Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (51 page)

The Word gives you examples to follow.
I like to study the biographies in Scripture, the stories of people who lived out their lives before God. That’s where the Scripture becomes real. Some offer a positive example, and those are the ones I want to follow. Others present a negative example that I need to avoid.

Using the working Word, Jesus Christ produces life-change for those who want to apply biblical truth. Is that true of you? A good test is this: Has someone who has known you very, very well over a period of time ever said, “Hey, what makes you so different? I used to know you, but you’re not the same person. Something has happened in your life.” What explanation could you give? Would it be that Christ has moved into your life?

In short, what is there in your life that you cannot explain on any other basis than the supernatural?

When I was a younger man, I came to a point in my life where I was the finest candidate for somebody’s psychopathic ward that you’ve ever seen. The boys in the white coats were just about to back up the wagon and take me away when a friend of mine, an executive, learned of my plight.

He flew to Dallas at his own expense and spent three days with me. Everything I did, he did. Everywhere I went, he went. He listened to every conversation, sat in on every class, even lived in my home. Finally, at the end of that period, he gave me his diagnosis: “Howie, your problem is that you are behind in your think time.”

You know, if I had given him $20,000 I don’t think I would have paid him enough for that insight. What he was telling me was that I was letting so many things occupy my attention that I wasn’t allowing myself time apart to process it all. Eventually I had become overwhelmed.

What my friend was describing is really the habit of meditation. That has
become a lost art in contemporary society, except, of course, among adherents of Eastern mysticism. I’m talking about something completely different from mental gymnastics that seek to empty the mind. True meditation is pondering the truth with a view to letting it help and readjust our lives. Since most of us are active, busy people, we’re likely to conclude that meditation was a nice thing for an earlier generation of believers, but it really has no relevance in our day and age.

Wrong. We already saw in
chapter 14
that meditation is useful in the step of Observation. It is absolutely essential to the step of Application. Remember Joshua 1:8 and Psalm 1:1–2? Both of those passages said that the key to spiritual prosperity is to meditate on the Word
day and night
. Put another way, we’re to weave Scripture into the fabric of everyday living.

My wife makes a soup that I can hardly resist. It takes her hours to make it. She starts it in the morning, and pretty soon our house is filled with a delightful aroma—and I just drool, ready to gobble it down. But she says, “Not yet. Wait until supper.” I call it her Enthusiastic Soup—she throws everything she’s got into it. It makes store-bought soup taste like dishwater.

How does the soup become that good? She leaves it on the back burner over a slow, simmering fire, until all of the flavors begin to mingle and make it delightful to the taste. What have you got on the back burner? What’s cooking in your mind? Are you taking advantage of the benefits of biblical meditation?

“But I have a hard time thinking,” someone will say.

No, the problem is that you’re starving your brain. You’re not providing it with any fuel. You see, there’s a direct link between meditation and memory. Memory provides the mind with the fuel it needs to make meditation profitable.

One of the regrets I have as I reflect back on my spiritual journey is that I did not memorize more Scripture as a young person. Eventually, though, I got into the “Topical Memory System,” a set of memory cards produced by the Navigators. It’s available in the King James, the
NIV
, the
New American Standard
, any translation you want. The program helps you memorize two verses a week. That’s really not much. But stop to think: do that for fifty weeks during a year and you’ll have one hundred verses of Scriptures under your belt.

Can that make a difference in your life? Not long after I began a program of Bible memorization, I had to have surgery. The surgery went fine, but I contracted an infection afterward. And it was the type of thing where I wasn’t sure whether I was going to live or die, but I almost wanted to pass on. I found that there was only one thing that sustained me during that period—the Word of God that I had committed to memory. That experience convinced me that memory is the key to meditation. And meditation is the key to changing my outlook.

The ultimate goal of Bible study is to practice the truth. Scripture was written not to fatten geese, but to train athletes and equip soldiers for the realities of life. “Run to win.” “Fight to win.” That’s the message of the Word.

You can’t consciously apply every truth you find in your study, but you can consistently apply something. So you always want to ask yourself,
Is there some area of my life for which this truth is needed?

One way to answer that question is to take a spiritual inventory. I’ve included one as a sidebar in this chapter. The idea is to prayerfully reflect on your true condition in the various areas of your life. Ask God to put His finger on a place where you know you need to apply the truth you are gleaning from His Word. Then, by faith and in obedience, begin acting on that truth in whatever way seems best for the area in which you need to grow.

I can assure you, your hunger for that Word will be in direct proportion to your obedience to it. In fact, there’s a cycle: The more you understand it, the more you use it; and the more you use it, the more you want to understand it. Both are necessary.

In the end, you’ll always find two sides to Christian living: you need food, and you need exercise. Too much food leads to obesity. Too little food develops anemia. But food is transformed into energy, and energy enables you to do that which God wants you to do. Yet in the process, you become exhausted and tired. You lose your perspective. So you’ve got to come back to the Word of God for refreshment. Remember that the Word of God experienced is the Word of God enjoyed.

I
n an earlier chapter I offered the principle that
interpretation is one; application is many
. That is, there is only one ultimate interpretation of a passage of Scripture. But that passage can be applied in different ways to different situations. In other words, the truth of God’s Word is adaptable, in that the same truth addresses a variety of circumstances. The truth doesn’t change; the circumstances do.

But there is another way in which interpretation is one, application is many. Just as circumstances vary, so do people. As we saw earlier, each of us is unique. One of a kind. Each of us is a piece of workmanship, handcrafted by the Creator of the universe, a masterpiece designed with a very special purpose in mind. That uniqueness has huge ramifications for how we apply God’s Word. It means that how you apply Scripture will probably look a bit different from how I apply it. Same truth, different ways of applying it. Not because one of us is better than the other, but because we are different from one another.