Derek Prince - How To Get God's Word Into Your Heart
This is a clip from: God's Word Your Inexhaustible Resource
In the previous session I spoke about various different effects that the Word of God is designed to produce in us who believe it. I want to return briefly to two because they're related and I want to use them to illustrate one another. I spoke, first of all, that faith comes by the hearing of God's Word. That's a wonderful truth. We can never over-emphasize it. If you don't have faith you don't need to stay without faith because faith comes. It comes by the hearing of the Word of God. And then at the end of the previous session I explained how God's word is intended to provide health or medicine for all our physical body. I illustrated it briefly from my own experience but only very briefly.
The passage that we looked at in Proverbs 4... I'd like to return there for a moment because it's a perfect illustration of what hearing is. So if you're wondering what it means to hear God's word, I can illustrate it for you and base it on my personal experience from Proverbs 4. While I was there in the hospital and I discovered these verses and I saw that they offered me health or medicine, I said to myself that's what I'm going to do. I'm grateful for what the doctors have done but they've not been able to provide healing so I'm going to take God's word as my medicine. When I said that I had the impression that God spoke to me inaudibly but very clearly. And He said when the doctor gives a person medicine the instructions for taking it are on the bottle. Then He said this is my medicine bottle and the instructions are on it, you better read them.
So I turned back and I saw that there are four instructions for taking God's word as medicine. You see, if a doctor gives you medicine in the natural but you don't take it according to the directions the doctor will say you couldn't expect it to do you any good. So if you have this passage in front of you or if you will listen I'll give you the four directions for taking God's word as medicine. And there's probably not a single person here who won't need these directions at some time in your life. Very few of us live a full length of life without some encounter with sickness. So, store this up and have it ready when the situation arises. Here are the four directions.
Number one, give attention to my words.
Number two, incline your ear to my sayings.
Number three, do not let them depart from your eyes.
And number four, keep them in the midst of your heart.
Let's consider just briefly what's involved in those four directions. First of all, give attention. When you turn to the Bible and to the word of God you need to give it your total undivided attention. Don't be distracted. Try to shut yourself off from all other voices or influences or impressions. Give undivided attention to the word of God. After all, it's God speaking to you. It's worthwhile listening to what He has to say. The second instruction is incline your ear or bow down your ear. And that is an attitude of humility. As a matter of fact, my mind is on Africa because I've been quoting this. But in an African primary or intermediate school if a pupil comes up to the teacher with his exercise book he will stand in front of the teacher with the book open and bow his head, incline his ear. In other words, he's saying you're the teacher, I'm the pupil. So that attitude of inclining your ear means: I want you to teach me, I'm willing to be taught, I need to learn.
See, I myself had this problem because my impression of Christianity from way back was that if you were going to be a Christian you should expect to be pretty miserable most of your life. My attitude was I'm not sure that it's worth being miserable for that. And I carried this attitude over even after I was born again. So as I studied the Bible it seemed to be saying to me all the time: God wants you healthy, He wants you strong, He wants you successful. And I kept saying to myself that's too good to be true that couldn't be what the Bible means. It must mean something different. So while I was reasoning like that with myself once again the Lord spoke to me, inaudibly and He said now, who is the teacher and who is the pupil? I said Lord, you're the teacher and I'm the pupil. And then He said would you mind letting me teach you?
And you see, I realized I wasn't inclining my ear. I wasn't prepared to listen. I had my own preconceptions as to what I thought God would be saying. And, if He was saying something different I couldn't hear it. Now, for those who have no Christian background you may not have that problem. In many ways you start with an advantage. You start with an open mind. But for those of us, and that's many of us here, who have some kind of background in Christianity, we've probably inherited quite a number of traditions and preconceptions which are not in line with the Bible. And it's often very hard for us to hear what God is saying because He's saying something different from what we expected Him to say. So the solution for that is incline your ear bow down your head, be humble, be teachable. I've been a teacher in various circumstances. I know it's impossible to teach people who don't want to be taught. You can do all the motions. You can go through all the lectures but there's no result.
So there has to be a desire to be taught, an attitude of being teachable. The third direction is: Do not let them depart from your eyes. And that, I think, means focus. Focus on the word of God. Don't look partly at the Bible and partly at other things because they may contradict what the Bible says. It's all really, in a sense, all of this means shutting yourself in with what God is saying to you through the Bible. Don't be distracted. Don't let any other influence turn you away from what God is saying. In the teaching profession- and I'm sure some of you are teachers we used to teach the primary school, teaching students that there are two main gates to the child's attention. The ear gate and the eye gate. And good teaching uses both. That's why a video in some ways is more effective than audio because it used the eye gate as well as the ear gate.
Well you see, God was ahead of the teaching psychologists by about 3,000 years because God says the ear gate and the eye gate. And then the end result is keep them in the midst of your heart. The purpose of all these instructions is to get God's word into your heart, the very center of human personality. The next verse of Proverbs, verse 23, says: Keep your heart with all diligence for out of it spring the issues of life. In other words, what is in your heart will determine the course of your life. So guard your heart.
I remember one of the African languages of my students said guard your heart with all your strength, for everything in life comes out of it. I cannot overemphasize that. For each of you here, what is in your heart will ultimately determine the course of your life. You cannot have the wrong thing in your heart and live right. And you cannot have the right thing in your heart and live wrong. Because, the heart is the source of all life that we lead. And the purpose of these instructions is to show you how you can get God's word into your heart. Through the ear gate, through the eye gate, through focused attention, through humility, through being teachable. And when you've put all that together, that is hearing. That's how faith comes. Whether it's sickness that you're dealing with or some other problem if you need faith this passage in Proverbs 4 describes how you can get faith.