God Speaking

“I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.”

(Psalm 119: 11)

Quite a few years ago my husband and I were attending the Alpha course 2 and during one of the sessions Nicky Gumble used a powerful little story to illustrate how having a lot of knowledge about a subject and actually taking it to heart and using it, were vastly different. The story went something like this. A young man was given a new very expensive car from his uncle, delivered to his home. He carefully took the owner’s manual from the car and spent many days studying every detail of the engine and some days he opened the door and admired the immaculate inside. Eventually his uncle came to see how he liked the car and the boy could recite all the details on how the engine worked, Then the uncle asked, “How do you like driving it?”  The boy was surprised and answered, “Oh I haven’t driven it!”

Nicky Gumble was really illustrating how sometimes we as Christians think that knowledge of God’s word is all we need and forget that we need to take it to heart and live it!

It is quite amazing to check two words in Scripture; heart and knowledge and find so many verse containing these words. According to Proverbs, knowledge is very desirable to obtain;

“Wise men store up knowledge, but the mouth of a fool invites ruin.” (Proverbs 10:14)

But at the same time knowledge alone without it being stored in our hearts is not enough, we need to make sure it enters our hearts.

“For wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.” (Proverbs 2: 10)

Jesus, himself, became very angry with the teachers of the law who were taking pride in their knowledge of the law, but not putting it into practice and what was even worse, hindering others from experiencing the joy of living God’s word.

“Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourself have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.” (Luke 11: 52)

So what is the key to knowledge that Jesus is talking about?

Firstly, it is still important to know the Heavenly Father through his word. Unless we read and study Scripture, we will not know who our Lord and Saviour is. Next we need to call upon our Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, to illuminate the words so we grasp the meaning. Then we have knowledge.

But the next step is the most important one, this beautiful knowledge needs to be stored deep in our hearts. What a pity not to take this final step. The boy in the story who only knew all about his car mechanically, was missing out on the joy of driving his car. When we hide God’s word in our hearts we have the joy of actually living with and walking in the footsteps of Jesus.