6) HAMMER:
The Word of God is also compared to a hammer in Jeremiah 23:29. A hammer is used to break hard stones. The stubbornness of human heart is compared to the hardness of a rock. We sin a lot. But we do not feel the guilt. We do not feel sorry for it. We do not repent. We do not care for God, whom alone we make sad because of our sins. We do not respond to the love of God. This is the reason why a human heart is compared to a rock. This is not only the situation of an unbeliever, but also at times true also for born-again believers. The Word of God is the powerful hammer which can break a hard, stone-like stubborn heart. Unbelievers read the Bible rarely. Therefore it is important that the Word of God be preached to them so that the stubbornness of their hearts could be broken and come to God. When we repeatedly preach the Gospel to unbelievers, their hearts will break and become sensitive to the love of God. But, what if a believer’s heart becomes hard?! Yes, it is possible for a believer’s heart to become hard. If you are a believer and reading this, you can surely testify that your heart was hardened on several occasions since you have been saved. There could have been times after you were saved, when you repeatedly committed a sin and you never felt sorry for that. Surely you might have experienced that some times you were not too sensitive to the love and discipline of God. No matter how much you tried, not even a single drop of tear flowed out of your eyes. That love and readiness to forgive others had disappeared at times. You were filled with anger and hatred. All these are signs that your heart was hardened. Next time when you feel like that, do not forget that there is a hammer to break the hardness of your heart. Open your Bible. Read and meditate upon the Word of God. By doing that you will be giving repeated blows on your stubborn heart. Spend time with God’s Word until you feel your heart starting to break. Then, again spend time with your Bible until you find that your heart has been completely broken into pieces. Then, still meditate upon God’s Word until your heart becomes like fine powder, ready to be re-shaped according to the desire of the Heavenly Father. Many believers stop meditating upon God’s Word as soon as they find that their heart is beginning to break. Others still continue until they find that their heart has been broken into pieces and then stop there. But, today I tell you; do not stop to give blows on your heart with this divine hammer until you find that it has become like fine powder. Steam power plants are places where electricity is generated. There they use coal to generate fire. They do not burn coal when it is in the form of big blocks, but first they break the coal with specially designed hammers until the coal becomes very fine powder. This coal in the form of fine powder is very powerful that it can explode like a bomb. This fine-powdered coal has the capacity to generate very large amounts of heat within a small amount of time. This heat is used to generate electric power. Likewise, when your heart is broken, God can use it to produce spiritual power. It is good (actually great!) to have a broken heart, because broken hearts are the real power sources which could be used to advance the Kingdom of God. The more broken your heart is, the more spiritual power it will be able to generate. A broken heart is a spiritual beauty. It is deep. It impacts the lives of many people for good. Many believers want to lead careless lives with no broken hearts. They do not want to be serious. They are on the surface. They are happy, but this is a happiness which is the cause of God’s sorrow! How is your heart? The love of God is flowing like a river. If your heart is like a rock, then it cannot get dissolved in that holy-river. If your heart is broken and is like a fine powder, then it will be dissolved in the river of God’s love. So, take the hammer and start giving blows to yourself! It will hurt you! But do not stop. When your heart becomes like fine powder, then you will surely recognize the sweetness in complete brokenness before the One True Living God.
7) MILK:
The Word of God is compared to milk in I Peter 2:2. Here, the Apostle Peter says that we should desire the Word of God just as the new born babies desire milk. It is amazing how the infants crave for milk. Nobody taught them to drink milk. Nobody inculcated a desire in them for milk. This comes naturally to the infants. They won’t stop crying until they get the milk. Nobody teaches them how to drink milk. It comes to them naturally. This is the nature with which every baby is born. They can’t digest anything but milk. It is similar with a newly-born believer in Jesus Christ. They desire the spiritual milk of God’s Word. Nobody will force them to read their Bibles, but they can’t get along without reading them. Like new-born babies, they drink the milk of God’s Word with great desire. When they do not have time to read their Bibles, they cry like infants. They will long for the time when they could get into meditating God’s Word. It will be difficult for them to leave their Bibles until their spiritual thirst and hunger is satisfied. Nothing can distract them, because, to them the Bible is the only one which is their real need at that time. Friends, or movies, or serials, or cartoons, or money, or food, or anything else which was previously interesting to them now becomes uninteresting. Their whole interest would be to drink that spiritual milk. Even if they try to feed themselves with other things they can’t get digested. The only thing they are able to take in is God’s Word. Nobody will have to come and teach them how to read their Bibles. Their newly-born spiritual nature will tell them how to do it. And there would be no question of not understanding the Bible at all. No matter how foolish the person is, he can understand the basics of God’s Word because of his newly born-again nature. If you never understood anything in the Bible, then you are not a born-again person. If you never craved for the Word of God as infants crave for milk, then you are not born-again. If you never felt sad because you were not able to find time to read your Bible, then you know nothing about Jesus Christ. Just as a newly born baby cannot help but cry for milk, the newly born-again believer cannot help but cry for the Word of God. This is one of the strongest proofs that a person is genuinely saved. The fact that you have read this message until this point is proof itself that you are saved. Otherwise, you could have left after reading one or two pages (or even 2 or 3 lines!). An infant feels that the only thing it needs to survive is milk. If you are saved, then you should have thought at least once in your life that the only thing sufficient for you is the Word of God. Had you ever felt like that? Rejoice if you did. You are God’s own child. You are the possession of Lord Jesus.
Milk has all the nutrients sufficient for an infant. If you do not get God’s Word immediately after you have been saved, then you are in serious spiritual danger. This could be especially true for those who cannot read. Many illiterates are being born again but they can’t read their Bibles. It is the responsibility of God’s servants to see that sound doctrine is preached to them. Not only should they get preaching, but also they should be educated so that they could read their Bibles by themselves. And, those who are literates and are newly born-again must meditate God’s Word. They must hear the God’s Word preached by a faithful and honest God’s servant. If you are a newly born-again believer and reading this, then do not leave your Bible. Let it be there with you always. Read it and meditate upon it whenever you get time. Keep your Bible beside your pillow when you sleep. Love your Bible as you love a best friend, because the Bible is the only thing which is able to give you strength. The Bible is the only thing, which you could be able to digest. Do not try to fill yourself with all those useless friends’ fellowship, or movies, or what ever old things you have. They will only do harm to your spirit. Drink the milk of God’s Word. If you do not do it now, you may never grow to your full potential in spirit. There is ample scientific data and proof which show that the babies who get to drink mother’s milk become healthier when they grow old than those babies who do not get to drink mother’s milk. Do not neglect your Bible. Love it. Desire it. Crave for it. Cry for it. Drink it. Be filled with it.
8) SOLID FOOD:
The Word of God is compared to Solid Food in Hebrews 5:12 and also in I Corinthians 3:2. Just now we have seen that the Word of God is like milk. But, it is also compared to solid food. Infants gradually gain strength by drinking milk continuously. When they gain enough strength to digest, they will be given solid food. Some portions of the Bible can be easily understood and digested. But some other portions are hard to understand and digest. To understand and digest this solid food from God’s Word, a person has to possess spiritual strength and maturity. God’s servants are spiritual mentors. They should be able to discern the level of the spiritual maturity of the believers and preach accordingly. You can’t give solid food to infants. You can’t share deep spiritual truths from the Word of God to newly born-again believers. You should not share the basics again and again with matured believers. The reason some preachers always preach the basics of Christian faith and never go into deeper truths is because they themselves are not matured in the spirit.
There are some other preachers. They find out and experience deeper truths from the Bible and they get exited. In their excitement, they forget that many people in their congregation are still not spiritually mature to receive such deep spiritual truths, and continue preaching them. The result is great confusion among those infants in spirit, because they still do not have strength to digest such strong spiritual food. The worth of a preacher is found in the ability to preach deeper truths in a simple and understandable language to the infants in spirit. The servants of God, especially the preachers and teachers of the Word of God should be very discerning. They should preach and teach according to the spiritual maturity of their congregations. Of course, you can find a wide variety of spiritual maturity in a single congregation. In the same congregation, one believer may be highly spiritually matured and the other may be just a newly born-again person. This is why, one-to-one evangelism, preaching, and house-visiting are very important services in the advancement of the Kingdom of God. This is a huge task, which needs many workers. That is why Jesus said that the harvest is plenty but the workers are few. We should pray that God will send sufficient workers into His Vineyard.
I had shifted my concentration onto God’s servants. Now we will be back with the believers! If you are a newly born-again believer, then don’t worry if you are not able to understand some sentences or passages or even books in the Bible. You will gradually understand them when you grow in your spirit by going through various kinds of experiences in life. These experiences may include sadness, joy, shock, answers to prayers, un-granted prayer requests, a difficult person you had to deal with, or poverty, or riches, or sin, or temptation, or anything in life. All these will gradually make you spiritually mature. You will gradually learn how Jesus will act and take you through all these different situations. As you go through these experiences, you will begin to understand and digest deeper spiritual truths in the Word of God. On occasions, you will be surprised to find that many sentences in the Bible that you had understood in a particular way now seem to have a deeper spiritual meaning to them. The same words which were useful to you as milk in the early days of your spiritual life are now beginning to show themselves as solid food to you! This is the miracle of the Bible! The same words of the Bible can perform the functions of both milk and solid food at different times! No book ever written has this wonderful ability. The Bible is the Word of God.
Some believers never try to discover this wonderful nature of the Holy Bible. They can only drink the milk of the Bible, but they can’t receive solid food from it. They say, “I have read the Bible 50 times. I don’t think there is anything new I have to know. No matter how many times I read, it is the same old story.” Are you thinking like this? Then you should know that you have failed to dig out the solid food. You should know that, even though you have read the Bible for 50 times, you are still a spiritual infant, unable to take in solid food. You don’t have that strength. This is because you did not search for answers from the Bible to all your life’s situations. You did not diligently seek out from the Bible how to behave in every kind of situation. You just neglected it. You did not give the Holy Bible its deserved place in your life. You just did not respect it. The result is that even though you have read it for 50 times in your life, you were never able to find solid food in it. You were never able to explain from the Bible to at least one person. The Bible has solid food in it.
There are some newly born-again believers who want to learn every thing very fast! It can’t happen like that. It is good that you have the hunger and thirst to know the deeper things of God. But you should be patient to learn everything that God wants you to learn. God has many things for you to learn. You can’t digest them in just one month. It is a life-long process. But you can be confident about one thing. No matter what your life’s situation is, God’s Word has the answer. No matter how much spiritual energy you require to overcome a particular problem in life, the Word of God provides you that strength with its solid food. This solid spiritual food can give you strength to face the fiercest attacks of the devil. Ultimately when you reach the end of road in your journey of life in this world, you will be able to give testimony with full faith and assurance that the Word of God indeed has solid food in it to give strength to fight every battle of life and equip you to face the God of Heavens and Earth with boldness. This testimony of yours will truly glorify the God of the divine, everlasting, and holy Word.
9) MIRROR:
The Word of God is compared to a mirror in James 1:23. A mirror plays a very important role in our lives. Many people can find time to stand before a mirror than for doing breakfast in the morning! This simple incident itself indicates the importance of a mirror in our lives. The importance we give to our outward appearance is quite significant. After life and pride, it is beauty to which human beings give more importance. When we look at a mirror, we see in it the true condition of our faces. A man recognizes how he looks only when he looks at a mirror. When we learn that the Word of God is compared to a mirror, we should recognize that we can see the true nature or condition of our spirits in that mirror. The Word of God shows our true nature. You come and stand before a mirror with the intention of checking your outward appearance. In the same manner, you should come to the Word of God with the intention of checking your inward appearance. The Word of God does not only reveal the truths about God, salvation, satan and such other issues, but also about you (of course, even me!).
You can know something about yourself by yourself. You can know something about yourself from your parents, siblings, friends, teachers, colleagues, society, and such. But no one can make you know completely about yourself including yourself! Almost everyone thinks, “I know completely about myself”. We often hear phrases like, “You need not tell me. I know about myself”, or, “Do you think you know better about me than myself”, or, “I can decide what is best for me”. We say such things out of the assumption that we know completely about ourselves. God wants to teach a lesson to all those who think that they know everything about themselves. Just think about the way God created our faces. He located the eyes in our face in such a way that it is impossible to look at our faces with our own eyes. Yes. Nobody can look at their own face with their own eyes! Just imagine a man who never saw an image or reflection of his face on a mirror or water or metal or on any reflective surface. Such a man does not have any idea of how he looks like. Other people can recognize how he is. They can know his face. They can give him a limited explanation to him about the appearance of his face. But these explanations cannot give the least idea to him about his face. The information such as, “You are black. Your eyes are brown. Your face is round. You have a short nose …..” cannot help the man about how he looks, unless he looks his image on a reflective surface by himself. But if someone comes to this man and tells him nothing about his face but simply puts a mirror in front of his eyes, then the man will know everything about his appearance.
If you want to know about your inward appearance or the nature of your heart, then don’t try to do it by yourself. It is as useless as trying to see your face with your own eyes. Don’t even depend on others to know about your inward nature. It is the same as someone explaining to you about how your face looks like. If you really want to see for yourself your true inward nature wholly, then come in front of the mirror called the Word of God. This spiritual mirror shows you everything about yourself. In front of this mirror you need not try hard to find about yourself like the philosophers do. Once you come to this mirror, you need not run here and there to “spiritual gurus” or psychologists or philosophers to know about reality. The Word of God is the divinely ordained perfect mirror for you to check yourself. You can spend as much time as you like before this mirror, until you completely remember about your nature. You can prepare yourself to look beautiful in your spirit in front of this mirror. How many times did you neglect taking breakfast or lunch or dinner because you were busy in front of a mirror? Have you recognized that spiritual beauty is more important than physical beauty? Do you realize that the beauty of the spirit is everlasting, while the beauty of the flesh is perishing? Do you recognize that it is more important for you to look beautiful to Jesus, than to your boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife or society? How much time are you spending daily in front of a mirror? Are you giving at least 10% of that time to be in front of the spiritual mirror of the Word of God?
The world may deceive you about who you really are. You will deceive yourself about who you are. But the Word of God will never deceive you. It will show you as you are. It will give you all the opportunities to recognize your defects and rectify them. It will not show you as a better person than you really are, like some people do. Neither will it show you as a worse person than you really are as some people do. You may be mistaken about your nature. The Word of God is the pure spiritual mirror. God gave it to you. It is an indispensable gift. Value it. Treasure it. Use it. Revere it. Spend time in front of it.
10) SWORD OF THE SPIRIT:
Finally, the Word of God is compared to the sword of the Spirit in Ephesians 6:17. This comparison of God’s Word is basically different from the previous nine comparisons that we had meditated. In those nine comparisons we saw that the Word of God is acting upon us. But, this last comparison shows that the Word of God acts upon our enemy, the satan. Those nine comparisons come under one category and this tenth comparison alone comes under a different category. The Word of God is the sword of the Spirit. Here, Spirit means not human spirit but the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit can effectively use this sword through you against satan. But, before this can happen, you should allow the Word of God to work in you according to those nine natures which we meditated earlier. If those nine works of the God’s Word are effectively accomplished in you, then you can wage war with it as the sword of the Spirit against satan. You cannot win over satan with God’s Word before first letting it win over you. First you have to be conquered and filled with God’s Word before going out to defeat satan with it. Some times, people speak to satan with God’s Word and find that nothing happens. Satan is still prevailing over their lives in spite of using God’s Word against him. This is because they are not allowing the Word of God to first work in them. Let the Word of God first work in you according to those nine natures and then go to fight against satan with it. You will discover that the hold of satan is being released from your life. You will find that strong holds are loosening up. The Word of God is a two-edged sword. It cuts you for salvation, and at the same time cuts satan for destruction.
Note that the Word of God is the sword of the Spirit. That is, it is the Holy Spirit who must use it for you against satan. For the Holy Spirit to use this sword on your behalf against satan, He must first find it in you. If the Word of God is not there in you, then the Holy Spirit cannot work for you. Keep the sword in you and allow the Holy Spirit to use that sword. Some people forget about the Holy Spirit and try to use God’s Word against Satan by themselves. You cannot use the sword against satan by yourselves. Holy Spirit should do that. Do not neglect the third Person of the Trinity. There are some others who forget about God’s Word and think that Holy Spirit will fight for them against satan. But that will never happen. Holy Spirit always uses the sword of God’s Word to fight against satan. If He cannot find that sword in you, then He will not fight against satan for you. You may have the baptism of the Holy Spirit. You may be an anointed person. But that is no reason to neglect your Bible. If you don’t read your Bible and meditate upon it, soon you will find that the Holy Spirit had left you and gone far away from you. That would be a dangerous situation because you will remain alone and helpless against your cruel enemy, the satan.
Many believers are not aware that satan attacks them. God’s Word is not given to us just for our relaxation. It is meant for war; war against evil forces of darkness. You should always be ready for war. You should be war-minded. You should be merciless against satan. Take up the sword. Hold it tight. Be determined. The Holy Spirit will use that sword against satan. Holy Spirit will move your hands in a skillful way against satan. You just give up to the Holy Spirit and hold the sword tight. Don’t be afraid or discouraged of the fact that the enemy is strong and fighting against you with wily wickedness. Persist in holding the sword tight. Do not loosen your grip on it. As long as you have the sword in your hand, the Holy Spirit will make you fight against satan. But once you lose your grip over it, the Holy Spirit cannot do anything for you. If that happens, the enemy will wound you. You will be wounded with sin, sadness, depression, fear, doubtfulness, sickness, discouragement, anger, etc. But, if you hold on tight to your sword, you can wound satan with sadness, depression, discouragement, fear, and doubtfulness! Hold the sword tight. Don’t be confident that you can wage the war by yourself. Let the Holy Spirit move your hands skillfully. Use the Word of God in the power of the Holy Spirit.
CONCLUSION:
The wounds that satan inflicts on God’s people are very painful. Recovering from that pain will be very hard. If you want to avoid those wounds, you have to use the sword of the Spirit. Many believers are in pain because they did not give God’s Word its deserved place in their lives. They did not honor God’s Word. They did not allow God’s Word to work in them as seed, or purifying water, or lamp, or two-edged sword, or fire, or hammer, or milk, or solid food, or mirror. But they want to use it as a sword against satan. Some are so ignorant that they don’t even know that God’s Word can be used as a sword against satan by the Holy Spirit. Victory and joy will come when you allow this miraculous Word of God to work in and for you according to its ten different natures. Make a decision now itself to read and meditate upon God’s Word daily. Hold your Bible. Hold it to the end of your life. Love it till you breathe your last. Honor it above everything else in your life. The Word of God will take you to Heaven to be with Jesus forever.
