Allow God’s Word To Perform Its Work

See now that I, I am He, and there is no god besides Me. . . . I have wounded and it is I who heal.
–Deuteronomy 32:39

As Christians, we are to allow God’s Word to perform its work in us. The Bible is like a surgeon’s scalpel. It is able to cut into the deepest part of our lives and lay open our real motivations not only before God, but before our own hearts as well.

God’s motivation in cutting you with His Word is not to bring hurt into your life but to bring healing. I remember a few years ago, I went to the doctor and he found a little growth. He said, “Robert, we ought to get rid of this growth. It is not malignant, but it could become malignant. So we are going to cut it off.” Imagine if I had said to him, “What? You want to cut me? You want to open me? What kind of doctor are you? Don’t you remember the Hippocratic Oath? You are not to do harm to anybody.” No, the reason the doctor wanted to open me up and cut out that growth was not because he hated me; it was because he wanted to bring healing to me.

It is the same way with God. In fact, God used that exact analogy in Deuteronomy 32:39. God said, “See now that I, I am He, and there is no god besides Me. . . . I have wounded and it is I who heal.” God cuts us. He wounds us. Not because He is a divine sadist, but because He wants to bring healing into our lives. One of my favorite quotes is from Alan Redpath, who said, “It is a tremendous moment in a Christian’s life when he can honestly look up into the face of God and say,‘Yes, Lord, You are right and I am wrong.’ . . . That is the thing for which God has been working in your life and in mine from the moment of our conversion.”

People occasionally ask me, “Pastor, what is the unpardonable sin?” The unpardonable sin is the one you refuse to ask God’s forgiveness for.

God’s Word convicts us. It cuts us open so that He can bring healing into our lives. Maybe God has been working on you, but every time He tries to slice you open with His Word, you climb off the operating table and say, “Not today, Lord. Not today.” The most important time in your life is when you come to the point as a Christian that you say, “God, You are right and I am wrong. Do Your work in my life so that I can experience Your rest.”

As somebody once said, “When you have read the Bible, you will know it is the Word of God because you have found it to be the key to your own heart, your own happiness, and your own beauty.”

***

Today’s devotion is excerpted from “Truth That Transforms” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2018.

Alan Redpath, “Victorious Christian Service: Studies In The Book Of Nehemiah” (Westwood, NJ: Revell, 1958), 160.

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960,1962,1963,1968,1971,1972,1973,1975,1977,1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.