Honest: By nature, I am not a disciplined person.
A lot of Christianity is acting on what you know despite how you feel. Praying when you don’t feel like it’s working. Preaching the Gospel to yourself when you feel like everything is falling apart or you’ve been forgotten. Reading His Word when you’re tired or life’s gotten too busy.
Motherhood. The best, hardest, most joyful, most nerve-wracking experience. So much good and so much different. Less time and more to do.
The Lord is faithful to remind me of Truth over and over and over again. He knows I forget. He knows it takes more than once before I get it. And then it’ll take a few more times, too.
Our pastor taught from 1 Corinthians 2 this week.
11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. 13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
How do we grow in the knowledge of God? Through His Spirit. How does His Spirit teach us? Through His Word.
Hebrews 3:7-11 says:
7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
9 where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
10 Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’
11 As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
Did you notice that it reads, “the Holy Spirit says,” not “said”? And what does He say, present tense? He quotes Psalm 95:7. The whole of His Word is speaking today. As the author of Hebrews goes on to say in chapter 4,
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
As if this message wasn’t enough, we’ve started reading A Heart for God by Sinclair B. Ferguson at my part-time/work-from-home job, a pregnancy care center.
Allow me to share a few quotes from the first chapter. Simply because I can’t say it better.
“While man has never had so much knowledge about the world as he possesses today, perhaps he has never had so little knowledge of God.”
“They [people who truly know God] are, in a word, holy. But our age is frightened of holiness. It is all the more tragic, therefore, that the church has also become frightened of holiness. It likes nothing less than to be different.”
“Do we consider knowing God to be the greatest treasure in the world, and by far our greatest privilege? If not, we are but pygmies in the world of the spirit. We have sold our Christian birthright for a mess of pottage, and our true Christian experience will be superficial, inadequate, and tragically out of focus.”
“No one less than God can bring us truth and reliable knowledge about him: God must give it himself.”
“In growing to know God, therefore, there is no substitute for the discipline of Bible study and Scripture reading and meditation. We cannot bypass the handbook God has given to us and then expect that we can know him in our own way. The only god we can know in our own way is a god that we make in our own image.”
That. Right there. The only god we can know in our own way is a god that we make in our own image. His Word teaches us about His true character.
Do you feel that you’ve been forgotten by the One who created you? Do you believe that you have to work to earn your salvation? Maybe you don’t say you do, but do you live like it? Do you compare your life to someone else’s and decide it doesn’t measure up?
God’s Word — knowledge of the living God — debunks all these lies from Satan.
I’m so thankful that God continues to remind me of my need for Him. As Psalm 103:14 says,
For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust.
So, in the midst of diapers and laundry and dishes and long nights and grocery shopping and messes and working from home, this undisciplined mama will make His Word a priority, because knowing God is the greatest privilege I have as a follower of Jesus.
The Oliver Farmhouse 