Scripture. If you will read them in your own language, if you will read, read what you can understand, that’s the first step.
If you’ve never done this before, if this is not an established practice or habit in your life and you’re starting this for the first time, what I would recommend is start in the New Testament. Start with one of the Gospels, maybe the Gospel of Mark or the Gospel of John, and start with just a little bit—maybe a chapter a day, maybe even just a story or a teaching section, a pericope, a paragraph—and you read it. Maybe you read it more than once. You read it and you give yourself some time to think about it. That’s meditation.
(2) Meditation is slowing down enough to digest the food that we have just put in our mouths. It’s slowing down enough to think about the word that we have read. In fact, the Hebrew word for “meditate,” the word hagah, carries the idea of a lion savoring its prey or a cow that is chewing the cud. It’s what my beagle Milo does when I give him a treat. He will take the treat—we put it on a little plate or something—he’ll take it and he will carry it off somewhere else where he can just kind of be by himself and devour that treat.
You need to do that with God’s word. You meditate on the word, spend some time thinking about it, pondering it, turning it over in your head.
(3) And then prayer. Prayer is crucial. I said this last week. Prayer is what keeps your Bible study from being merely intellectual. Prayer is what bridges mind and heart, knowledge and experience, faith and love. Prayer is what helps you move from the written word to Christ, who is the incarnate word. In prayer, you are engaging with God as you respond to his word.
So we should always attend our reading and meditation of Scripture with prayer. It doesn’t have to be long, it doesn’t have to be profound. It just needs to be simple prayers, but a genuine prayer. “Lord, teach me. Lord, help me. Lord, show me. Lord, open my eyes. Help me understand. Help me apply. Lord, work in my heart.” You’re seeking the Lord.
Those are the essential ingredients. In some measure, in some form, every day: Scripture, meditation, prayer.
Now, in the last five minutes here, let me just tell you what I am currently doing. I’ve done many different things over the years. I am thankful that even as a child, before I was ever a Christian, my parents made me read the Bible. It was all duty. They made me read the Bible. We couldn’t turn on the TV until we’d read the Bible, so that was good motivation. I liked TV a lot; I didn’t like the Bible very much, but I read the Bible because mom and dad said I had to read the Bible or I couldn’t watch TV. So before I was a Christian, I was reading.
But my devotional life really began to grow when I became a Christian at about fifteen years old and I started reading the journals of a missionary named Jim Elliott. And Jim Elliott, when he was at Wheaton College, heard Stephen Olford preach about the importance of a daily quiet time, and Jim Elliott started writing in his journal. He would take a passage of Scripture and he would write his thoughts.
Somebody loaned me that book, I started reading it, and it taught me what to do. And I started doing it. I started reading the Bible and writing down my thoughts. Over the years, I’ve done that off and on, off and on, off and on.
A few months ago I was on a personal retreat, wrestling with things in my own heart, in my own life, seeking spiritual renewal; and one of the things that I was working on in that retreat was just trying to think through in a fresh way, “What is the basic minimum commitment that I need to make in my devotional life so that I am regularly in the word?”
As I thought through that and thought through all the different things over the years that I’ve done, what I really arrived with was I just need an old-fashioned quiet time. That’s what I need. I need an old-fashioned quiet time, the way we used to do it years ago. I just need time in the word, meditating. And I do it with a journal and prayer. And I recommitted myself to that, and the Lord has used that to renew me over the last several months.
So here’s my approach. Three anchor points in the day.
I begin the day with the Lord’s Prayer. Usually before my feet hit the floor, I’m praying the Lord’s Prayer. I’ve done it long enough now that sometimes even in those kind of twilight moments, you know, those moments when I’m just starting to wake up, the Lord’s Prayer is in my mind. It’s a good way to start the day, to frame the day, to commit the day of the Lord. I start with the Lord’s Prayer when I wake up.
I devotionally study one passage of Scripture at a minimum. I write it down; you can see what my journal looks like. This was yesterday. I just write in a notebook my thoughts. Nothing profound about it. I’m not writing it really for anybody else; I’m writing it for me. I know you’re squinting trying to read it. “What do you write?” It doesn’t really matter what I wrote; the point is, you just take a passage and you write down your thoughts.
Then the third thing I do is what’s called the Examen prayer. It’s not really a specific prayer, it’s a framework. I do this when I go to sleep at night. I try to think about my day, and where do I express gratitude, where do I confess? What do I need to confess? What I need to repent of, my sins of that day; and what do I need to thank the Lord for? And then often in that I’m praying for unbelievers—they’re a burden on my heart—praying for their salvation. That’s what I do.
You don’t have to use my method. It is a method; it’s not the only method. But what you do need is some kind of daily and consistent devotional life, where you get Scripture, meditation, and prayer in your life.
So, here’s the summary. Your soul needs sustaining; God has given us his word. What a gift, what a treasure. He has given us his word to sustain us, cleanse us, defend us, direct us, enrich us, delight us. You would be crazy not to do this. You want to do this. You know in your heart and in your soul that you want to do this, that this would be good for you.
So here is the call. Will you commit yourself to a renewed daily devotional life? Or maybe for some of you for the first time, where you say, “Yes, Lord, this is my intention. This is my purpose.”
I’m not asking you to make a vow. I’m not asking you to say that you will do this and then you turn around and feel guilty the first day you skip. That’s not the point. Instead, it’s an intention that, “Lord, by your grace, as you will remind me and as you will empower me, my serious intention is to cultivate this habit of regularly seeking you in prayer and in your word for the sake of my own soul.”
Let’s pray together.
With your heads bowed, I’m going to do something this morning that I almost never do, but I want to ask you this morning to make this commitment to the Lord if you feel that God is moving your heart to do it, and if you’re doing so, if you are saying, “Yes, I want to establish this or I want to renew this or I want to recommit myself to this,” I just ask you to raise your hand to indicate that that is your purpose this morning. I see your hands. The Lord sees that.
It is just a way for you to take that little step of obedience and of trust in the Lord, and you will not regret it. I want to pray now that God will bless us as a church as we commit ourselves to God and to his word.
Lord, we thank you today for your word. We thank you for the truth of your word that is given for our benefit, that you’ve spoken to us for our good, for our joy, to help us, to sustain us. We thank you, Lord, that you teach us to live in dependence on you. And Lord, we are all at different points in that journey and in that process, but this basic lesson remains for all of us, that we cannot do anything apart from Christ. We are branches who need to abide in the vine, and we do that as we abide in your word and your words abide in us. So, Lord, we commit ourselves afresh to seeking you, to seeking you on a daily basis by reading and pondering your word and by bringing our hearts before you in prayer.
Lord, you see the hearts of your people this morning. You see those who have committed themselves to it, those who maybe are struggling for a variety of reasons and may not be ready to take that step. Wherever we are, Lord, would you give your grace this morning and pour your Spirit out upon us this morning, so that we would once again feed our souls on Christ and on the gospel as we feed on your word.
Lord, as we come to the table, it is our same purpose. It is to come and to feed on Christ, to trust in Christ, to commune with Christ as we take the physical elements of bread and juice, to remember that by faith we are feeding on Christ, the living bread. So, Lord, draw near to us in these moments, continue your work by your Spirit in our hearts. And Lord, may there be an abundance of fruit, the fruit of the Spirit, the fruit of grace in our lives, as we devote ourselves afresh to your word. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake. Amen.
