Hebrews 4:12
For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
Ravi Zacharias tells the story of a Vietnamese man named Hien Pham. Mr. Pham was a devoted young Christian whose ability to speak English made him valuable as a civilian translator for American forces during the Vietnam war. After Vietnam fell to the communists, Mr. Pham was arrested and accused of spying for the Americans. He was repeatedly imprisoned and marked for “re-indoctrination” to Marxist thought. He was prohibited from reading any English literature – and certainly not the Bible. The one day as he was forced to clean out a filthy latrine, a soiled piece of paper with English words printed on it caught his eye. Washing it off, he discovered it was a page from the Bible containing these words from Romans 8:
We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose…
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers… nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8: 28, 38-39)
Encouraged that God had not forgotten him, the next day Mr. Pham asked his guards if he could clean the filthy latrine again. Soon he discovered that one of the prison guards was using the pages of an English Bible as toilet paper. Every day Mr. Pham fished the pages from the waste can, cleaned them off, and began to piece together his personal Bible. Eventually Mr. Pham survived the horror of the prison camp and escaped to North America, where he lives today. He credits those soiled pages of God’s word with keeping him from despair and giving him hope that God would sustain and deliver him.
What does the Apostle Paul mean in Hebrews when he says the word of God is “living and active?” He means that the Bible is more than just words on a page that we read every now and then. He means that God’s word is alive because the Holy Spirit has filled each word with the presence and power of God himself. Therefore, the words and verses of the Bible actually have the power to read us - that is, to reveal the motivations and attitudes of our hearts as well as to provide strength and encouragement in the deepest parts of who we are. Just as Mr. Pham discovered the power of God to sustain him through words on soiled scraps of paper pulled from a latrine, so the power of God is made available to us each time we invite God to speak to us through his word.
Ask God to teach you to read his word in a way that allows the Holy Spirit to speak his truth to your heart as well as to your mind.
Pastor Brian Coffey
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