Why You Need to Keep Coming Back to the Word

The Bible is life–changing. Not only will reading and responding to God’s Word change your life today, but the Bible will continually change you as you keep coming back to it throughout your life. It’s not enough to sample the Word; you need to incorporate the habit of daily coming back to the Word into your life. 

God’s Word is where the power is

R.A. Torrey shared what has become one of my favorite quotes, “People who pray for power but neglect the Bible abound in the church. But the power that belongs to God is stored up in the great reservoir of His own Word, the Bible. We cannot obtain or maintain God’s power in our own lives or in our work unless there is deep and frequent meditation on the Word of God.” 

Torrey was a longtime ministry associate of D.L. Moody who also had a passion for God’s Word and based his whole ministry on it. In one of my favorite stories about D.L. Moody, he shares:   

A quickening that will last must come through the word of God. A man stood up in one of our meetings and said he hoped for enough out of the series of meetings to last him all his life. I told him he might as well try to eat enough breakfast at one time to last him a lifetime. That is a mistake that people are making; they are running to religious meetings and they think the meetings are going to do the work. But if these don’t bring you into closer contact with the word of God, the whole impression will be gone in three months. 

If you really want to grow in your Christian life, you need to keep coming back to the Word of God.   

It’s not enough to read the Bible once and then move on. Each of us need daily manna from heaven that God gives as we come back to His Word each day. 

Your Bible is living and active

When you become a student of the Bible and you read it consistently throughout the years, different Scriptures stand out at different times. God’s Word is living and active and will often speak to you what you need to hear at just the right moment. 

God’s Word also becomes living and active in your heart when you memorize Scripture and meditate on it. To meditate on the Word of God means letting it roll over and over again in your heart and mind until it settles deeply into your spirit. It’s one thing to get into the Word of God, but it’s another thing to let the Word of God get into you. I spend much of my day as part of a ministry team thinking on the Word of God and what God wants to speak into the chaos, dysfunction, and brokenness of our world. I meditate and ponder what God might be saying and what He might want me to say to bring hope and truth into a world that desperately needs Him.   

Remind your heart daily what God has said

It’s important to keep coming back to the Word of God because the Bible tells us the importance of remembering what God has said:  

“For this reason I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know and are established in the present truth. Yes, I think it is right, as long as I am in this tent, to stir you up by reminding you, knowing that shortly I must put off my tent, just as our Lord Jesus Christ showed me. Moreover I will be careful to ensure that you always have a reminder of these things after my decease” (2 Peter 1:12-15, NKJV). 

It is good to be reminded of what God has said, and you do this by coming back to the Word over and over so your life is continually changed.

Matt Brown

Matt Brown is an evangelist, author of Truth Plus Love: The Jesus Way to Influence, host of Think Eternity with Matt Brown, and founder of Think Eternity—a ministry dedicated to amplifying the gospel every day through podcasts, devotionals, videos, live events and more. Matt and his wife Michelle have three children. They live near Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can follow Matt at @evangelistmatt and thinke.org.