If you’re like me, your cell phone is like an appendage. People call us, text us, send us Facebook messages and tweets, and so it seems the phone is always beckoning. Recently, I was traveling to hold a gospel meeting, and I realized that I had left my phone charger at home. I instantly started trying to find a way to get a charger. Without electricity connected to my phone, I would be powerless to do many of the things I wanted to do.
This problem with my phone illustrates an important point: God is our source of strength to deal with life, and one of the ways in which we access this power is by allowing God to communicate with us (the other way is by communicating with Him through prayer). God speaks to us through His word, the Holy Scriptures. Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). We cannot be saved without learning and obeying the Scriptures (2 Timothy 3:15). The words of God are powerful in providing understanding of our situation as human beings (Hebrews 4:12).
When my phone’s battery was dying, I did not pretend that there was nothing wrong, that I could continue to use my cell phone without a charge of power. It would have been foolish to deny that my battery was dead. God’s word is the power source for human beings, but some folks fail to plug in, even though they have no spiritual power on their own. They are dead spiritually, because of their sins (Colossians 2:13), and apart from the saving word of God they have no power to be enlivened spiritually or to live the best kind of life (John 10:10; 1 Peter 1:23). Yet they pretend that there is nothing wrong, that they have plenty of power on their own.
When my phone’s battery was dying, I did not pretend as though no working outlets existed, or that it was impossible to actually plug into any of them. It would have been foolish for me to say, “There’s nothing to be done, because there are no real outlets to use, and even if there were, who could use them?!” Yet some folks who need God’s word say things like this: “Everybody has a different interpretation of the Bible, so it’s impossible to really understand it correctly.” Evidently, they think God incapable of clearly communicating His will to man, and so they go through their lives without making an effort to access God’s will for their lives. The fact of the matter is that we can understand and obey God’s word (Acts 17:11; 1 John 4:1)
May we be faithful in our study and application of God’s word—the power we need in order to be saved and to be all we can be.
