Recently the brothers and sisters have been practicing a time of morning watch to learn how to contact the Lord by reading the word and praying. In this message I do not want to give you more knowledge. Rather, I would like to stress this practice and confirm that it is right. Reading the word and praying is absolutely necessary in our spiritual life.
Many passages in the Bible show us what the word of God is, what the proper way is to appropriate it, and how to take the word and apply it to ourselves. Second Timothy 3:16a says, “All Scripture is God-breathed.” God-breathed is the literal translation of the Greek word in this verse. All Scripture is the breath of God and is something breathed out of God Himself. We all know that God is Spirit. Whatever is breathed out of God as Spirit must be spirit; this is logical. Therefore, we have John 6:63, which says, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words which I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.” The words He speaks are spirit because He is the Spirit. The words He speaks are something breathed out of Him, and anything breathed out of Him must be spirit. All Scripture is the breath of God. In Greek, pneuma, the word for spirit, is the same word for breath and air. This is very meaningful. By 2 Timothy 3:16 and John 6:63 we can realize that the word of God is simply the breathing of God as the Spirit.
All the words spoken by God in the Scriptures are spirit. Two more passages prove that the word and the Spirit are really one. Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to God.” Ephesians and Colossians are two sister books; many things in them are the same. Ephesians 5:18 and 19 say, “And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissoluteness, but be filled in spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and psalming with your heart to the Lord.” Colossians says that we sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs by the word of Christ richly dwelling in our heart, while Ephesians says that we sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs by being filled in spirit. By comparing these two passages we can realize that the word is the Spirit. To be filled with the word properly means that we are filled in spirit. It is wrong to have the mere knowledge of the word but not be filled in spirit. To have the word dwelling in us requires that we be filled in spirit, because the word is the Spirit.
How do we know that we are filled in spirit when we have the word? If we keep the word only in our mind, we will not sing, but when we have the word as the Spirit filling us, we will spontaneously sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Psalms are long poems. We should not say that we have too many long hymns. I am still not satisfied with the length of our hymns. I would like to write one with more than one hundred verses, like a psalm. Psalm 119 has one hundred seventy-six verses, consisting of twenty-two paragraphs of eight verses each. In general, though, hymns are not too long and not too short, while spiritual songs are short, like a chorus. When we have the word as spirit filling us, spontaneously we will sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. When we sing hymns, do we exercise our mind or our spirit? To memorize the word is to exercise the mind, but to sing hymns from the word is to exercise the spirit. We should learn to sing and not just to memorize.
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