Sep 18, 2026 Receive The Word of God – Words of Grace Blog – September 18, 2026
We give a significant amount of time, energy, and money to the ministry of the word at Grace Community Church. But how we receive the Word is what makes the difference in our hearts.
I was a regular church attender before I became a Christian. I remember the emphasis my church placed on the Bible. The Bible was held in high regard as the inerrant and authoritative word of God. It was taught in all the classes. People carried Bibles to church. It was important that everyone had a Bible, even the children.
One particularly strong memory I have from those years is of watching a group of people during a sermon. Bibles opened, notepads being filled, they were hanging on every word. The attention and receptivity to the word they showed struck me and has stuck with me. This was something that I wondered about but could not relate to.
Then God captured my attention. After months of conviction of sin and pondering what confessing Jesus as Lord would mean in practical terms for a young teenager already set on seeking maximum pleasure in life, I found myself in a church service captivated by the word being preached. The message that night was from the book of Hebrews. The preacher was not a youth speaker, but rather a visiting Bible expositor who aimed his message at everyone in the room. And I was on the receiving end of that laser-like sermon as it was doing spiritual exploratory surgery on my soul.
My church had done its job. My teachers had given me the word. My pastor had preached it faithfully. I had tasted the word, but would I take it and eat? The word had been implanted, but would I receive it for the salvation of my soul?
That night Hebrews was a scalpel in the hand of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s work in my heart is the explanation for why I began to pay attention to the word like never before, and why months later, when I confessed Jesus as Lord, I began to read the Bible. It was the convicting and convincing work of the Spirit that led me to receive the word of God which I heard from others, and to accept it not as the word of others but as what it really is, the word of God which went to work in me (1 Thessalonians 2:13).
I tell this personal account of the work of God opening my heart to receive the word because this week I have been meditating on Acts 17 and the mission to Thessalonica. There, Paul and Silas preached the word, and many received it. Later, when Paul wrote a letter to these new believers (1 Thessalonians), he described with much thanksgiving how they received the word of God. That description is my testimony.
That description will also be our theme this Sunday at Grace. We will rejoice in the word of God and examine how we are receiving it.
This weekend, prepare yourself for the Lord’s Day by reading and praying over Acts 17:1-9 and 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10.
Don’t forget that we will gather for prayer on Sunday evening at 6:00. Our prayer topics will be church ministries and leadership, and the elder selection process that begins September 27.
-Scott