Rethinking what I think of the Word

I've been listening to these talks from the Gospel Coalition Women's Conference re: word-based women's ministry (here, here, and here). Concurrently, I've been realizing my own lack in really understanding the importance of the Word and the singularity of the Word as the sole source of authoritative revelation of God from God. It's better late than never, but part of me wishes that I had been taught how to read, study, and rightly value the Word a long time ago. But reading and studying involved the mind, and the mind was somehow at odds with the Holy Spirit. Or so it was taught and inferred.

During a severe trial, I read the Word night and day. But I was looking for messages from God about me and my situation rather than the revelation of who He is and letting that change me and my perspective. To make matters worse, a friend, who I looked to as a spiritual mentor, advised me that I could only take verses as promises from God when the Holy Spirit "anointed" them. Oh, great. Now not only was I looking for the wrong thing, but my feelings, under the guise of the "Holy Spirit", became the arbiter of what was the word of God to me. Yikes!

Here's Carl Trueman's take:

There is, however, an equally inadequate tendency within evangelical circles to pay lip service to the Bible as an inspired book while using it in practice as merely an inspirational book. This is most obvious in the common tendency to use the Bible as a collection of blessed thoughts, as a series of quaint literary pegs upon which to hang personal experiences, or as a sort of almanac out of which God is able to speak in some intangible and mystical way... Preaching and worship which seldom rises above the level of immediate experience of practical application, which has an almost entirely pragmatic focus, is a breeding ground for precisely this kind of thing. In such a context, the Bible functions not so much as an inspired book, saying and doing what God wants it to say and do, but an inspirational book, saying and doing what we, perhaps unconsciously, want it to say and do to us. (emphasis mine)

Here's to unlearning decades of this self-absorbed view that wrongly stands in authority over the word of God and submitting to what it truly is:

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Hebrews 4:12