Eight Ways to Cultivate God's Word

It's our beautiful hymns. We certainly want a world like that. And God has promised that for us. That gives us so much hope, no matter how difficult the things are in this world. God the Father and Jesus Christ are in charge, and they're going to bring it to a happy ending. I want to begin with a statement that struck me several years ago when I first heard it from a minister.

He said that God has given us just two gifts to convict us of the truth. Just two gifts that we've been given. The first one of those gifts is the Holy Spirit. And the second one is God's Word, the Bible. Those are the two things that we receive in this life to help us understand the truth. They both come from God. One is available to the world. We have millions of Bibles, basically translated into 805 different languages. But it is a sealed book. Without the first element of God's Spirit, you cannot understand God's truths. The world doesn't understand that, but it's part of what God reveals. He says nobody can know the Father except by the Son. And nobody can know the Son except by the Father. And it says that it's only Christ who can reveal it to you and through the Holy Spirit. So I want to focus on the second gift that I've mentioned here, given by God, to convict people of His truth. That is, the Word, His Word, the Bible. If we want to grow in grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, as the Scripture tells us, 2 Peter 3, verse 18, the Bible can't just be a passive possession, but it has to be an active one.

God's Word has to be cultivated by us. Therefore, I want to share with you eight comparisons of God's Word that can help us to understand what God's Word can do for us. So the Bible gives different illustrations or comparisons, and I think it's a good way to be able to see all the different facets. Just like a diamond has many different faces to it, this is the same way God's Word has so many faces to be able to understand it. And so the first one is that the Bible is like a seed.

It's like a seed. Let's make sure it is being watered and fertilized enough by us. So let's look at Luke chapter 8 verse 11. Luke chapter 8 verse 11. It says, now the parable is this. This is the one about the parable of the sower. It says, the seed is the Word of God. That's unmistakable. And then verse 15 it says, but the ones that fell on the good ground are those who, having heard the Word with a noble and good heart, keep it and bear fruit with patience. There's a couple more translations that help us understand it even better. God's Word translation says, the seeds that were planted on good ground are people who also hear the Word, but they keep it in their good and honest hearts. You have to look at it. What kind of heart? Is it open? Is it honest?

It says, and produce what is good, despite what life may bring. So it doesn't matter the different trials and tests you go through. You're still there cultivating, fertilizing that seed of God's Word so it will produce the proper fruit. You can do it on its own. Another translation adds even more to this verse. The Passion translation says, the seed that fell into good fertile soil represents those lovers of truth who hear it deep within their hearts. Not superficially, but deep within their hearts. What is being read here in God's Word. They respond by clinging to the Word, keeping it dear as they endure all things in faith. This is the seed that will one day bear much fruit in their lives. It takes time, but that's what it's produced. So that's the first comparison of God's Word to a seed that's planted, and it's planted into our hearts and minds. And it's up to us to water and cultivate it so it doesn't dry up.

Secondly, God's Word is like a fire. Let's make sure we give it enough fuel to keep it alive. In Psalm 119.105, it says, Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. So a lamp has fire in it. That's what produces it. And it's a light to my path to guide us in the proper way. So God's Word has to be fed by reading it.

In 2 Timothy chapter 1 verse 6, Paul tells young Timothy, Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. So one way to stir the Spirit is to add fuel to that fire.

So if the Spirit is sort of the light itself, but you've got to put fuel. You have to put wood. You have to keep it going, or else it can be quenched. It can be put out. In the easy reading version, it says, That is why I want you to remember the gift God gave you. God gave you that gift when I laid my hands on you. Now I want you to use that gift and let it grow more and more like a small flame grows into a fire. And finally, last scripture on this point, it says Psalm 119.97. This is what David thought about God's Word and His law. He says, Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day. I deeply love your law. It says in the contemporary English version, I deeply love your law. I think about it all day. Do we ask ourselves often when we think about something that grabs our attention? That's an interesting thought or comment. Let me see what the Bible says about it.

I have an example. It happened today. I had an interesting thought. And I just had it that what a blessing it is when God produces the riches and not by dishonest gain, which happens so many times. And I memorized two scriptures. One was Proverbs 10, verse 22. Let's read it. Proverbs 10. Just to show you how the process works. First you have the question, and then you go and you study it in the Bible. What is God's answer? Why is it that some riches are blessed and you have a good conscience? It's something that comes from God. You do your part, but you know that it is through Him that the blessings come. It says in Proverbs 10, verse 22, it says, the blessing of the Lord makes one rich, and he adds no sorrow with it. That means that there's no guilty conscience, no dishonesty involved, and there are a lot of rich people that are very troubled people, very fearful. So that's not the type of blessing that God is talking about here. And then the second scripture, Proverbs 15, verse 6, it says, in the house of the righteous there is much treasure, but in the revenue or income of the wicked is trouble. All kinds of issues. I remember reading about one of the richest men here in the United States that was John Rockefeller. And of course, the big oil man, he basically monopolized the oil industry, standard oil and all of that, back in the early 1900s. But yes, he became a millionaire by the age of 30, and then he just multiplied. But he had so many enemies after him, and the government was after him too because of the monopolies developed, that he actually, because of the worrying and concern, lost every hair in his body. Just all the hair was lost. He became bald from the tip of his head all the way down to his toes. And the stomach was so damaged that he could only eat crackers and mother's milk. But you know, he did turn it around, and he said all this money that I was just hoarding and counting, said I'm going to start giving a lot of it away. And he started the Rockefeller Foundation and started giving a lot of wonderful projects. And guess what? His health started to improve, and he started being able to eat more things. And then his disposition changed, and he became more at peace with himself. And eventually he was able to go back to his own diet. He almost was 100 years old before he died. But he was never able to retain any hair, so he had to wear a wig. So he paid a consequence, but it tells us here that there are just spiritual principles involved. And that's what it tells us here, just like David. If you're meditating all day on God's law and how it applies in our lives, and think about it all day, it's a wonderful exercise. Instead of just going around in life and never questioning, oh, look at this beautiful sunset. Who created that? What if there weren't any human beings that existed? What good would it have been? You don't have a seal out there in Seal Beach. Oh, what a wonderful sunset! I really am enjoying all these colors. They can't think about that. It had to be done for human beings. All the effort that God created just to build that kaleidoscope of beautiful colors.

Thirdly, God's Word is like a mirror. It reflects God's will. Notice in James chapter 1 verse 21. James chapter 1 verse 21. It says, Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness, its humility, the implanted Word, that seed that we've talked about, which is able to save your souls. See, in the long run, God's way produces inner peace, inner joy, all of these fruits of God's Spirit, which your families can benefit from. If you don't do it for yourself, do it for your family. But be doers of the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. So we can read it, but if we don't apply it, it doesn't do us any good. We have to put it into practice. He's like a man observing his natural face in a mirror, for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. Still got his own inner image, which is the important thing.

He forgets what the mirror told him.

He says, but he who looks into the perfect law of liberty, so this is describing the mirror of God's Word, who looks into the perfect law of liberty. Because it is God's will that is being shown, how God sees us, and not how we see ourselves. And it's the law of liberty, not of slavery, because God's law liberates us from sin, from wrong thoughts, from wrong attitudes. And so it liberates us. It frees us from all the troubles that besets us. It says, and continues in it, which is another thing. God's Word is not easy to look at all the time, because we see how many imperfections we have. But we have to continue in it and not be a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work. This one will be blessed in what he does. God is going to bless that person who doesn't fear looking into his mirror. We're all sinners. We all make mistakes, but we know we are perfecting through God's Spirit and His Word. We're perfecting ourselves, becoming better people. You can sort of summarize the church that means taking out the worse in us and developing the best in us. Is that a good deal? I think so. In 1 Peter 1, verse 22, it says, In a sense, you have purified your souls. How? In obeying the truth. So as you obey the truth better, you become more purified, because the truth is the soap that cleans us. Through the Spirit, that's the first gift that God gives us, He says, In sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again, not of corruptible seed, but incorruptible, through the Word of God, which lives and abides forever. So again, the Bible repeats itself, this formula, the Spirit, the Word, how much we have to be developing it in our lives.

And I'm not going to be able to cover the eight ways in this first sermon. I'm just going to cover the first four, and then part two will have the last four.

But the fourth way that I want to talk about, it is like a jigsaw puzzle.

The biblical pieces have to fit together to show the overall purpose. I remember one of my daughters loved jigsaw puzzles, and so we'd buy, start out with 500, then 1,000, eventually 5,000, and she just enjoyed it. It was therapeutic. How many like to work on jigsaw puzzles? See? Quite a number.

Well, do we also work on putting God's Word, that jigsaw puzzle, the pieces? Do we work on putting them properly? Sometimes we can do a physical puzzle, but it's the spiritual puzzle, so it's even more important. Notice in 1 Corinthians chapter 2. 1 Corinthians chapter 2. In verse 13, he's talking here about receiving God's Spirit and then using it to understand God's Word better. Let's start a little before this. Let's start in verse 10, just to get the proper context. It says, But God has revealed them to us through his Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. It helps us to deepen our understanding of God and his ways.

What makes us human beings? Well, we have a Spirit in man that gives us understanding. It imparts things that animals do not have. I remember when, maybe in the early 70s in the church, the 1970s or so, when the church was studying about the spirit of man. Some churches believed, no, the spirit of man is born evil. You start out with an evil nature. And then others say, no, it's just a good nature. And what we found in the scriptures is that the human spirit is neutral. It's like a blank slate. Now, you have human nature, but that hasn't been activated yet. And so the spirit in man can be developed positively or negatively, but it also needs to work with God's Spirit. That's where you unify it and you have that complete person. If you lack God's Spirit, it's just your spirit of man that is working, and it develops according to the culture and the philosophies that a person adopts. So that's what it says here. What's in a person's thoughts and minds? Well, it's the spirit of man that is receiving all of this knowledge. He says, even so, no one knows the things of God except, and it should say here, by the Spirit of God. So the spirit of man does not have God's Spirit. You can add God's Spirit and then you can understand things. That's why it's such a rare person that has both.

Verse 12, he says, now we have received not the spirit of the world, which is the carnal and satanic type of influence, but the Spirit, and it should say, which is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. The spiritual truths. These are freely given. You can't pay for it.

Of course, in my life I've seen so many things and experienced such interesting anecdotes. It says here that these are freely given.

Well, in the church back in the 70s, when I went to Ambassador College, I got to know a fellow by the name of Bobby Fischer. How many have heard of Bobby Fischer? Wow! It's almost the whole congregation. He was the first U.S. chess master that beat all the Russians. Guess what? The guy was intellectually so smart that he started saying, I want to know about whether there's a true church or not out there. Guess what? After studying all the churches, all the religions, the Buddhists, and everything else, he came and said, no. The church of God is the one that has the truth. Just from his intellect. He could actually look at a chess board and play, and he could think 20 moves ahead. And so, this man, you could not fool him. And he came to it. And so, he eventually went to Pasadena. They had a little apartment for him. I think Dave Wallach might have known a little bit of that or not. Anybody know about... Because I was just a student there. I was playing basketball in the evenings. And sure enough, one day there was Bobby Fischer with one of our physical ed instructors.

And I said, why? What is Bobby Fischer doing here? And one of the ministers said, oh, well, he's very interested in the church, and he wants to get baptized. Wow! Probably the richest man that's ever come into our church, right? And you know what? No minister ever baptized him. Why? Because he put a condition. I know this is the truth, but I don't want to fellowship with people. I just want to hear the messages through the radio or through the communications. But he didn't want...he didn't feel comfortable around other people. And the minister said, I'm sorry. That fellowship is one of the things that you have to accept. Whether you're uncomfortable or not, you have to be there with the humble people. And he said, no. And we said, okay, you can't be baptized. And he left. And then he went on his way. But that was a moment in time when the smartest guy, basically, in the world, figured out by studying what we believed and studying the Bible that that was the right way to explain it. So it tells us here that these are the things freely given. Now, we weren't going to say, oh, he can bring a lot of money. Big deal. We've had people that have tried to buy their way into the church. And no, sorry. This is free. This is for the poorest person as well as the richest person. But there are conditions. You have to be willing to come to services and to fellowship with the brethren, because we are a body. We are now, whether it's man or woman, whatever nationality, doesn't matter. We're all one baptized by Christ. Verse 13, it says, these things we also speak. This is part of the teaching. Not in words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches. That's in us comparing spiritual things with spiritual. And this is talking about comparing one part of what the Bible says with another part, and unifying it together, bringing it together.

It says here, comparing spiritual truths in one section of the Bible with those in the other. That's why people can't understand this jigsaw puzzle. Unless you have God's Spirit, you're not going to put it together properly. So we need that wide and deep understanding, building up a truth through bringing all the Scriptures on that subject. And once we have it right, once you've got all of it, it points to one action. That's why we keep the Feasal Tabernacles. Because that was kept in the Old Testament, and it was kept in the New Testament.

And not only that, the Book of Acts, we have all of the travels of the Apostle Paul, and he's keeping the Day of Atonement, he's keeping Pentecost, he's keeping Passover, Days of Unleaven. It's all mentioned there. So, see, we don't care what a certain person says about that. Some authority figure. No, the authority figure is the Bible. Just like one time I had to tell one of the people that were the heads of when they started going off and took the church, wrong teachings, anything. And I said, we don't have a pope in this church. The Bible is our pope. We have to go by what the Bible says. Sometimes we can spend hours in a jigsaw puzzle. How much time do we spend figuring things out in God's Word? Today, it is more easy than ever to study. We have online Bible commentaries, dictionaries, just a wealth. You can just put it in a Google and just ask. You'd be surprised what that Google many times says. This is the truth, what the United Church of God is saying. And they use our website to prove a lot of things. Why? Because it makes sense. It's not based on a church. It's based on biblical logic and God's Word and His Spirit.

Remember what happened in 1995? Many of the brethren had quit studying their Bible like they should, asking questions, checking things out for themselves. And many got duped. And our salvation can be at stake. Let's go to Acts 17. This is what we call the Berean attitude.

The Berean attitude. Acts 17, verse 10. It says, Then the brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea. This is in Greece. When they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. These were more fair-minded than those in the Sonica, in that they received the Word with all readiness and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. See, they were looking into their Bibles to see whether that was so or not. Just like at the first message that was given.

It brought up. It's there. It's all there. God's truths. But a person must want it and apply it. He says, Therefore, many of them believed. So what was the result? People who searched didn't say, Oh, this is the religion of my mother and father. Or this is what my church teaches.

No, this is what I have proven that is in the Bible. This is what the Bible teaches. That's why I keep it. That's what they did. Therefore, many of them believed. And also, not a few of the Greeks prominent women as well as men. So some of the Greeks that attended at that time, they were what they called God-fearers. And when they came in, they said, Wow, this is the truth.

And they started attending the church that Paul founded. At that time, there. So these are four different comparisons of what God's word should be in our lives. The first one, it's like a seed. Let's make sure it's being watered and fertilized enough by us. Secondly, it's like a fire. Let's make sure we give it enough fuel to keep it lit because it can disappear. We can become so distracted with other things that our understanding and knowledge of God's word shrivels, dries up, withers. It's also like a mirror. It reflects God's will.

So let's constantly peek into it to see how God sees us. And let's do something about it. And then lastly, it's like a jigsaw puzzle. That the biblical pieces have to be fit together to show the overall purpose.

And you can basically mention and reduce it to God's plan of salvation. That's the purpose. Bringing many children to glory and through God's stages. Passover, first he sent Jesus Christ in that first stage to be our Savior. But that's not enough because then the Days of Unleavened Bread is a people after Christ's sacrifice that were purified.

Unleavened bread was removed from their lives. They started a new way of life. But then they also needed God's Spirit, which is Pentecost. And so that's the plan. So everything in the Bible has to fit that plan. And so Pentecost, it's the story of God's Spirit. From the first time in the Garden of Eden, there was the Tree of Life. It was God offering Adam and Eve the opportunity to have God's Spirit at that time, unite with the Spirit of man, and begin following God and eventually being resurrected to eternal life. And that goes all the way to Revelation 22, where you have the Tree of Life again that is brought out.

And then afterwards you have the Feast of Trumpets, the great next event, the coming of Jesus Christ, with the trumpets blaring out to the world. They're not going to be happy. The kings and rulers of the world, that's why they say when that trumpet sounds, it doesn't say, the world will rejoice. Remember what it says? What does it say? The world will lament. It's almost like, again, that famous Penelope with the dangers of Penelope.

You always had that nasty, macknasty guy, you know, and drats, you know, foiled again. Human beings will say, oh, he's coming, ah, foiled again. We are not going to be able to do our crimes and evilness. That's the attitude that they have. And then, of course, we have the Day of Atonement. The next great event, Satan's going to be put out. He's not going to influence human beings anymore. So I'm going to transmit through the airwaves the attitudes of lust and greed and vanity, which is being bombarded. That's all going to be removed.

And then finally, of course, Feasal Tabernacles, when Christ sets his kingdom up. And boy, is that ever going to change everything. And then, of course, the last great day, about the future resurrections after the thousand years. So the Bible, those are the main chapters in the Bible.

And the first one with the Passover has to do with the Ten Commandments, because we've got to quit breaking them. So, as I mentioned here, it's like a jigsaw puzzle. It has to be fit together to show that overall purpose of God's plan of salvation. God willing, then, next time I give a sermon, because I'm planning to go to Mexico City next Sabbath, but then God willing, be back. You can hear even the four more fascinating ways that we can cultivate God's Word.