When I read Kate Quinn’s novel, The Rose Code, last year, I found myself on a journey to a hidden place called Bletchley Park, where during WWII, men and women worked night and day creating ciphers and decoding the encrypted messages of the Third Reich. I was enthralled with their processes, with their sheer stick-to-itiveness, and with the magnitude of importance for keeping their hidden work a secret. These code breakers’ work, as unknown as it was to the world, greatly impacted the outcome of the war.
Not so unlike those cryptographers, we must do the hidden work of unpacking the meanings of God’s written messages to us in His Word. If we’re honest, some days reading Scripture can feel like breaking codes – as though God is intentionally hiding its meaning from us.1 Other times we can read the words and sense a deeper meaning, but it’s just out of reach.
In seasons and moments like these we, once again, have to choose to live like the original Twelve, the disciples who walked and talked with the actual Word Himself, Jesus. Like us, they bumped up against confusion and lack of clarity, having to ask Jesus to explain the meaning of His words. So, like them, we can learn to stick with the Word; we can learn not to give up when understanding falls short.
But that’s not where we stop. We must also choose to believe Jesus when He says there’s “nothing concealed that won’t be revealed, nothing hidden that won’t be made known” (Matthew 10:26). The disciples demonstrate faith and trust when meaning is muddy, and they show us what it looks like to finally ‘get it.’
For example, we can see the light of understanding dawn on them during their first conversation with the resurrected Christ (Luke 24:36-49). Jesus could sense their doubts, so He invited them to see His scars and touch His body (vv.38-39). Then He “opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures” (v.45). The Word revealed everything that had been concealed. He made known to these faithful followers what had once been hidden!
We can also recall the day of Pentecost, ten days after Jesus’ ascension, when the Holy Spirit blew into the room and into the Eleven (Acts 2:2-4). From that moment on, the Spirit enlightened, equipped, and enlivened the followers of Jesus to speak His Word to all who would listen!
As followers of Jesus, this is our reality too.
Even when God’s messages to us feel hidden, we can keep trusting and continue choosing to follow and obey – just as the disciples did. And, we can turn to the Holy Spirit to help us understand even if it takes time for clarity to come. The key is believing that anything in God’s Word that feels hidden to us now will be made known.
Processes
Just as the cryptographers of the twentieth century developed processes for identifying ciphers and unlocking coded messages, God has given us the Spirit to help us read the Word with true understanding. The Spirit opens our eyes and hearts so that what God desires for us to know will be given to us.
Word and Spirit. As Forrest Gump would say, the two go together like peas and carrots. To be sure, they not only go together but are inseparable – no matter our taste preferences. 😉
Anyone can open the Bible and read it like a history textbook. They can find names of places and people, as well as, the patterns of human behavior throughout all time. Others might pick up the Bible to read it as a story, looking for plot lines and characters who intrigue and baffle. Then there are those who pick apart Scripture to either dismiss its value and its God or to promote their own agenda. Churches and Christians who live in the Word without the Spirit become lifeless in their legalism.2
The opposite can be true, too. When people ignore Scripture completely in order to follow the Spirit’s lead, the result is confusion – for who is to be the interpreter, the confirming authority of what ‘truths’ have been spoken by what ‘spirit?’ Churches and Christians who live in the Spirit without the Word become rigid individualists who are easily misled by the ensuing chaos.2
We could almost say Word and Spirit together become our process of checks and balances. The Word informs what the Spirit says, and the Spirit brings life and growth from what the Word shows.
Word and Spirit each do the work of revealing God to us.3 But we need both in order to see Him fully and to grasp His truths and ways. Their tandem work in us becomes our process for uncovering the messages of God. We ask the Spirit to guide us into all truth (John 16:13), and we read the imperishable, living Word, trusting it to reveal not only the will of God but God Himself (1 Peter 1:23-25).
Stick-to-itiveness
The beauty of reading the Word with the Spirit is that our eyes open more and more to the truth and beauty of our unchanging, faithful God. And the Bible’s words never grow stale or old, for the living Word meets us where we are in each season of our lives with freshness and accuracy that can only come from God Himself.
Maybe you’re like me, however, wanting to read the Bible all the way through so that we’ll come away with all the knowledge we need. One and done. With this ‘quick fix’ mindset, we come at the Word as one item on a checklist: we’ve read it; therefore, we have what we need. And we move on.
Or maybe we prefer to jump into passages of the Bible and pick out the verses that say what we want to hear. We skip context and rely on what we already know to fill in the blanks. In essence, we weaponize Scripture to fuel our hidden motives.
But, neither of these methods give space for God’s Word to actually do its hidden work within us. Reading God’s Word is not a sprint but a marathon, offering us a lifetime of learning. Understanding God’s Word is not available so we’ll have a bunch of information and sound smart at the next women’s gathering at church – rather, it aids us in the process of transformation. Paul gives us the best explanation of the purpose of Scripture:
“There’s nothing like the written Word of God for showing you the way to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and useful one way or another—showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting our mistakes, training us to live God’s way. Through the Word we are put together and shaped up for the tasks God has for us.”
2 Timothy 3:15-17 MSG
The only way to learn to live God’s way and to be shaped by righteousness is to stick with reading the Word. As much as humanly possible, read it every day. Read it at multiple paces, with varying purposes, and with other people. Look for common themes and repeated phrases but, really, look for God, while learning from Jesus and listening to the Spirit.
Importance
The relentless work of those WWII code breakers went absolutely unnoticed by the world. All their work had to be done in secret, or it would have been done in vain.
Such is the inner work of sanctification, where believers who have received salvation by faith also put forth effort in the ongoing work of becoming more like Christ. Led by the Spirit and guided by the Word, we grow in the hidden spaces. No one witnesses the time we give or the sacrifices we make in order to remain in the sanctifying Words of God. No one sees the inner transformations taking place in our minds and hearts and souls.
Inspired by the Spirit, Paul came up with a metaphor of a soldier’s armor to help us understand the inner work of living in Christ. We need the truth of God as our salvation in our minds and His righteousness in our hearts. We need peace and faith in our souls to fuel our desires to continue onward with Jesus. And we need the Word of God, aka: the Sword of the Spirit, to inform and equip us for all we do.
Paul knew the importance of the holy effort required to remain tethered to God’s Word. Such hidden work keeps us on track, in truth, and totally equipped for the wars waging in and around us.
Impact
Without the decoded messages, the Allied Powers would never have been able to avoid attacks by the hidden enemy u-boats. Some historians go so far as to say that breaking the German enigma-coded messages was the greatest victory of the war.4
Friends, however we choose to spend our time and energy has a direct impact on what we think, believe, and do. If we feed our minds with constant newsreels, our anxiety rises along with our dread, disbelief, and doubt of God’s sovereignty. If we have a constant diet of social media posts, our envy rages while our feelings of insignificance rises, and we begin to distrust who we are in Christ. If we spend all our energy controlling our environment and the people in it, we give-in to the illusion that we can protect our hearts and families, our reputations and careers, leaving no room for God.
For these reasons, you’ll hear me talk a lot about spiritual rhythms – those practices that we incorporate into our lives with consistency for the purpose of abiding with Jesus. When we remain in the Vine, we are filled with His goodness and peace and love. Rhythms ebb and flow, rise and fall, increase and decrease with each season. Rhythms help us to keep moving in step with Jesus. Rhythms that include Word and Spirit grow us, shape us, and strengthen us from within – like branches attached to the Vine.
And the impact of such hidden work has no limits. Just as God’s story began long before we were born and will continue on into eternity, our transformative journey will leave long-term ripples that affect the world and other people far beyond our days on earth.
I’ve taken this one post about the importance of remaining in God’s Word way into the future – not to stress you out but to encourage you in the dailiness of remaining in His Word. Even when the messages of Scripture read like encrypted memos, we stick with it, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal what we need as we need it. We lean into the processes and rhythms – because when we know, believe, and live out the Word, our hearts will not only warm within us,5 but they will propel us to live out our faith in the world with an unfathomable impact.
Father God, You have promised that the fullness of peace will come when the earth is full of the knowledge of You. There are so many layers to this promise, but maybe the one that leaps out to us today is that we can grow in our knowledge of You by remaining in your Word. We know that your Word is forever, so we long to go deeper in your Word so that our intimacy with You increases – and the discernment we long for will be opened in our minds so that we can live faithful lives for You. Lord Jesus, You are the Word. In You life is found, and that life is the light of all mankind. So we ask that You would continue shining your light into our minds so that the written Word of God would continue to be illuminated for us. You have promised to reveal all that has been concealed, to make known everything that has been hidden. We’re so grateful for this truth because it gives us staying power and hope for what’s to come. Holy Spirit, how we marvel at the way You work with the Word to be a revealing power of truth in our lives. We desire more of You in our hearts and more of God’s Word in our minds. So, we ask You to fill us now with a fresh wind of faith. Activate within us a greater hunger for God’s Word. And may You ever be our Holy Guide through its pages. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
(inspired by The Savior’s Story, page 81; Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14; 1 Peter 1:22-25; John 1:4; Matthew 10:26; John 16:13; Acts 2:2)
Resources: I love sharing with you the books, podcasts, articles, and anything else that has inspired, encouraged, or taught me. These are humble offerings with no expectations.
- 1 – I had already written this post when I listened to Annie F. Down’s podcast interview with Michelle McKinney Hammond. I chose it because of its title, “Living a Life of Whimsy.” But I marveled throughout their dialogue because so much of what was discussed is what I’d just written! God is so good to affirm a message from Him! Here’s a taste of what Michelle said:
- “Trust in knowing that there’s a process. I think sometimes in Christendom, we want the quick fix. There’s no such thing. No story that you read in the Bible had a quick fix.”
- “Understand that there’s a process. And trust His agenda for your life. See, the enemy comes and tries to make you suspicious of what God is doing. [Like], things aren’t going right because you did this or you made a wrong choice or God doesn’t like you this week. [The enemy] comes up with all kinds of stuff. But what you’ve got to understand is that God madly and passionately loves you. His agenda towards you is always good. That’s what we’ve got to know…. God’s working on us.” (emphasis is mine)
- 2 – This article helped me find words for what I’ve known to be true about Word and Spirit.
- 3 – JD Walt has a great post about how the Word and Spirit do their revealing, from November 8. 2023.
- 4 – An adapted quote from this article.
- 5 – The two disciples who, unknowingly, walk to Emmaus with Jesus make a huge realization after He disappears: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). I LOVE THIS SO MUCH! Their hearts recognized Jesus in the Word before their minds did!! But Jesus didn’t leave them in the mystery. He opened Scripture to them! He’ll do the same for us!
- Caroline Cobb sings “Like a Tree” on our Hidden Messages playlist, giving us tunes and rhythms to go along with words of the Psalmist that are all about God’s Word — all about rooting ourselves in His Word (Psalm 1). So good!
- In my “Teacup Video” I elaborated a bit more on the mystery of God. Trust me, it’ll be a theme we’ll run into a lot in this year’s exploration of ‘hidden.’ You can find it on my Facebook Author Page and Instagram.
- It’s getting close to time for another edition of The Abiding Life Newsletter, in which I offer up fun facts and further encouragement about this sanctification journey we’re on. It’s a place where I can share more intimately my heart and experiences of life on the Vine. You can subscribe to it here.
Rhythms: As my newsletter’s title infers, we seek to develop an abiding life in this space — a place where we can get informed but also be transformed as we learn to abide in God’s presence throughout our days. I like to think that developing rhythms is what aids us in our desire to become more Christlike.
- As we continue our rhythms of stillness and solitude, let’s plant our roots in the Word of God in order to soak in it for spiritual revelation and transformation! I mentioned reading it at different paces, with varying purposes, and with different people — here’s how that might look:
- Pace: One month read a few verses a day from one of the Gospels, paying attention to the Spirit’s promptings and the questions that arise. Then the next month read all the Gospels at a much quicker pace, looking for the larger contexts and conversations. Here’s a one-month Mark reading plan. And here’s a one-month reading plan for all the Gospels.
- Purpose: One month read a letter from Paul, such as Ephesians, with the main purpose of learning Paul’s teachings to that church. Then another month read the same letter with your focus on what God is asking of you in this season. Or reading it as a prayer that you can personalize. Or listening for a truth the Spirit might be trying to reveal to you for this season of your life. Here’s an Ephesians reading plan.
- People: One month read the book of Acts (a chapter a day) along with a partner, texting or calling each other regularly/daily with insights and questions. Or with a small group that gathers weekly in order to discuss the way Acts is structured and the main apostles’ teachings. Or with an online group that meets virtually with the heart of building community through the shared experience of reading the Bible together. Here’s an Acts reading plan.
- Finally, as a community, let us not neglect sharing God’s amazing grace with others! Share your God-stories with people around you. Share this site. Share God’s Word. Shine His light into the world!
Featured Photo by Bethany Laird on Unsplash. “All the Bits and Pieces” photo by Sahand Babali on Unsplash.