To those waking up to a darkness this morning hear this clarion call: open your Bible!
If you are needing to make a decision; or maybe the mountain is just too high and the valley simply too deep: get into the Word of God!
Hear the voice of God through the Word of God!
Pay attention to it for it is in this place that you will find an illumination of your heart.
The light will come into your deepest recesses of battle.
The renewal of our lives will always bring the Bible back to the centre of our lives.
“I wrote for them the many things of my law, but they regarded them as something foreign.” (Hosea 8 v 12)
Remember how Jesus in the most excruciating unbelievable traumatic of times, hanging on the cross, quoted these words: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?
Why did Jesus say what he said? It is because as he went through hell the power of the Word of God held him. Just as he had done on many occasions where he would quote one verse from an Old Testament passage and the lesson wasn’t in what he quoted but the rest of the passage that he had been silent on. He endured because of the Scriptures.
What was Jesus saying? Maybe this: “Though I feel abandoned and am going through hell, I still trust Him. And I know later in this Psalm that I am quoting, a Psalm that speaks of me, that vindication will come after the suffering.” God’s written Word is at the centre of the cross. Psalm 22, the Messianic Psalm, was in the mind of Christ. He was being held together by the Word.
Hosea’s generation were not in renewal and they ignored God’s Word at their peril. The Scriptures were unfamiliar. The Law was given to show them the way. It was given to form culture.
Renewal brings us back to the culture of God because it brings a person into submission to His Word.
Missions Paul 