Full text of Bible teacher Derek Prince’s teaching titled ‘God’s Word: Your Inexhaustible Resource (Part 2)’ which was recorded in Singapore, April 1989.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Derek Prince – Bible Teacher
In the previous session, I spoke about various different effects that the Word of God is designed to produce in us who believe it. I want to return briefly to two, because they’re related, and I want to use them to illustrate one another.
I spoke, first of all, that faith comes by the hearing of God’s Word. That’s a wonderful truth. We can never overemphasize it. If you don’t have faith, you don’t need to stay without faith, because faith comes. It comes by the hearing of the Word of God.
HOW TO GET GOD’S WORD INTO YOUR HEART
And then at the end of the previous session, I explained how God’s Word is intended to provide health, or medicine for all our physical body. And I illustrated it briefly from my own experience, but only very briefly.
The passage that we looked at in Proverbs chapter four, I like to return there for a moment, because it’s a perfect illustration of what hearing is, so that if you’re wondering what it means to hear God’s Word, I can illustrate it for you and base it on my personal experience from Proverbs chapter four.
While I was there in the hospital, and I discovered these verses, and I saw that they offered me health or medicine, I said to myself, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m grateful for what the doctors have done, but they have not been able to provide healing. So I’m going to take God’s Word as my medicine.
Now, when I said that, I had the impression that God spoke to me inaudibly but very clearly, and He said, ‘When the doctor gives a person medicine, the instructions for taking it are on the bottle.’ Then He said, ‘This is My medicine bottle and the instructions are on it. You better read them.’
So I turned back and I saw that there are four instructions for taking God’s Word as medicine. You see, if a doctor gives you medicine in the natural, but you don’t take it according to the directions the doctor will say to, well, you couldn’t expect it to do you any good.
So if you have this passage in front of you, or if you will listen, I’ll give you the four directions for taking God’s Word as medicine. And there’s probably not a single person here who won’t need these directions at some time in your life. Very few of us live a full length of life without some encounter with sickness.
So store this up and have it ready when the situation arises.
Here are the four directions.
Number one, give attention to My words.
Number two, incline your ear to My sayings.
Number three, do not let them depart from your eyes.
And number four, keep them in the midst of your heart.
Let’s consider just briefly what’s involved in those four directions.
First of all, give attention. When you turn to the Bible and to the Word of God, you need to give it your total, undivided attention. Don’t be distracted. Try to shut yourself off from all other voices or influences or impressions. Give undivided attention to the word of God. After all, it’s God speaking to you. It’s worthwhile listening to what He has to say.
The second instruction is: Incline your ear, or bow down your ear. And that is an attitude of humility. As a matter of fact, my mind is on Africa because I’ve been quoting this. But in an African primary or intermediate school, if a pupil comes up to the teacher with his exercise book, he will stand in front of the teacher with the book open and bow his head, incline his ear.
In other words, he’s saying, you’re the teacher, I’m the pupil. Understand. So that attitude of inclining your ear means I want you to teach me. I’m willing to be taught. I need to learn.
See, I myself had this problem, because my impression of Christianity from way back was that if you were going to be a Christian, you should expect to be pretty miserable most of your life.
My attitude was, I’m not sure that it’s worth being miserable for that. And I carried this attitude over even after I was born again.
So as I studied the Bible, it seemed to be saying to me all the time, God wants you healthy, He wants you strong, He wants you successful. And I kept saying to myself, that’s too good to be true. That couldn’t be what the Bible means. It must mean something different.
So while I was reasoning like that with myself, once again the Lord spoke to me inaudibly. And He said, ‘Now, who is the teacher and who is the pupil?’
So I said, ‘Lord, You’re the teacher, and I’m the pupil.’
And then He said, ‘Well, would you mind letting Me teach you?’
And you see, I realized I wasn’t inclining my ear. I wasn’t prepared to listen. I had my own preconceptions as to what I thought God would be saying. And if He was saying something different, I couldn’t hear it.
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