An Encouraging Word
By Paul W. Jackson
When Pastor Wim challenged his flock to engage in deep personal examination, I expected to find empty holes when he asked “where is God’s Word in your heart?”
There were several. I haven’t committed the Word to memory. I spend more time working and playing than reading and praying. I reached into some old holes, rooting around for evidence that God’s word has sunken like a corner fence post into my heart. Rooting revealed that His Word is in my head, holey as it may be, like a Top-40 song played once an hour. From my head leak biblical metaphors, wisdom passages and imagery. But is it enough? Nope. Certain activist atheists know the Bible, too. Their motivation may be nebulous, but it’s in their heads, a sign of God’s grace. Individuals may read it to condemn rather than build, but they wouldn’t have the choice if His Word wasn’t ubiquitous in the western world.
The Roots
Like most of my contemporaries, I couldn’t have escaped God’s word if I’d wanted. My first memories include climbs onto my mother’s lap with a children’s picture story Bible. By the time I learned to read, the cover was ragged and its stories memorized. Whose head wouldn’t fill with adventure as a boy sorts stones in a stream while a menacing soldier laughs in the background? A child, like me, about to defeat an entire nation’s most powerful enemy? What encouragement for a young mind! The real Bible, the one my dad read, confirmed and reinforced the stories, and went deeper. By contrast, Aesop’s fables were engaging, fun stories with fine moral lessons, but they lacked the authority of Proverbs or the Sermon on the Mount. Even as a child, by God’s grace, I could feel the authority. Dad didn’t read to us from Aesop after supper. It was the Word of God, seven days a week.
Childlike applications of God’s word might be the door through which people invite the Bible into their heads, but my passageway into the Word had been flung open to the great outdoors (by God’s grace and parental diligence), so I passed the preliminary test. Still wasn’t enough. Digging deeper, I evaluated just how much of my life and work is influenced by the Word. Again, expecting to fall into holes, especially when comparing myself to public square Bible thumpers, I realized that biblical wisdom had been pursuing me from a very tender age. However, my young-adult self applied the word where I could get the most traction for personal vindication. When my brother and his wife were going through a divorce, I went to Proverbs 21:9 to justify my attitude toward her: “It is better to live in a corner of a roof than in a house with a contentious woman.” Take that, b—-!
The Fruit
Using isolated passages as a bludgeon was not what God had in mind. If I’d paid attention to all of the Word, I’d have known that. Still, roots were growing, and God could already see nascent fruit He’d conceived from His heart.
So I set out to evaluate if God’s Word really has sunken into my mind and heart. Where is evidence of progress? I learned that God provides the evidence. Seems like circular logic, but it’s true. I try to remember each time the Bible is opened to pray that this Word sinks deep into my heart, as Charles Stanley instructed. And even before I knew who Dr. Stanley was, my earthly father gave his children Bible application. Sunday only Christians, we were warned, have set the Word into a shallow, somewhat worthless hole. A hole dug only one-seventh of the post’s length leads to a leaning and weak corner post that can’t keep the fence taut for long, let alone keep sheep in pasture.
Once dirt around it gets well-tamped, the Word becomes solid and stubborn, like roots digging downward to ensure we stand like a tree that bends but won’t break. Which leads to some assurance, perhaps even epiphany. The Word was planted long ago through that story Bible like a mustard seed in my head, but it wasn’t content to stay there, dormant. If I confined it there, it would become root-bound, in dire need of transplanting. But when it’s roots are freed from captivity in my head, it’s ready to grow again. It takes time to grow large enough to feed and shelter birds and critters, but I see signs of revival. I learned that the Word must start in the mind, but it’s deepest roots grow, unseen and sometimes painstakingly slow, into the heart. It must be so. The Word is the source of all truth. It’s rich and fertile, a motion light, a guidebook, a treasure trove. It’s everything Psalm 119 says.
But only if it takes root and grows. When it does, it becomes a corner post. If the Word is hidden in my heart, as are four feet of a ten-foot six-by-six, shallow, fleshy roots can’t push it out. The mustard seed, planted perhaps by the wind of God’s common grace, can grow alongside the post and eventually produce shade, berries and seeds. It will become a stonger corner post than mere head-knowledge could ever plant. Here’s how I know – and how we all can know – that the Word’s roots have spread from my head to my heart: I’m a different person. No longer do I lose sleep rehearsing barbed rebuttals and personal affronts. Seldom am I offended. I’m far less critical. When I trip and fall, as the Mercy Me song reveals, I “hit the ground running back to you.” That’s evidence of God’s Word reaching from head to heart.
With such deep roots, can a tree fail to produce fruit? Maybe it’s not big, juicy, marketable fruit quite yet, but blossoms are forming. How do I know? By examining fruit with the magnifying glass of the Word. I found that despite my tendencies to fall into holes I’ve dug, there is amazing grace and joy in knowing His Word is rooting. The Word is on my tongue, in my head, and, hopefully, in my actions. And just as I started doubting that joy was really there; that there is solid evidence that I’m on the right track, God fed my roots from Jeremiah 15:16:
“Your words were found and I ate them, and your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart…”
Let it be so.
Paul W. Jackson is the retired editor of Michigan Farm News and author
of one novel: The Organic Underwear Conspiracy.
Copyright 2024