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  • Writer's picturePastor Matt

Hooked

Updated: Apr 5, 2021

By: Pastor Matt

You may listen to this devotion in audio form via podcast here.




For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

- Hebrews 4:12


I don’t have a lot of practical experience with swords, double-edged or not. But one experience I had when I was a kid comes to mind when I think about this characterization of the piercing sharpness of God’s Word.


I must have been 5 or 6 years old. We were on a family vacation, a trip we used to make regularly with family friends to stay for a week in a house on the North Carolina coast. We kids would spend hours, from sun up to sundown, it seemed, out on the beach playing in the sand and the surf. Our parents would mostly watch from the deck of the house, but they spent their share of time on the beach too. Sometimes the dads would pass the time with fishing poles, casting out into the surf as the waves rolled in.


They never really caught much. I don’t suppose that was the point. But when you’re a little boy, that doesn’t matter—you just want to try it too. Thus began my attempt—when the adults weren’t looking—with one of the unattended poles. My feeble attempt ended as quickly as it started, with the barb of a hook somehow stuck in my hand, blood dripping everywhere. Time has erased many of the details, but I do remember it taking a long time for my parents to get the hook out of my hand. I remember it cutting on the way in and on the way out, and I remember it hurting.


Our passage characterizes God’s Word in a similar way—but as a sword, not a little fishhook! It’s sharp. It pierces. It’s double-edged, so it cuts, on the way in and on the way out, and it can be painful.


Maybe you have experienced this with God’s Word. You’re sitting in worship listening to a sermon, and then all of a sudden you’re caught. It feels like the pastor is speaking directly to you, though you know he couldn’t have known your specific situation. It feels like a sword, dividing your joints and marrow, soul and spirit. That’s the dangerous, painful edge of God’s Word.


Or maybe it’s not so immediate, but sneaks up on you over time. You read your Bible, day after day, and you become convicted. There’s an area of your life where God begins to prune so that you can grow. That, too, is the dangerous, painful edge of God’s Word. This is part of what God’s Word does to us: it helps us look at ourselves honestly, to see truthfully. It helps us see our need for Christ.


But that Word doesn’t leave us there. It also tells us of the good news that is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes. It tells that God so loved the world that he gave his Son that all who believe in him would have everlasting life. It tells us to not let our hearts be troubled, and to not be afraid.



Open our hearts, O God, to accept your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own, that, hearing, we may obey your will. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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