DAILY READING
REFLECTION
Keeping God's Word in Your Heart
by Ken Dillman
A cursory reading of the Bible reveals the premium God has always placed on the Scriptures. God told Joshua to meditate on the Book of the Law, day and night, and in doing so, he would be prosperous and successful. In Deuteronomy, Moses instructed the Hebrew people to keep the Lord’s statutes and commandments, and to teach them morning, noon, and night to their children, so that they would have long lives, and that life would go well for them. The Psalmist wrote that maintaining purity happens when we store up God’s word in our heart. And Jesus taught his disciples to make disciples and teach them to obey everything Jesus had taught and commanded.
In today’s text, God speaks through Moses regarding Israel’s future king(s), saying, “And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes and doing them.”
The Bible isn’t just a history book that provides the believer with information, it is also a manual on how to live life with God and people. Israel’s future king(s) would need to be anchored in the Scriptures in order to lead the people and live holy lives.
Earlier this year, I started a small group Bible study with four generations of my family: My 97-year-old father-in-law, myself, my 38-year-old stepson, and my 12-year-old grandson. We approached our study with the goal of becoming deeper disciples of Jesus and to learn how to live out all that Jesus taught in the gospels. It’s been encouraging to watch my father-in-law engage the Scriptures as he’s never done before in his life; each week he asks questions about the Bible, of things he had heard many decades earlier in life. At times, he’s tearful when the love of Jesus found in the Scriptures come crashing down on him, as he reviews life.
Israel’s future king(s) were to draw deeply from the scriptures. God understood that as a country’s leaders go, so goes the country; that can be true of our families too, as the leaders of the families go, so goes the family
PRAYER
Lord God, help us to understand the importance of keeping your Word in our hearts. We need to read it every day and we need to pass on the importance of being in Your Word. You are the great I AM and we can become closer to you by abiding in your Word. Amen.
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