Practicing To Live With a Present Christ by Coming to the Word


	Practicing To Live With a Present Christ by Coming to the Word To Live With a Present Christ We Must Exercise to be in His Word In order to have the present Christ, you must fight to be in the Lord's presence. Calling, groaning, mourning; singing the hymns; coming to the word; and prayer can greatly help you to be in the Lord's presence in your private exercise. In this message we will cover the matter of the word. Four Basic Ways for Daily Practice There are four basic ways to come to the word which I would recommend to you. There are other ways to get the riches from the word as well, but during this time we will cover these basic ways. We should daily come to the word for life by spending time to pray-read the word, read-pray the word, memorize the word, and to read and study the word. How do you know when to exercise which of the four? When you feel weak, pray-read the Word. When you feel dull, read-pray the word. When you feel that you are poor, memorize the Word. If you desire to be a blessing to the Body, study the Word. These four practices meet the basic needs. 1. PRAY-READING: for strengthening in spirit. Pray-reading is for the strengthening of your spirit. Read-praying is for the receiving of inspiration regarding Christ, ourselves, and all the spiritual things. Memorizing is for your equipping and develops your ability to utter things for the Lord. Memorizing will also strengthen you, but in the way of strengthening your whole person, not just your spirit. Without the practice pf pray-reading, the church life will be dead. If the church in your locality is in such a state, come together to pray-read! Come together and learn to pray-read with the saints without formality. As long as there is a form, the Spirit cannot be free. You have to break through any kind of form. Try different things. Mix proclamations, exhortations and testimonies into your pray-reading. Be really free. Imagine what would happen if the saints were meeting just to do this one thing! In many small churches the saints don't know what to do as they are meeting together in their group of five or eight. Do this! Come together to pray-read. Pray-reading really opens up your spirit. If you feel that you have lost interest in spiritual things and that your spirit is weak, pray-read and read-pray. Pray-reading will strengthen you. Read-praying will inspire you. Practice this in your localities. If you do, your local church will be strong. Don't worry about fruitfulness; take care instead of your healthiness. Increase comes out of your healthiness. 2. READ-PRAYING: for the inspirations concerning Christ, ourselves, and spiritual things. Read-praying originated in Taiwan. When it was brought over the Unites States, it became pray-reading, which is actually a somewhat different practice. The present Christ in the late 1950's was read-praying. The present Christ in the early sixties was pray-reading. When you have the present Christ, however, you shouldn't reject or deny yesterday's Christ. I still treasure January 1, 1953, because that is when I first received the Lord Jesus. You need to treasure every step the Lord has led you through. All the Christ you have experienced is precious to you all your life. Pray-reading seems more advanced than read-praying, but read-praying has its value. Since we don't practice read-praying, we need to demonstrate it to you. You begin by just reading the word out loud. In your reading, some word, phrase or verse will touch you more than other. When you hit upon something that touches you during your reading, you turn it into prayer. Pray out your inspiration. As you pray out the inspiration you have received, you will be further inspired and led to further prayer through your further reading. Read-praying is not as easy to practice corporately as pray-reading is. Learn, however, to pray through the word in this way. If you do, every time you come to the Bible, you will find it easy to get inspired. There isn't one verse in the Bible that I cannot receive inspiration from. Even "Judas hung himself" can render some inspiration. Why? Because I have practiced so much read-praying. Read-praying gives birth to inspirations, and these inspirations cause your whole spiritual life to become very satisfying and encouraging, even charming. As you read-pray, read the word slowly. Do not try to "squeeze out" inspirations. It is not that you are seeking to find inspiration as you read; just let the inspiration come. At a certain point in your careful and deliberate reading, some word or phrase will stand out. That word or phrase should then become the basis of your prayer. The word will yield you real inspiration. Through such an exercise the word will abide in you much more richly. 3. MEMORIZING portions of the Word: for equipping, utterance, strengthening, and future spiritual understanding. Memorizing is actually the best form of pray-reading. When you pray-read some verses, you will receive strengthening to your spirit, but if they have not remained in memory, they will not be able to continually be your supply. The verses you memorize will not only strengthen you as you pore over them; they will be able to strengthen you next month, next year, and even all your life. Today, forty years later, I am still strengthened by those sections of the word I memorized when I was a young man in high school. It is best to memorize without using any shortcuts. Just go over the verses again and again until you are able to recite them effortlessly. It doesn't matter if you understand what you have memorized; one day they all will become useful. The reason people forge verses is that they have not memorized them by means of "mindless" repetition. When I was young I memorized portion after portion of the New Testament in this manner. If you memorize in this way, at a certain time light and strength comes, and the word you have memorized becomes a strengthening element in your daily life. This is why it is crucial that the young people memorize the word; the more the better. The older you get, the more difficult it becomes. Young people's coordinators should even pick out key portions for the young people to memorize and help them to get into this. This kind of memorizing is for your future spiritual understanding. You may not understand a thing of what you are memorizing today, but in the future your exercise will depend much upon how much of the word you commit to memory now. As you memorize, try to memorize verses in sets, such as by chapters. To memorize shorter sections is easier to do, but also easier to forget. To memorize sections of verses is harder to do but also harder to forget once memorized. This is why you should memorize longer portions. With longer portions you also experience more enjoyment as you memorize. Memorizing is actually a very enjoyable exercise. Our concept of memorizing something is that of some dull routine of drills such as reciting multiplication table. My experience has been, however, that the more I memorized the word, the more I experienced joy and rejoicing. I also found that my practice of memorizing directly affected my ability to minister. I am able to jump when I share a message because I have enjoyed such a buoyancy while memorizing the word. Your ministering ability is developed by this. Memorizing equips you and also grants you utterance. Memorizing the word strengthens your Christian life, and equips you for future ministry and usefulness. 4. STUDYING: for storage of divine riches and for life. Besides memorizing, you should study the Bible for the sake of storing up the divine riches, and for life. It is best to do this kind of study in small groups, although you also need to study the Bible on your own as well. Make an effort to get together as a group with some saints to study the Bible. In addition to using the morning revival material, you should make the effort to study the portion of the word being covered. Locate the key verses, gain inspirations, and get into the thought of that portion of the word. Help one another in this kind of labor.