In today’s blog, I talk about how we can open our mouths wider. God says that if we open our mouths wide, He will fill them. I especially want to eat and be filled with Scripture, because it has the power to make me more like Jesus, to increase my faith, and to keep me focused on eternal things.
Here is what will you learn in today’s blog:
· How to get stirred up to read God’s Word more
· How to naturally teach the Bible to your kids
· How to talk and think on God’s Word
· Where you can immediately begin teaching the Bible when your heart is burning
Opening Your Mouth Real Wide
For years I spent so much time just absorbing the Bible. I made reading the Bible each day the highest priority in my life. But after I got married and had children, reading the Bible became more of a discipline and less the overwhelming obsession it had previously been. I’m so thankful for those years of learning God’s Word, only I want more now. I’ve been meditating on the verse “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it” Psalm 81:10. Basically, this means that God provides for us everything we need to be satisfied, filled, and happy—if only we will look to Him, call upon Him, and believe Him. Amen!
But what really spoke to my heart from this verse is opening my mouth wide to receive God’s Word. I am certain that whatever is in my thoughts will end up on my tongue. I will speak about what I think about. Jesus said that we will end up talking about whatever is in our hearts (Matthew 12:34). It’s just what humans do. We talk with our friends, our spouse, whoever about the things we’ve been thinking about.
And of course, what we think about comes so much from what we take in. That’s why we must fill ourselves with good things. I know what I need to put in my mind. I need to open my mouth wide and let God fill me with His Word. I need to make God’s word my continual feast.
Before I open my mouth to speak—with my friends, to my kids, at the Women’s Events I speak at, at church and everywhere else I go—it first needs to be filled. I need to open my mouth wide and eat up the glorious things the Bible teaches. Which brings to my mind, “Your words were found and I ate them, and Your words became for me a joy and the delight of my heart” (Jeremiah 15:16).
Every time I’ve found myself in a place of serious Bible reading, it has come following a prayer, asking God to put that desire in my heart. I've prayed that I would hunger and thirst for the Bible more than my necessary food. When I think back to the times in my life when I most longed to teach the Bible, it was those times when my mouth was so full of God’s Word that I felt like Jeremiah and David—it burned in my bones. When Jeremiah was not speaking the Word of God to the people, he said, “In my heart it becomes like a burning fire shut up in my bones; and I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot endure it.” (Jeremiah 20:9, Psalm 39:3)
But first, he had to be filled with God’s Word. He first learned the Word of God, and then it burned inside him. This is the order. You come to a place when the Bible is so saturating your life that the joy of a Scripture or the excitement over how it applies to your life burns inside you. And when it burns inside you, what do you do? Teach kids!
Now that I have children, I have the perfect audience, night and day, anytime I want, to let God’s Word just pour out of me. So I want to open my mouth wide again. I want to be filled with Scripture. Not just when I’m teaching women or doing something “professionally,” but that the Bible would so burn in my bones that I could not help but speak of it when I rise up and when I lie down, when I travel and when I eat. (Our family also has a formal “Devotions” time when we read the Bible and pray. But we’ve never talked about God’s Word too much. There is no such thing.)
This is the biblical plan: Let the Bible saturate your life and heart. Open your mouth wide and let God fill it. And then, let that full mouth of wisdom and truth and kindness be poured out. And especially, let it be poured in love upon your young sponges—the children in your life whom God has made receptive to your teaching.
