How to Get God's Word Into Your Heart

Here are the 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. 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.

So, the solution for that is, incline your ear. Bow down your head. Be humble. Be teachable. I’ve been a teacher in various circumstances. I know it’s impossible to teach people who don’t want to be taught. You can do all the motions, you can go through all the lectures, but there’s no result. So, there has to be a desire to be taught, an attitude of being teachable.

The third direction is, “Do not let them depart from your eyes.” And that, I think, means focus. Focus on the Word of God. Don’t look partly at the Bible and partly at other things, because they may contradict what the Bible says. It’s all really, in a sense, all of this means shutting yourself in with what God is saying to you through the Bible. Don’t be distracted. Don’t let any other influence turn you away from what God is saying.

In the teaching profession, and I’m sure some of you are teachers, we used to teach the primary school teaching students that there are two main gates to the child’s attention: the ear gate, the eye gate. And good teaching uses both. That’s why a video, in some ways, is more effective than an audio, you understand, because it uses the eye gate as well as the ear gate. Well, you see, God was ahead of the teaching psychologists by about 3,000 years, because God says, the ear gate, the eye gate.

And then, the end result is, “Keep them in the midst of your heart.” The purpose of all these instructions is to get God’s Word into your heart, the very center of human personality. The next verse of Proverbs, verse 23, says,

“Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.”

In other words, what is in your heart will determine the course of your life. So, guard your heart. I remember one of the African languages of my students said, “Guard your heart with all your strength, for everything in life comes out of it.”

I cannot overemphasize that for each of you here. What is in your heart will ultimately determine the course of your life. You cannot have the wrong thing in your heart and live right. And you cannot have the right thing in your heart and live wrong. And the purpose of these instructions is to show you how you can get God’s Word into your heart, through the ear gate, through the eye gate, through focused attention, through humility, through being teachable.

And when you put all that together, that is hearing. That’s how faith comes. Whether it’s sickness that you’re dealing with, or some other problem, if you need faith, this passage in Proverbs chapter 4 describes how you can get faith.