Read: Hebrews 1:1-3
Sustaining all things by his powerful word. (v. 3 NIV)
Emile Cailliet was an agnostic during World War I who had a strange longing for “a book that would understand me.” He attempted to fulfill this longing by compiling an anthology of quotations meaningful to him, but when he read it he was gravely disappointed. Though Cailliet had forbidden it, his wife obtained a Bible. He grabbed it and opened to the Beatitudes. “I read and read and read—now aloud with an indescribable warmth surging within,” he recounted. “I could not find words to express my awe and wonder . . . This was the Book that would understand me! . . . As I looked through [the Gospels], the one of whom they spoke, the one who spoke and acted in them, became alive in me.”
God’s mighty Word transforms human lives, from the Ethiopian eunuch reading Isaiah 53:7-8, to Augustine “taking and reading” Romans 13:13-14, to Martin Luther finding Christ’s righteousness for him in Romans 1:17. For the Reformers, the “peculiar power” of Scripture (see John Calvin, Institutes, 1.8.1), was the potent agent of reform.
God creates, covenants, and judges by his Word. When God the Son dwells on earth, he is called the “Word” (John 1:1). Scripture is a lamp (Ps. 119:105), a sword (Eph. 6:17), and a seed (1 Peter 1:23). Make it a driving passion to read God’s Word, to saturate your life with Scripture, and you will find power, direction, protection, and new life.
As you pray, ask God to transform you by his powerful Word.
Michael Andres is a professor of religion at Northwestern College. He first met his wife Joan in a History of the Reformation class at Arizona State University.
