The Sword Of The Spirit

And my guess is that many of you have experienced that. As you sit down and read through God's Word and you read about something...you may be reading about love and saying to yourself, “I don't love enough, I have such a lack of love.” You may be reading about bitterness and say, “That’s me, I have such bitterness in my heart.” You may be reading about hatred and you realize your heart is filled with that. You may be reading about pride and you say to yourself that’s me, that’s me, that’s cutting me wide open and now it’s obvious before God and now even before my own eyes. That’s the Word, that’ the work of the Word.

Let me tell you something we ought to thank God just as much for the reproving work of the Word as for the doctrinal part of it, right? We ought to be just as eager to be reproved by the Word as you are to be instructed by the Word. You ought to be just as eager to have your sin exposed as you are to have some great truth and principle taught to you that you can apply. Why? Because if you’re truly God’s child, you hunger after what is right and you hunger after righteousness. An exposure of sin should be a welcome process, it’s a bitter sweet experience. We can rejoice then that in the perfecting of the man of God the Word will save, the Word will teach the principles of truth and then the Word will convict and reprove and confute the sinner.

Get Trained – Learn How To Swing Your Sword

“Do your best (Be diligent) to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, who correctly handles the Word of Truth.” (2 Tim. 2:15)

This is a statement made to a young pastor by the name of Timothy. He is told that he must do his best to present himself approved to God. How can he do that? By being a workman who doesn’t need to be ashamed. How can he accomplish that? By handling the Word of truth accurately. It is essential that he as a minister of God’s Word handles it carefully - proclaim it accurately. Paul is encouraging him to become a student of the Bible. – By the way – what’s the application of this verse? Is it for guys named Timothy only? No – it’s for all of us, isn’t it? We are all to be students of the Bible, because we all need to know how to swing the sword in the battles we face in life. Every single one of us needs to be able to correctly interpret and apply the Bible to our lives.

It’s always been the plan of our enemy from the beginning that we would exchange the truth of God for a lie. It’s always been his primary purpose that we would make the stupidest exchange imaginable – that we would walk away from the truth of our loving Heavenly Father and follow a lie and pursue something lesser than Him. Each one of us have an area of weakness in our lives (gambling, addiction, sex, finances, gossip, pride) and what Satan does is try to tempt us in those areas and exchange what God has prepared for us for what the momentary rush that indulgence in those weak areas brings our way. But at the end of the day when we make that exchange we ask ourselves – “what in the world did I just do?” I exchanged the truth – for what ? Guilt? Shame? Remorse? And Satan wants more than anything that at the very end when you stand before God and his majestic glory and all the riches and treasures of heaven for you to stand there and say “What did I exchange this for?”