Bible Claims

What might change in your home if you turned to the Bible when faced with a big decision, relationship problem, or challenge? What might change in your workplace or church if the words of the Bible truly became the lens through which people viewed the world and chose to live by?

The Bible authors knew how valuable the words of the Bible were. No other book can speak to your life as these words can. The words can sit on the page in your Bible, but how can you keep them in your heart?

One of the claims the Bible makes about itself can be found in Hebrews 4:12. A two-edged sword is powerful and sharp, but the Bible can do what human tools cannot for the human soul. The Bible describes itself as being alive. Perhaps you’ve wondered how this could be, given that it was written thousands of years ago, but Jesus said, “ ‘The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life’ ” (John 6:63, NKJV). If your heart is broken or your life is falling apart, God can speak His words into your world and change things around. The Old Testament also describes God’s words as being very active and not at all stagnant or passive (see Isa. 55:11). When David reflected on the impact of God’s words on his life, he wrote, “This is my comfort in my affliction, for Your word has given me life” (Ps. 119:50, NKJV).

Perhaps you’ve experienced severe hunger at some point in your life, or maybe you’ve fasted or gone on a diet. Doesn’t food taste good after you’ve been hungry? In a spiritual sense, the Bible is food for our souls.

If your soul is empty and hungry, open the Living Word. Read Jeremiah 15:16, 1 Peter 2:2, and Matthew 4:4.

God’s words taste good to the mind and heart, and when we read them, they will fill us and sustain us as promised.

The messages in God’s Word, the Bible, come from God Himself. God sent them specifically for us and for every other person who has sought Him. When we read them with a prayerful, open heart, those words won’t be wasted.

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Additional Reading: Selected Quotes from Ellen G. White

Like [a] child, you shall receive day by day what is required for the day’s need. Every day you are to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Be not dismayed if you have not sufficient for tomorrow. You have the assurance of His promise, “So shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.” David says, “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” (Psalm 37:3, 25). . . .
He who lightened the cares and anxieties of His widowed mother and helped her to provide for the household at Nazareth sympathizes with every mother in her struggle to provide her children food. He who had compassion on the multitude because they “fainted, and were scattered abroad” (Matthew 9:36) still has compassion on the suffering poor. His hand is stretched out toward them in blessing; and in the very prayer which He gave His disciples, He teaches us to remember the poor. . . .
The prayer for daily bread includes not only food to sustain the body, but that spiritual bread which will nourish the soul unto life everlasting. Jesus bids us, “Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life” (John 6:27). He says, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever” (Verse 51). Our Savior is the Bread of Life, and it is by beholding His love, by receiving it into the soul, that we feed upon the bread which came down from heaven.
We receive Christ through His Word, and the Holy Spirit is given to open the Word of God to our understanding and bring home its truths to our hearts. We are to pray day by day that as we read His Word, God will send His Spirit to reveal to us the truth that will strengthen our souls for the day’s need.
In teaching us to ask every day for what we need—both temporal and spiritual blessings—God has a purpose to accomplish for our good. He would have us realize our dependence upon His constant care, for He is seeking to draw us into communion with Himself. In this communion with Christ, through prayer and the study of the great and precious truths of His Word, we shall as hungry souls be fed; as those that thirst, we shall be refreshed at the fountain of life.—To Be Like Jesus, p. 11.