Hearing God’s Voice from His Word
James 4:8 says, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.”
Take a moment and turn your attention to God. Tell God that you desire to trust and obey Him. Ask God to speak to you from His word.
Psalm of the Day
Psalm 51:10-12 Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
Read the entire Psalm
You read these verses from this Psalm, now pray this Psalm to God. Ask Him to purify your heart, renew your spirit. Ask Him to draw near to You and fill you anew with the Holy Spirit. Ask Him to restore joy. Ask Him to give you a willing spirit and to sustain you. Yes you can put effort towards all these things that you pray for but pray to the merciful God and ask for Him to intervene.
SCRIPTURE READING:
10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who prophesied about the grace that would come to you, searched and carefully investigated. 11 They inquired into what time or what circumstances the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating when he testified in advance to the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.
All flesh is like grass,
and all its glory like a flower of the grass.
The grass withers, and the flower falls,
25 but the word of the Lord endures forever.
And this word is the gospel that was proclaimed to you.
Having God’s Ear through Prayer
- Express thanksgiving to God.
- Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal sin to you.
- Confess your sin to Him and receive forgiveness.
(1 John 1:9 “If we confess our sin He is faithful and just and will forgive our sins.”) - Bring your personal requests to God.
(Psalm 62:8 “Pour out your heart before God”) - Pray for someone in your small group.
- Join with others from River and pray for our national, state, and local government leaders.
Living as God’s People by applying the Bible
Scripture Reflection from the Sermon
Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
2 Peter 3:15,16
If you struggle to understand how we got our Bible, it’s okay, but you need not worry. God has in fact spoken to us in his word. God directly inspired the authors of Scripture. These documents were then treasured and preserved and copied over and over in order to be distributed and used in Churches. We don’t have the originals, which is probably a good thing. They would have likely be worshipped, and they might have been altered… a terrible thought. What we have is better–we have thousands of hand copies. From these thousands of copies, we know with high certainty what the originals said, but there is no danger of one person altering a single copy and distorting the Word of God. The first church recognized the Word of God, even as Peter expresses it here in this passage. They knew that Paul’s letters were inspired by God. The later church councils were said to have established the “canon” of the Bible (the books that were accepted as fully inspired and authoritative). This is not true in actual practice. Scripture was not “created” by any one person or group. What councils officially declared was what the church had long known. The books that were and are the Word of God had been preached and lived with great power of the Holy Spirit.
Application: What would happen if you lived with full confidence in the Scripture? I understand that you may have trouble knowing what parts of the Bible mean. Peter himself confessed as much. But what if, when you are confident you know that it means, you held nothing back in obeying? Men and women who have made this decision and followed through have experienced God in unusual ways. Do you want to join them?