As President and Founder of MMM, I have heard many of our faithful attendees say “I am really trying to internalize the Word but I cannot do it. I try and think I am succeeding until I fall back from where I was from the start.”
It is obvious from this statement that our students who are failing in “Internalizing the Word” have been doing so because they are depending on their own strength instead of the Holy Spirit. For all students in this boat, I share with you the Secret of Internalizing the Word.
- Learn DYING and START LIVING. Sounds contradictory, but not. Jesus had to die before he was resurrected. We must die before we get to heaven. And you and I must die, not physically, but spiritually if we would really live. (Mark 8:35ff) Jesus did not come to bring death but the “abundant life.” (John 10:10b)
- Stop TRYING and START TRUSTING. Many who fail in internalizing the Word say ‘I am trying or have tried, but I cannot hold out.” Exactly. Neither can I. But we are in good company; the Apostle Paul, for example, even Jesus in the days of His flesh. I chose 1 Cor. 15:10c as my life verse to remind me that I cannot internalize the Word or walk in the Spirit by depending on myself but by the Grace of God which is with me. (1 Cor. 15:10c)
- Stop Dedicating and Re-Dedicating Self but Surrender Self to the Holy Spirit. Even Paul tried to live the Christian life in the flesh and utterly failed until he called himself a “wretched man,” (Romans 7:25 – (wretched means miserable and tired.) No saved person can keep the law or live a Christian life (Internalizing the Word) without outside help. Paul made it crystal clear that it was not “I”, the EGO, who was living, but “Christ who lives in me” through the Holy Spirit. (Gal. 2:20) At one point in his life he was controlled by the “law of sin and death, which is the flesh, until he discovered the “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” (the Holy Spirit) and was delivered from his fleshly bondage; then the Holy Spirit enabled him to live up to the requirements of the Lord (internalizing the Word) to the fullest. (Romans 8:3-4)
- Begin each day with this Prayer, “O Lord, I cannot live the Christian life, but the Holy Spirit will live it through me, if I surrender to Him, enabling me to Internalize the Word of God.”
- Stop Crying and Start praising. Paul cried out “O wretched man I am” until He surrendered to the Holy Spirit, then he praised God “Thanks be to God who gives me the Victory through the Lord Jesus Christ… for the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus (that is the Holy Spirit) has freed me from the law of sin and death.” (workings of the flesh) (Romans 7:25 – 8:2) “And what the law could not do in the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of flesh and for sin condemned sin in the flesh IN ORDER THAT THE RIGHTEOUS REQUIREMENT OF THE LAW MIGHT BE FULFILLED IN ME WHO WALK NOT AFTER THE FLESH (the law of sin and death) but by the SPIRIT.” (Romans 8:3-4)
(I was moved to prepare this message after I hear the late Adrian Rogers, on a recording, expound the supernatural power of the fully surrendered Christians as set forth in Romans 7 and 8) and then I applied this truth to the “Internalizing of the Word.”