Nearing Home - Billy Graham [56]
The key is this: God wants us to be spiritually strong and has provided us with every resource we need. In ourselves we are weak, so if we try to meet life’s struggles and temptations on our own, we fail. We need God’s strength to face life’s challenges— and He wants to give it to us. He will strengthen us in faith as we make use of the resources He has given us; He will develop a root system within us that grabs hold of surety. As Peter reminded us, “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness” (2 Peter 1:3).
Tragically, many Christians never discover this. They have committed their lives to Christ . . . they may be active in their churches . . . they pray and read their Bibles on occasion—but they remain spiritually immature and weak in the face of life’s temptations and setbacks. The Bible warns us about the danger of remaining spiritual infants “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming” (Ephesians 4:14).
We may be old in years, but if our faith is immature, we will enter those latter years fearful and unprepared. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Just as a baby needs food and exercise in order to grow, so we need the spiritual food and exercise God has provided for us. Without them our faith is weak, but with them spiritual strength increases, and we are better prepared for whatever life has in store for us.
How do we grow strong in our faith? What spiritual resources has God given us to make this happen? In the next few pages I would like to examine five of these gifts.
The Gift of God’s Word
Some years ago Ruth was visiting one of our daughters, and she decided to build a rudimentary zip line for the grandchildren. Always adventurous, she secured a sturdy wire at an angle between two trees. To test it she climbed the tree at the taller end, grabbed the handle (made from a piece of pipe), and started down the inclined wire.
But the wire broke, hurtling her to the ground some fifteen feet below. She broke several bones, crushed a vertebra, and suffered a severe brain concussion that left her in a coma for a week. As she slowly recovered, she realized that large blocks of her memory were missing—including all the Bible verses she had memorized since childhood. “That was the worst part,” she said later. “The Bible meant so much to me and had guided me all my life, and now I couldn’t even remember a single verse. It was devastating.” I understood her heartache; I would have felt the same way in her place. Thankfully, over time her memory largely returned, including—little by little—the Bible verses she had learned over the years.
Why was the Bible so important to her? And why should it be important to us? The reason is simple: the Bible is God’s Word, given by God to teach us His truth and guide us through life. The Bible says,
I am the LORD your God,
who teaches you what is best for you,
who directs you in the way you should go. (Isaiah 48:17)
The Bible is not an option; it is a necessity if we are going to be rooted in Him.
How does the Bible help us develop spiritually? First, it points us to the truth—about God, about ourselves, about the world around us, about the future, and most of all about Jesus Christ and His love for us. Only Jesus—the incarnate Son of God— could say, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. . . . Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:6, 9). The Christian faith isn’t just a matter of personal opinion or unfounded optimism. It is rooted in the unchanging truth of God, revealed to us in the pages of His written Word. The Bible is the constant rain that waters our root system of faith. It is the inspiration from which we drink daily.
The Bible then nourishes our growing roots with principles to live by. Every day we face decisions—some insignificant but others of great importance