Day 3 - Joshua 1:8 "This book of instruction must not depart from your mouth, you are to recite it day and night, so that you may carefully observe everything written in it. For then you shall prosper and succeed in whatever you do."

Second section...

"You are to recite it day and night."

So are we supposed to go around quoting Scripture incessantly.  Can you picture this...

"Good morning, Janice! It's a bright sun-shiny day!"

"Good morning...yes, remember "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."  That's Genesis 1:1 in case you don't know!"

or....

"Man I sure am glad it's payday!"
"Me too!  You know the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 6:23."

Effective? Maybe at getting you classed as out-of-touch and someone who's trying to impress others with their Biblical knowledge.

But on the other hand, this scenario is one that might just make a difference with your child....

"Mommy, isn't the sky so beautiful today?"
"It really is...you know that the very first verse in the Bible tells us that 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.' We need to always remember that everything we see was made by God, everything we see in the sky and everything we see around us."

Or this conversation with someone who is struggling with thinking that they are beyond God's love...

"I want to believe in God's forgiveness, but He can't love me...I'm rotten, there's so much sin in my life."

"You know, God knows that's exactly how we feel...and in Romans 5:8 He clearly tell us that's why He sent Jesus for us.  'For God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."  He knows that we need saving because of our sinfulness, and He loves us enough to provide His Son for our salvation."

These are simple illustrations, but I hope you get the point...we don't want to be obnoxious about our knowledge or use it to impress people, but given the right moment, and led by the Holy Spirit, then we should be ready to recite God's Words without hesitation.  Day and night, they should be on the tips of our tongues, ready for Spirit-led opportunities.

Second reason for constant repetition is for our own discipline.  That's what we'll talk about tomorrow night!

I pray tonight to become more and more aware of opportunities to share God's words with those who are thirsting for them, and with that awareness to be courageous and bold in letting His words come out of my mental storage bins, to be used for His effectiveness.  That's the whole point, isn't it?

Praying His blessings all over you!

Day 2 - Week 11 - Joshua 1:8 "This book of instruction must not depart from your mouth; you are to recite it day and night, so that you may carefully observe everything written in it. For then you will prosper and succeed in whatever you do."

Wow - this one is a long one, isn't it?  Let's break it down bit by bit and absorb it slowly.....

"This book of instruction must not depart from your mouth...."

In our reference book, 100 Bible Verses Everyone Should Know by Heart, Robert J. Morgan states in reference to this section of our verse, "We must keep speaking it, reading it, repeating it, hearing it."

Referencing the Bible as "this book of instruction" reinforces the first application that Paul listed in our verse of last week...that of teaching.  We've probably all heard the phrase, "BIBLE - Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth."  We have in our hands God's book of instruction.  He has given it to us and He wants us to not only read it, but to know it and to declare it. 

The word "depart" used in this verse is used in the context of "be removed", so the verse could read, "This book of instruction must not be removed from your mouth."  It should always be ready to flow off our lips, to cite God's Word at appropriate times to ourselves and to others.  You can picture God's words being stored in the back portion of our mouths, just sitting there waiting for the right time to be released, but never removed.

We can't be concerned about their removal if they are never firmly stored in the first place.  Aren't all of these verses affirming our exercise of Scripture memorization?  It's like we are memorizing all of God's reasons for memorizing!  He is an encourager when we struggle, isn't He?

I'm loving God's wonderful book of instruction.  The more I memorize, the more I find myself quietly saying verses during the day when random occurrences bring them to mind.  And I smile knowing that God is pleased hearing His words on my breath.

Day 1 - Week 11 - Ready for a tougher one?

You may get tired of me going over our verses, but you'll just have to bear with me.  I HAVE to recite them periodically so I can keep the ones I've already learned firmly placed in this somewhat mushy brain of mine!  AND as a result, even more firmly embedded in my heart!

So do you use this time to exercise your brain along with mine? Hope so!  Here we go....

Four Corners of the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
John 1:14 "And the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.  We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only, who came from the Father full of grace and truth."
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life."

Romans Road:
Romans 3:23 "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
Romans 6:23 "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord."
Romans 5:8 "But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
Romans 10:9 "If you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved."
Romans 12:1 "Therefore, my dear brothers, by the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.  This is your spiritual worship."

The Gift of Scripture:

2 Timothy 3:16 "All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness."

This past week has impressed upon me the value of Scripture in so many different areas of life, and how I have often undervalued it in so many areas of my personal life.  I could be much farther down my road of faith had I used Scripture to its maximum profitability.  If I had turned to Scripture when I needed to be taught, convicted, corrected and just for the continual training that I have always needed, I would have made better decisions, avoided some pitfalls and been a better example to others of God's activity in my life.

But one of the most wonderful things about our God, and about the message of Christianity, is that He continually allows us to not only start over, but to use our past, whatever it may be, to build on our future and to allow Him to use the things we have gone through to enhance our lives, not detract from them.   Many Christians I know with the strongest testimonies are those who have come the farthest and can closely identify with people who struggle with many of the same things they did  in the past.  Many times our histories become our ministries.

So...what will this week's verse impress upon us?  It is a little more difficult passage, but again broken down becomes fairly easy to grasp.  This is an Old Testament verse from the book of Joshua:

Joshua 1:8, "This book of instruction must not depart from your mouths; you are to recite it day and night, so that you may carefully observe everything written in it.  For then you will prosper and succeed in whatever you do."

Wow - that's quite a bit.  But I think by the end of this week we will grow to love this verse and wholeheartedly embrace it. 

Remember what we send last night about a more rigorous training routine!  Let's get moving!

Day 7 - Week 10 - 2 Timothy 3:16 "All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness."

Last night for our first verse on our irreplaceable gift of the Holy Bible.

First - I was SO reminded of the other aspect of the third use of Scripture that we discussed last night...correction, from my friend Donna.  She made me realize that I only applied the applied use of Scripture as a tool in correcting others...but didn't even mention the fact that correction most often applies to Scripture's effect on us personally!  It is when we read Scripture that the Holy Spirit whispers in our ear, "You might want to pay attention to this part...you've really been lacking in this area", or..."How does what you're reading right now compare to the way you lived today...are you in line with what God is expecting of you as His servant and as His messenger?"  Scripture corrects.  It corrects us on a daily basis as we allow it to.  But we have to keep our spiritual ears open and our hearts soft so that we can be pliable to its correction and allow ourselves to humbly accept that God's Word is the authority, over and above what we think.

At one time there was a bumper stick that said, "God says it, I believe it, that settles it."  And I thought that was pretty good to remember.  Until I heard a minister point out that the phrase was really in error.  He pointed out that it should read, "God says it, that settles it."  My belief does not affect the absolute truth of God's Word.  Whatever He says stands.

Now on to the final aspect of the profitability of Scripture...."training in righteousness."  Isn't that just a beautiful phrase.  Training in righteousness.  Who would not opt to become a person of righteousness?  And yet, we do opt to ignore our Bibles and fore go the training that is readily available to us.

Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."  I don't think that most of us really know what "righteousness" means.  What do you think? 

Strong's definition: "in a broad sense: state of him who is as he ought to be, righteousness, the condition acceptable to God.

This is one of those areas that it is easy for us to say, "Well I can't ever be truly righteous...God knows that I will never be what I ought to be."  But Jesus tells us that those who yearn for righteousness will be blessed.  And we are told in our verse that the Bible is profitable to us for training in righteousness.  So we should put righteousness as our goal and we should use the Bible to help us train for that goal. 

Brings to mind Paul's exhortation in Philippians 3:8-15, "What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.  I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.  Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. All of us who are mature should take such a view of things."

Pressing on - striving toward what is ahead.  Not being content with what we are, but knowing that God is ready to train us on a daily basis toward the righteousness that He intends for His children. 

No, we will never attain complete righteousness, other than what we can claim through the blood of Jesus over our lives.  But we can bring glory to God and express to Him our gratefulness for what He has done by striving to be all that we can be during this "earth story" portion of our eternal lives.  And that hunger and thirsting to be as righteous as we possibly can be will bring us blessing, just as Jesus promised. 

Let's commit to a more rigorous training program.  We can become stronger...we can run further...we can bear more weight...we can become the spiritual Olympians that God sees in us.  This reminds me of the admonition that Paul gives Timothy, and the verse that I will close with, 1 Timothy 4: 7-8, "train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come."

Day 6 - Week 10 - 2 Timothy 3:16 "All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness."

I hope you all have had a Sunday of worship and of rest.  I have had both.  I heard good teaching this morning in my Bible study as Jim McKee began leading us through the time between the resurrection and Pentecost.  As I listened, I couldn't help but think of this week's verse and how I was seeing it in action.  Jim does a great job of bringing the Scripture to life and to use it, very profitably for those in attendance, to teach, to convict, to correct, to train us in righteousness. 

While I had somewhat hoped that we could find an alternative word for "correction" so as to avoid a difficult subject to deal with, I'm not able to do that.  The Greek word used in this verse is "epanorthosis" and is used in the New Testament only one time, in this verse.  The definition is, "restoration to an upright or right state; correction, improvement of life or character." 

Correction ---not a pleasant task.  I do not like confrontation and avoid it, sometimes to a fault.  But when we reread our verse, we do not have to take on correcting others.  For it is not assigned to us...it is assigned to Scripture.  "Scripture is....profitable for...correcting."

I'm reminded that many times I have heard others say, "I'm not telling you that (whatever behavior was being addressed) is wrong, the Bible tells us."  That's where knowledge of Scripture is so important.  And another reason that I feel it is important to memorize Scripture sources along with the words.  When we can quote chapter and verse to help us in discussing topics that may need to be brought to a Christian brother's or sister's attention, it is much more convincing than saying we think the Bible addresses it. 

A couple of things that I feel are critical to Biblical correction....

• It must be done in love, with the sincere best interest of the person at heart.  No other motivation.  No trying to prove we are right and they are wrong, only that we know that God's Word speaks against their behavior and it will not lead to their best future.
• It cannot be early in your relationship with that person...there has to be a foundation of Christian love and respect already established before there can be confrontation; otherwise, without trust, the person will more than likely feel criticized rather than corrected and become defensive.

And when, after prayerfully presenting our concern to God, we are convicted that we are the one that the Holy Spirit is leading to correct another, then we must remember the words of Paul in Galatians 6:1,

Dear brothers and sisters, if another Christian is overcome by some sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself. (NLT)

One more thing...I note that correction comes third in this list, after teaching and convicting (the word I choose to use over rebuking).  If a person has not been taught the Word of God, and if they haven't been convicted of it's truth and surrendered their will to God, then there is no point in spending time correcting their actions.  Their actions are those of a person who has not chosen to live according to God's ways, so how can we really correct them...if what they are doing is not illegal, then there's no reason (in their eyes), not to pursue their current course.  Christian correction is for Christians...we cannot impose God-given laws on those who have not given themselves to God. 

For those, we can pray, pray and continue to pray for eyes to see, ears to hear and a heart that can be broken.