Oxygen To My SoulSample

Treasuring the Word of God

The psalmist delighted in God’s Word. To delight in God’s Word is to love it, to treasure it, to value it, to regard it as priceless. The remarkable thing is that the psalmist’s Bible was Genesis through Deuteronomy. We’ve got so much more to delight in: Psalms, Isaiah, Proverbs, John, Acts, Romans, Ephesians, and more.

In his extraordinary book The Heavenly Man, Brother Yun tells this story:

After his conversion as a young man, he found out about the Bible. He did not have one. He did not know anyone who had one. Bibles were scarce in China in those days. He was so hungry for the Bible. His mother had heard of an old man in another village who had been a pastor. They went to visit him. The old man told him to pray for a Bible. So, day after day, he knelt down with one simple prayer, “Lord, please give me a Bible. Amen.” After a month nothing happened, so he went back to the old man’s house and this time the pastor told him he needed to fast and weep for a Bible. So for the next 100 days, he fasted morning and noon and ate a little bit in the evening, weeping and praying for a Bible. Still no Bible. Then one morning at 4 a.m., he received a vivid vision in which two men give him a Bible. The vision was so real that he got up in the middle of the night and began looking for a Bible in the house. Not finding it he began weeping loudly and woke his parents. His parents rushed in to see what was wrong and they wept with him. Just at that desperate moment, they hear a faint knock at the door. He answers it and there are two strangers at the door, the same two men that he had just seen in his vision. They give him a bag containing a Bible. In his own words, he wrote: “My heart raced as I opened the bag and held in my hands my very own Bible! The two men quickly departed into the still darkness. I clutched my new Bible to my heart and fell down on my knees outside the door. I thanked God again and again! I promised Jesus that from that moment on I would devour his Word like a hungry child.” 

That’s what it means to treasure God’s Word.