20 My son, give attention to my words; incline your ear
to my sayings.
Proverbs 4:20
What does it mean to give attention to God’s Word? It
means to give full attention to His Word. Don’t give His
Word or His sayings divided attention. Pay full
attention to the Word of the Lord concerning healing.
When you take a Word CD or tape on healing home, don’t
play it at the background when you have visitors. Some
of us keep the Word as “background music” all the time
and it never has our full attention, thus we never
imbibe all we need to from the Word.
To “give attention” to something or someone means to pay
attention to, to pay heed to, to be attentive to, to
listen to, to concentrate on, to take note of, to bear
in mind, to take into consideration and to observe. Can
you see how very little attention we believers give to
the Word of God? Even in church during sermons where the
Word is being preached right before us, many of us sit
down in the pew and daydream. We travel in our minds
from places we have been, to places we would want to be.
We think of the appointment we have after service and we
don’t pay attention to the Word. If this can happen in
church, then certainly for the rest of the week the idea
of taking the initiative to create a window to attend to
the Word of God fully is definitely necessary. If the
Word will heal your body, you must respect dose #1.
To make this clearer, the opposite of the word
“attention” is to disregard, ignore and neglect. Can you
imagine a nurse in a hospital not attending to her
patient, or a nursemaid not attending to an adventurous
toddler, or even a distracted husband not paying
attention to the conversation of his wife? The fullness
of every relationship is enjoyed when the required
attention is given to it. Full attention requires that
you remove all distractions. It often demands that you
make a sacrifice of your time, desires, and even
finances (e.g. to buy a walkman, an Mp3 player an iPod
or even a notebook just for the Word).
A man who pays attention to the Word of God day and
night is a blessed man.
Confession:
I give God’s Word full and undivided attention and it
becomes medicine to every part of my body.