Christians confess that God is. Indeed, his name is “I am” (Exodus 3:14). According to Hebrews 11, a fundamental aspect of pleasing him is believing that he exists: “Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). But unless we are philosophers, words like existence and being and is are fairly bland. They don’t awe us (though they should).

Perhaps that’s why the Bible regularly stresses that God doesn’t merely exist, but that he lives. “The Lord lives, and blessed be my rock, and exalted be the God of my salvation” (Psalm 18:46).

A common oath throughout the Old Testament is “as the Lord lives.” What’s more, references to “the living God” are highlighted in some key biblical stories. Reflecting on the biblical witness to the living God may stir our affections more than simple statements about his existence.

Not Like the Idols

The Bible often refers to Yahweh as the living God in order to set him apart from the idols of the nations. In Jeremiah 10, the prophet exhorts Israel to avoid the vain customs of the people. He looks with disdain on the making of an idol:

A tree from the forest is cut down     and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.They decorate it with silver and gold;     they fasten it with hammer and nails     so that it cannot move. (Jeremiah 10:3–4)

The idols of the nations are “like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak.” What’s more, “they have to be carried, for they cannot walk.” There’s no reason to fear them, since they can do neither evil nor good (Jeremiah 10:5).

Isaiah echoes the same truth in chapter 45 of his oracle. The nations “carry about their wooden idols, and keep on praying to a god that cannot save” (45:20). Isaiah 46 elaborates:

Bel bows down; Nebo stoops;     their idols are on beasts and livestock;these things you carry are borne     as burdens on weary beasts.They stoop; they bow down together;     they cannot save the burden,     but themselves go into captivity.“Listen to me, O house of Jacob,     all the remnant of the house of Israel,who have been borne by me from before your birth,     carried from the womb;even to your old age I am he,     and to gray hairs I will carry you.I have made, and I will bear;     I will carry and will save.” (Isaiah 46:1–4)

The contrast couldn’t be clearer. Donkeys carry the idols of the nations; Yahweh carries his people. Idols can’t even save themselves; the Lord saves his people.

According to Jeremiah 10:6–7, this is why Yahweh is unique.

There is none like you, O Lord;     you are great, and your name is great in might.Who would not fear you, O King of the nations?     For this is your due;for among all the wise ones of the nations     and in all their kingdoms     there is none like you.

“Donkeys carry the idols of the nation; Yahweh carries his people. Idols can’t even save themselves; the Lord saves his people.”

In contrast, the nations are “both stupid and foolish,” worshiping wood overlaid with gold and silver, and clothed with violet and purple by the hands of men (Jeremiah 10:8–9). “But,” the prophet says, “the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King” (Jeremiah 10:10).

This is a fundamental difference between the Lord and the gods of the nations. The Lord is the living God. He’s not a statue. He’s not dead; he is alive. When Yahweh is on the move, it’s not because someone put him on their shoulders. He comes and goes as he pleases.

‘You Are God Alone’

He is the living God who speaks from the fire (Deuteronomy 5:26). He dwells with his people and drives out their enemies (Joshua 3:10). When David confronts the giant Goliath, he is particularly incensed that the uncircumcised Philistine has defied “the armies of the living God” (1 Samuel 17:26, 36). Likewise, Hezekiah appeals to Yahweh for deliverance when Sennacherib, king of Assyria, mocks “the living God” (2 Kings 19:4, 16). He pleads with Yahweh,

Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands and have cast their gods into the fire, for they were not gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore they were destroyed. So now, O Lord our God, save us, please, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O Lord, are God alone. (2 Kings 19:17–19)

King Darius, after being tricked into casting Daniel into the den of lions, calls Daniel the “servant of the living God” (Daniel 6:20). When he sees that God has preserved Daniel, he decrees that all peoples “tremble and fear before the God of Daniel, for he is the living God, enduring forever; his kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion shall be to the end” (Daniel 6:26).

In the New Testament

In the New Testament, Paul echoes the prophets when he urges the inhabitants of Lystra to “turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them” (Acts 14:15).

However, we also discover some surprising things about the living God in the New Testament. He has a Son, as Peter confesses when Jesus asks who the disciples say that he is. “You are the Christ, the son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). More than that, the living God has a Spirit, as Paul testifies to the Corinthians: “You are a letter from Christ . . . written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God” (2 Corinthians 3:3). The living God is the triune God, eternally subsisting in three persons.

The triune God also has a household, “the church of the living God, the pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). More than that, those of us who have set our hope on the living God as our Savior have now become the temple of the living God, in whom and with whom he dwells (2 Corinthians 6:16). We are the children of the living God, as numerous as the sand on the seashore (Hosea 1:10; Romans 9:26).

“Have you considered recently how wonderful it is to draw near to the God who exists, the God who is?”

And as such, we take care, lest there be in any of us an evil, unbelieving heart, leading us to fall away from the living God (Hebrews 3:12). Our consciences have been purified by the blood of Christ so that we no longer offer dead works, but instead serve the living God (Hebrews 9:14). And one way or another, we will have to eternally face the living God. Either we will fall into the hands of the living God (a fearful and terrifying prospect, Hebrews 10:31), or we will come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, and to his innumerable angels in festal gathering (Hebrews 12:22).

Longing for the Living God

But perhaps the most striking note about the living God is expressed twice in the Psalms. It is the note of longing after such a God.

As a deer pants for flowing streams,     so pants my soul for you, O God.My soul thirsts for God,     for the living God. (Psalm 42:1–2)

And then again, in Psalm 84:

How lovely is your dwelling place,     O Lord of hosts!My soul longs, yes, faints     for the courts of the Lord;my heart and flesh sing for joy     to the living God. (Psalm 84:1–2)

Have you considered recently how wonderful it is to draw near to the God who exists, the God who is? And more than that, to draw near to the God who lives and who is to us the fountain of life? We come to him to drink, to satisfy our souls with the greatest reward that he offers: himself.

I’ve been doing the same Bible-reading plan for years.

Quite simply, nothing has shaped me these last two decades like learning (and re-learning) to slowly work through the day’s assigned readings morning after morning, month after month, year after year. This particular plan has four short readings per day, and 25 days per month. It moves a reader through the full terrain of Scripture in twelve months. That makes for about fifteen minutes per day, at an average reading pace — which is too fast for Bible reading (more on that below).

Not that this habit of starting each day with open Bible (and coffee) is always clean and easy, but it’s far more automatic and enjoyable and fruitful now, twenty years later, than at the beginning. It’s amazing how a longstanding, daily habit can change you — not just in terms of psychological pathways and external actions, but also how a soul can be formed and conditioned.

We tend to overestimate how much we can change in the short run, and underestimate how much we can change in the long run.

Condition the Soul

Souls really can be conditioned, like bodies can be conditioned. In fact, our souls are perhaps all the more “conditionable” than our stubborn bodies (“brother ass,” as C.S. Lewis called the body). God made our minds and hearts to be trained and retrained. They are plastic, to borrow the term from neurology. You can train them in greed (2 Peter 2:14) or train them in godliness (1 Timothy 4:7).

“Souls really can be conditioned, like bodies can be conditioned.”

Among many profound benefits of starting each day with God’s voice is how this first-thing encounter with God through his word shapes, trains, and conditions our inner man. After years of Bible reading, I know I have a painfully long way to go, yet I don’t want to overlook the deep blessings and joys of early-morning soul-steeping in the word of God.

Why Not Check the Box?

Over the years, as far as I can tell, perhaps the single most significant “breakthrough” for me in daily Bible intake was learning to ignore those little boxes next to each of the daily readings. If you’re a box-checker, I cast no stones. I simply share my own weaknesses and flaws by testifying to the breakthrough. Silly as it may sound, when I stopped checking the boxes, something started to change in my attitude toward God’s word.

Why would I not check the boxes? There they sat, immediately to the left of each assigned passage — conspicuously empty, practically calling out to me to fill them. But what I began to own in my own soul is that ending each reading by checking a box was promoting or reinforcing the wrong approach in me. When the arc of my “time alone with Jesus” was moving ever toward checking a box, I was orienting on the wrong end. I needed to retrain myself, by omitting that final step, to reinforce in my soul that I wasn’t sitting in front of Scripture to accomplish the day’s first to-do. I wasn’t here to achieve. This was not labor but devotions.

“When I stopped checking the boxes, something started to change in my attitude toward God’s word.”

Later in the day, I might do the hard work of studying the Bible or working to produce some article or sermon. But for now, first thing in the morning, I had God’s word open first and foremost to receive, to see Jesus, to feed my soul on him. What my soul really needed to start the day was him, not some small sense of accomplishment. I needed to encounter and enjoy the risen Jesus, not cross off the day’s first task.

I know now that there is a little hit of dopamine in checking boxes and crossing items off a list. But in time, I grew unsatisfied with that. I didn’t want to confuse the joy of completing a task with the enduring depth and riches of finding my soul being fed, being genuinely made happy in Christ through his word.

In retrospect, I can see that learning not to check the boxes then led to several other dominoes falling.

Slow Way Down

At an average reading pace, it takes about 70 hours to read through the whole Bible. Break that up into 300 days (25 days per month), and you have less than fifteen minutes per day. When I was pressing to check boxes, I could knock out the day’s readings in ten or twelve minutes. And by the end of the fourth reading, I hardly could remember what I had read in the first or second, or even fourth, passage.

When I stopped checking the boxes, it helped me to remember that I wasn’t there to finish the readings but to feed my soul. This freed me to slow way down in my reading speed. I could read at the slowest, most deliberate pace I found enjoyable, and stop to re-read any sentence or paragraph that was particularly unclear, or especially sweet — and still the full time elapsed would be less than half an hour.

In the book Meditation and Communion with God, longtime seminary professor Jack Davis waves the flag for “a more reflective and leisurely engagement with Scripture” in our day (20). According to Davis, the nature of modern life, and the “information overload” we have through television, smartphones, and endless new media “makes a slow, unhurried, and reflective reading of Scripture more vital than ever” (22).

Off the Clock Devotions

Another domino that soon fell was learning to set aside enough time to be able to lose track of time. What some in the work world call “flow” I found to be immensely helpful for morning devotions. I needed to sit where I wasn’t staring at a clock, or hearing one tick, or checking the time every few minutes. The rest of my day so often seemed timed and on the clock. In these morning moments before the risen Christ, I needed to lose consciousness of time, to read slowly and re-read, to explore cross-references and rabbit trails across the canon.

Some days the first assigned reading met and fed me. Other days little to nothing struck me in the four short readings, and I would review them to find somewhere to linger and feed. But neither happened well “on the clock.” There was no reliable timeframe I could assign to genuine soul feeding. So I needed enough space to linger before God without rushing off to the next part of the day.

For starters, I’d recommend half an hour, with the glad expectation that it will grow over time as your appreciation deepens for these quiet, unrushed, morning moments over God’s word.

Move into Meditation

Finally, and most significantly, not checking the boxes freed me to move from slow, unhurried reading into meditation, and then from meditation into prayer.

As I would move through the day’s readings, I was on the lookout for some patch to pause and feed, to really press into my soul, a place to meditate over some particular word from Christ to me that morning. Such meditation is a lost art in our day — not Eastern meditation in which you empty the head, but biblical meditation in which you seek to fill your mind with God-revealed truth and seek to press it into the heart.

Meditation, then, can serve as a kind of “bridge discipline” between Bible reading and prayer. I used to finish reading the passages, check the boxes, and then pivot pretty unnaturally to praying through lists, for myself, my family, friends, ministry partners, and missionaries. Learning to move from unhurried Bible reading into a few minutes meditating on a particular paragraph or verse helped me to focus and feed on a specific divine glory for the morning, and then make that the springboard into and theme for my prayers.

Enough for Today

I won’t pretend that not checking the boxes is for everyone, but maybe like me you’d be helped to take some defiant step to remind your soul, “I’m here to enjoy Jesus.”

One last note: when I stopped checking the boxes, I no longer felt the pressure to “go back” and make up any readings I hadn’t completed the day before. This freed me to really focus on feeding my soul today, to “gather a day’s portion,” rather than try to make up for yesterday, or last week. I realize that for new Bible readers, it may not be quite so easy. You need context to understand verses aright. That’s important. But I would have you take heart that getting a more intuitive sense of the context grows tremendously over time, as you make the annual journey through Scripture, and supplement your reading with various studies.

As George Mueller (1805–1898) so memorably said, his first business every day was to have his soul happy in God.

Leaving the boxes empty has helped me with that.

The church of Jesus, near and far, at home and abroad, is on a global mission against the gates of hell.

Under God, and by the power of our all-authoritative Christ (Matthew 28:18), we raid the “domain of darkness” and carry captives to safety (Colossians 1:13). We go to spiritual sleepwalkers and say, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 5:14). We break into the house of the strong man, still bound by the Stronger One, and “plunder his goods” (Mark 3:27).

You might imagine, given such a mission, that God would arm his church with some spectacular weapons. But surprisingly enough, we join Jesus in destroying the devil’s works not mainly by casting out demons, or working miracles, or engaging in power encounters, but by teaching the truth.

Go . . . and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. (Matthew 28:19–20)

Missions as a Teaching War

Teaching may seem like a weak weapon to wield against the devil. Do knights slay dragons by persuasion? But in God’s hands, faithful teaching undoes one of the devil’s favorite schemes, as old as Eden and as subtle as that ancient snake: false teaching.

As Andy Naselli observes in The Serpent and the Serpent Slayer, the devil acts sometimes with obvious, spectacular opposition, and other times with hidden, unspectacular craft. Or, he acts sometimes like a dragon, and sometimes like a serpent (Revelation 12:9). As dragon, he devours; as serpent, he deceives. As dragon, he persecutes and oppresses; as serpent, he seduces and ensnares. As dragon, he breathes fire; as serpent, he whispers falsehood.

And between the two, the serpent may be the deadlier. In Eden, Satan could have terrified Eve with his fangs; instead, he lured and lied with his tongue — with his teaching (Genesis 3:4–5). And so he still does (John 8:44). False teaching felled the world, and false teaching keeps it in oppression.

“At every stage of the kingdom’s advance, the lie of the garden dies by the truth of the gospel.”

So, at every stage of the kingdom’s advance — from Jesus to his apostles to the church — the lie of the garden dies by the truth of the gospel. Teaching wins back the world.

Teaching Launches the Kingdom

Jesus did more than teach during his ministry — he healed, worked wonders, and cast out legions of demons. He attacked the devil’s domain with both the right hand and the left. But teaching was the central assault.

Following his baptism and wilderness temptations, his public ministry began when he “came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God” (Mark 1:15). Indeed, the Spirit anointed him “to proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18), a mission that ever rested on the front of his mind: “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God . . . for I was sent for this purpose” (Luke 4:43). Preaching and teaching were “his custom” (Mark 10:1), what he did “throughout all the cities and villages” (Matthew 9:35). “You call me Teacher,” he told his disciples, “and you are right, for so I am” (John 13:13).

The healings, the wonders, the spiritual authority — these were all fingers pointing to his kingdom-heralding, gospel-giving words. In fact, without embracing his teaching, the souls of former demoniacs were merely emptied and swept, inviting worse darkness to enter (Matthew 12:45). Only “the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32), Jesus told some would-be disciples. And so, he taught.

Teaching Spreads the Kingdom

The apostles were not confused about what it meant to carry on their risen Teacher’s mission. The book of Acts records many demons cast out, wonders worked, and diseases healed, but the emphasis again lands on teaching — or, in Luke’s broad vocabulary, proclaiming (Acts 4:2), preaching (Acts 8:4), disputing (Acts 9:29), speaking (Acts 16:13), reasoning (Acts 17:2), proving (Acts 17:3), persuading (Acts 18:4), explaining (Acts 18:26).

The apostles, like Jesus, demonstrated the kingdom in both word and deed, but they were clear that the deeds served the words (Acts 3:11–16). Ultimately, it was the apostles’ Spirit-empowered teaching that turned hearts, toppled idols, saved sinners, and founded churches. And so, it was to the devil’s shame, but the apostles’ glory, to hear the Jerusalem council complain, “You have filled Jerusalem with your teaching” (Acts 5:28).

And more than Jerusalem. By book’s end, the teaching had broken out of Judea, run through Samaria, and begun to reach “the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8), liberating captives all along the way. The last verse pictures Paul in Rome — doing what? “Teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 28:31).

Teaching Grows and Guards the Kingdom

As the age of the apostles ended, the mission against spiritual darkness did not. And unsurprisingly, the apostle Paul placed teaching at the center of the church’s ongoing advance. Not only did he charge Timothy, his spiritual son, to devote himself to teaching (1 Timothy 4:11, 13; 6:2; 2 Timothy 4:2), but he labored to create a legacy of teachers: “What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). Whatever happens, Timothy, make sure the church keeps teaching.

“Through teaching, God will grow and guard his kingdom in lands once ruled by lies.”

By teaching the truth, the elders of the church — and, under them, every member (Colossians 3:16) — proclaim the gospel and gather new believers; they also protect the gospel and guard believers from the ever-present threat of serpentine deception, including what Paul calls “teachings of demons” (1 Timothy 4:1). Such teachings are sometimes permissive, scratching ears and suiting passions (2 Timothy 4:3), and sometimes restrictive, banning marriage and forbidding foods (1 Timothy 4:3), but they are always false and always deadly.

And so, the church teaches and teaches and teaches — trusting that through teaching, God will grow and guard his kingdom in lands once ruled by lies.

God Empowers the Teaching

On the surface, Christian teaching may look unremarkable — as unremarkable as Jesus telling parables beside the sea, or Paul reasoning with some Thessalonian Jews, or Timothy unrolling the scroll to preach again. But through the ordinary words and phrases of faithful Christian teaching, God works wonders.

When the risen Lord Jesus told Paul to go teach, he also told him the effect his teaching would have:

I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. (Acts 26:17–18)

Through teaching, God works miracles greater than the multiplication of loaves, or the deliverance of demoniacs, or even the raising of Lazarus. He shatters our delusive darkness. He forgives our innumerable sins. And he frees his people from the power of Satan, that serpent of false teaching and forked tongue, and wins us back to himself.

So, in the church’s global mission against the gate of hell, words are our greatest weapons.