Word and Prayer must dwell in you.
When a person recognizes that he or she has been made right with God through Jesus’ act of laying down His life for them, God’s love compels them to surrender all to God. This is the beginning of an exciting life because now the person has a grand purpose, that of being a dispenser of God’s spirit. No longer will the person feel useless in this world. No longer will a person question, “Why am I here? What is the point of life?” Every day, every minute, God is using that yielded person. He or she becomes a dispenser, a container, a distributer of the Almighty God, the Great I-Am.Two essential prerequisites for fulfilling this purpose as God’s dispenser is prayer and the Word.Watch your prayer life. The enemy is always out to counter the efforts of a Christ-filled person who is striving to pray. Slewfoot (as I call the devil) will do anything and everything to curtail one’s personal prayer life. Don’t you find that just as you are about to go into prayer, the phone will ring? Or as you are in prayer, a family member will interrupt you, needing something? Perhaps while trying to meditate, you will hear the washing machine clanking in a disconcerting way, breaking your undivided attention on God. Satan works hard to cut your praying short, to interfere with its quality, or some how put his claw upon it to unsettle you in your prayer hour. Be aware of that strategy. Claim Christ’s blood, and prayer, even in the midst of attack.The second thing that is mandatory is to get into the Word. A rich life in the Word of God is indispensable to a life devoted to being the dispenser of God’s spirit. The Holy Spirit’s presence in your life is not a substitute for the Word of God. A lot of people think the Holy Spirit’s dwelling in you is an adequate substitute for Scripture. That is not so. And it is dangerous to your spiritual walk to think you don’t need the Word on a daily basis. A mental grasp of the Bible is not enough. You must be saturated in the Word, like a sponge wet with water. You must be marinated with the Word, like a shish-kabob swimming in sauce.Austin-Sparks, an early 20th century theologian, reminded me that we do not want just a theoretical knowledge of the Lord from the Bible. Instead, we want to live IN the Word of God. We want the Word to be present in our minds and hearts daily. This way the Holy Spirit can bring the verse up, quicken our conscience with it, and direct our path by it. The Bible says, "Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly.”To be a dispenser for God’s Holy Spirit, you need the Almighty’s presence, the indwelling Word as God’s instrument of change, and the flow of prayer to activate the dispensing process.
