HEARING GOD IN HIS WORD

Listening to God begins with the Bible. God will speak personally to you through His word. James 1:21 calls us to receive with meekness the word of God grafted into us. God will graft His word into your heart.

Let me suggest 4 disciplines that are essential to developing faith from God's word in your life. First, READ it. Read it prayerfully. Read it hungrily. Read it consistently.

Next, MEMORIZE Scripture. You may begin by memorizing verses that stir your heart. You could start trying to memorize chapters systematically going through whole books, first of the New Testament and then of the Old. If you could memorize a chapter a week, you could memorize the entire New Testament in less than four years.

All of my adult life I have encouraged and helped adults memorize Scripture. I have helped quite a number who were convinced they could not memorize. Let me give you several steps to memorizing a verse or a passage.

1. Commit to memorizing. If you are determined, you will succeed.
2. Ask God to help you memorize. 
3. Read it aloud. It is much more difficult to memorize something silently.
4. Repeat it over and over until you can say it without looking. 
5. Continue to review what you have memorized. I mark the day when I memorize a verse, and review it every day for a month.

The third discipline in listening to God in the Bible is to THINK about it. After you have memorized a verse you will be amazed at new things you come to understand from it. I recently memorized a passage whose meaning puzzles me. I meditate on it some everyday. I still do not understand much about this passage, but God ministers to me through it.

The final discipline for opening the word of God so that God can speak to you through it is, OBEY it. A major key to understanding the word of God is a willingness to obey. As we learn to obey small things in Scripture, He will reveal greater things to us.

http://thinkinginthespirit.blogspot.com/
http://theanchorofthesoul.blogspot.com/
http://watchinginprayer.blogspot.com/
http://writingprayerfully.blogspot.com/

FaceBook, The Published Works of David B. Young
https://www.facebook.com/bdavidyoung49/

Website
http://daveswatch.com/

YouTube
https://goo.gl/PyzU