Today, on this Sanctity of Life Sunday, where we celebrate that we have physical life and spiritual life because God has granted us both, where we uphold the sanctity of life from the womb to the tomb and where we declare that we are people of life, and that we will promote life, support life and speak life as the people of God ought to do, we also declare that God’s Word is life.
I want to look at some Scripture with you that affirm the life-giving power and properties of the Word, and as I read these Scriptures, wherever the word, “life” or “live” appears, I want you to declare that word out loud as I read.
20 My son, be attentive to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. 21 Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart. 22 For they are LIFE to those who find them and healing to all their flesh. Proverbs 4:20-22
My soul clings to the dust. Give me LIFE according to your word! Psalm 119:25
“Man shall not LIVE by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Matthew 4:4
“It is the Spirit who gives life. The flesh is no help at all. “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and LIFE.” John 6:62-63
Let’s unpack these Scriptures one at a time today.
20 My son, be attentive to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. 21 Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart. 22 For they are LIFE to those who find them and healing to all their flesh. Proverbs 4:20-22
Solomon begins this section of Scripture by saying, “Be attentive to the Word.” Pay attention to the Word. The Word is worthy of our attention. We give our attention to a lot of frivolous things. We watch crazy reels, one right after the other, from people doing skateboard tricks, to people feeding their toddlers, to people trying on various outfits and suggesting we ought to dress the same way, to people making recipes we have no intention of ever trying, to people popping their pimples (don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about). I mean, come on! If we see enough value in those things to give our attention to them, surely, we can see the value of giving our attention to the Word.
II Chronicles 33 details the story of King Manasseh who didn’t have any time or attention for the Word of God. He reigned for 55 years. That’s a long time to be influencing God’s people without including the wisdom that comes from the Word of God.
II Chronicles 33 says he did evil in the sight of the Lord. He rebuilt high places for pagan worship. He put some of those altars in the temple of the Lord, leading Judah into idol worship, right in the temple. He burned his own sons as an offering to pagan gods. He used fortune-telling and omens and sorcery and dealt with mediums and people who attempted to talk to the dead. It’s said of Manasseh that he led Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to do more evil than the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the people of Israel. When we dismiss the Word of God, when we distance ourselves from it, we will move in the direction of evil. We will find ourselves doing things we would never have thought possible. There is no other explanation for the kind of vile and wicked life that Manasseh lived than the fact that he had no use for the Word.
On the heels of the account of Manasseh’s reign of evil, verse ten says this: 10 The Lord spoke to Manasseh and to his people, but they paid no attention.
We’re told to pay attention to the Word because attention to the Word will keep us from evil. Evil is the opposite of life. Evil leads to bondage. We see it in Manasseh’s life.
What happened next was that God allowed them to be bound as slaves, literally chained up and taken off by the Assyrians. A lack of attention to God’s Word will lead to bondage, to some kind of enslavement.
Back to Proverbs 4:20-22:20 My son, be attentive to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. 21 Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart. 22 For they are LIFE to those who find them and healing to all their flesh. Proverbs 4:20-22
Notice the three ways we can give attention to God’s Word. We’re told to incline our ear to the Word. We need to hear God’s Word declared. You have a plethora of ways to hear the Word of God. Choose to follow ministers and Bible teachers who hold the Word in high regard. Listen to sermons and podcasts by people who teach the Word as it is and who don’t twist it to say what they want it to say.
Second, Solomon says, “Don’t let the Word escape from your sight.” Read the Word for yourself. Pick a Bible reading plan on the YouVersion Bible app, and read it with friends if you need some accountability, but get your eyes on it. Pastor Kim is starting a group reading for a few weeks in February in the YouVersion app. Ask her how to get connected!
So, get your ears on the Word, get your eyes on the Word, and third, let it penetrate your heart. Look again at the end of verse 21. Keep the Word within your heart. Meditate on it. Memorize it. Be shaped by the Word. Let it sink in deep. Solomon says, you need to read the Word on multiple levels. That’s what is involved in giving your attention to the Word.
Notice verse 22 again, God’s Words are LIFE to those who find them and is healing to all their flesh. Don’t discount what it means to have life in any given situation. When the news is bad, when the unknown is looming, when the circumstance is confusing, when the relationship is strained, when you don’t see how something will work out, to know that you know that you know that you have LIFE is everything.
What Solomon means by “they are LIFE” is that when situations come at you, situations that have the capacity to take life from you, God’s Word is there to combat those attacks, and even if something steals some facet of your life, some of your emotional strength or zaps you of spiritual energy, help will come to you through the Word of God that will replace what has been lost, that will fill up whatever gets drained and will give you Divine fortitude to keep on living the life that God has in store for His children.
Notice, too, that Solomon says the Word produces healing in a person’s flesh. Healing can come through the Word. Listen, the Word of God has creative power. All that has been created was created through the spoken Word of God. When God said, “Let there be light,” there was light. God’s Word has the power to create, to bring forth, to cause to come into existence. Whatever He has created, He can recreate. We just heard a testimony on Wednesday from Marilyn Finley about how she was healed of stage 3 kidney disease. It didn’t go from stage 3 to stage 2 or to stage 1. Her kidney disease was gone. She was healed. God is still healing, and this Scripture indicates that one way that healing comes is through the Word.
God’s written Word began as His spoken Word because the Bible we read, God Himself spoke to those who put pen to paper. II Timothy 3:16 says that “All Scripture is breathed out by God.” People spoke and wrote what the Holy Spirit inspired them to write.
We also read that the Word of God is living and active, Hebrews 4:12. When I speak, you may be able to remember what I said or you may be able to remember how you felt about what I said, or you may remember a version of what I said, but my words, once spoken, are past history. They are merely a record of something that took place in a moment in time. However, God’s Words, every one of them, are still alive, still present, still working in this moment. They don’t expire. So, when you read the Word, understand there is healing power, there is Divine help IN THE MOMENT.
That is Proverbs 4:22. The next Scripture we read says, My soul clings to the dust. Give me LIFE according to your word! Psalm 119:25
Again, we see that there is life in the Word. The Psalmist, clinging to the dust is a picture that takes us back to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve fell because of their sin. Their weakness and frailty were on display when God said to them, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, til you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19) We all struggle with the effects of humanity’s brokenness. Our hope for life to come to us is to be resuscitated by the Word of God.
Listen, you can cling to the dust, you can cling to the brokenness in this life, or you can run to the Word for life. Look at what he said just a few verses later: “I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart.” (For you set my heart free) Psalm 119:32
This no longer sounds like a weak, frail, puny, dusty and desperate individual. Because the Psalmist feasted on the Word, He was able to run in the way of God’s commandments. He had gained spiritual strength. He went from sitting in the dust to kicking up the dust under his feet. The Lord had enlarged his heart. The Lord had set his heart free from the sin that kept him spiritually feeble. From feeble to free because of the life-giving Word!
Look at the verse before verse 32: “I cling to Your testimonies.” Psalm 119:31 When I read that verse, I thought of this person clinging to the Word, clinging to the testimonies of God, like a shipwrecked man would cling to a life raft or a floating plank in the sea. He was holding on “for dear life” to the Word of Life! There is an awesome progression here in Psalm 119. He went from clinging to the dust to clinging to the Word! Listen, what you cling to will determine if rescue comes!
If he had continued to cling to the dust, he would have been living a low kind of life. Metaphorically, he would have been on his belly. Right? I mean, how many of you can cling to the dust from a standing position? If you are clinging to the dust, you are as low as you can get, but we see here that if you cling to the Word, you move from holding the dust, from biting the dust, to running in victory. The Word of God moved him from the dust to his destiny in Jesus.
In our third life Scripture Jesus said, “Man shall not LIVE by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Matthew 4:4
Satan was attacking Jesus in a series of tests. Satan tried to make the first of three temptations about physical hunger. Jesus knew it was about far more. He knew it was about Who or what He was trusting in to deliver Him from evil, to sustain Him in a time of weakness. Church, where we look for satisfaction, where we go to be sustained, where we get our spiritual and emotional nourishment, determines whether we will fall for Satan’s schemes or whether we will walk victoriously in the power of the Spirit.
We know in the wilderness testing that Jesus walked in the power of the Spirit, Luke 4:1. Listen, the Spirit of God and the Word of God are connected. The Word won’t say something contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit won’t say something contrary to the Word. They are going to back each other up. Jesus recited the Word to Satan, and I believe, as He did, the Spirit was lifting Him up because I believe the Spirit will always back the Word! The Spirit of God honors the Word, and the Word honors the Spirit.
What the wilderness temptations of Jesus remind us, is that we are all going to face temptation. We will all be weak in our flesh, and in those moments of weakness, we can give in to the call of the flesh or we can stand fast on the Word and receive life-giving power by the Spirit of God. There is life in the Word!
Just as we rely on physical bread/food to sustain our bodies, we are to rely on the Word of God to sustain us spiritually. We need the spiritual nourishment that comes from the Word of God. Jesus helps us see that as food is sustenance for our physical bodies, so the Word of God is sustenance for our spiritual health. How often do you eat in a day? You don’t just eat once a week, right? You and food have a regular relationship. That’s the way it is supposed to be with the Word of God. We need to constantly be taking it in.
To live well, we need to be physically AND spiritually strong. We don’t have any problem getting to the table to eat. We don’t have an issue opening the refrigerator for a snack or rifling through the pantry for something to munch on. No one has to remind us to get something to eat. It’s automatic and often. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had the same inclination and appetite for the Word of God? When we really believe God’s Word is life, we’ll begin to crave it more and more!
Jesus called Himself the Bread of Life in John 6. When we feast on the Word, we are feasting on Jesus and taking Him into our being in a way that will build us up. After a very lengthy discussion on Jesus as the Bread of Life, and how spiritually speaking, we have to feed on Him, Jesus connected the Spirit and the Word. This is our last “life” Scripture this morning.
“It is the Spirit who gives life. The flesh is no help at all. “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and LIFE.” John 6:62-63
The righteousness of Christ is imparted to the believer by the Spirit of God when a person is saved. The Holy Spirit not only conveys this right standing with God to a person, but the Spirit of God deposits the life of Christ inside the believer. As believers take in the Word of God, the Spirit of God enables the believer to grow.
I’ll be honest, some parts of the Word are easier for me to digest than others. Some sit better with my natural tendencies and desires. Other parts of the Word call for sacrifice or for me to deny myself in some way. Other parts, if I apply and obey the Word, well, they cause me to have to humble myself, to confess my sin, to admit I was wrong, to change my ways. The Word isn’t always easy to swallow, is it?
John 6 is such a meaty passage. As Jesus unpacked what it meant that He was the Bread of Life, there were people who couldn’t accept it. Jesus fed well over five thousand people in the early part of the chapter. Y’all, I struggle to throw a dinner party for six! He literally fed them with five loaves of bread and two fish through a miracle of multiplication. Everyone was thrilled with physical food to eat. He demonstrated He was a Provider of physical needs.
Following that miracle, Jesus walked on the water out to a boat where His disciples were being tossed around in a storm. He got them safely to shore. He demonstrated His power over nature, but when He started talking about His authority over all things spiritual and His requirements for His followers, there were many followers who said, “I’m out.” In John 6:60 they basically said, “The Word of God is just too hard to hear and accept.” Six verses later, after He declared that His Words were Spirit and life, we read, “After this many of His disciples turned back and no longer walked with Him.”
Many people walked away from the Spirit of Life, from the Word of Life that day. What a tragedy. Sadly, this continues to happen in churches across our nation and world. Sadly, people decide it is too hard to follow Jesus, the Life-giver. If you aren’t following the One who gives life, you are following the one who is seeking to assassinate your very soul. Satan wants people to believe the Word is too hard to accept and follow when it is the way of the Word that actually gives people life.
There is no spiritual life apart from Jesus. There is no eternal life apart from Jesus. There is no abundant life on earth without Jesus.
”The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have LIFE and have it abundantly.” John 10:10
31 So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:31-32
The Word of God is the truth. The Word of life sets us free to be who God created us to be. Abiding in the Word is the way to every benefit God offers. Don’t walk away from the Word of Life. Walk in it.
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