The apostle Paul brings us in verses 16-17 to four graces that dwell in believers. The first is the indwelling word – ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.
Read the word of course daily, absorb it, seek to understand its sense. Remember its great passages and its doctrines and its promises. It is our object of admiration. When you read the Scripture constantly, you marvel at its composition, its nature, its organisation, and its amazing consistency and development of themes. It is also one of the means of your communion with Christ. It is your sense so often of the very presence of the Lord. You take up a psalm, and even as you make its prayer or its contents your own, you are conscious of your union with Christ and his nearness. The daily use of Scripture sharpens our zeal, shrinks the world in our estimation, increases our sense of indebtedness to God.
The church of Rome claims to honour the Scripture, but you soon discover it does not because there is something else equal to the Scripture, and in fact more important that the Scripture, and that is the traditions of the church and the declarations of successive popes and colleges. If there is any dispute, church tradition always trumps the Scripture. The charismatic people have to be so careful, and unfortunately they are not. They have in their midst literally thousands of supposed prophets who tell us, we should be worshipping this way, and we should be carrying out this practice. God, they claim, has revealed it to them. But it is nowhere in the Scripture, and it ends up trumping the Scripture. No, our sole authority and basis for everything is the word of God.
I noticed in a Christian magazine a gentleman had written a letter complaining about the lockdown. He said, more or less, it you cannot sing, it is not worth going to church. But this is the key – ‘singing with grace in your heart’. Being locked down, at least for a short time, may do us a favour because we can only sing with grace in our hearts and not with our lips, and perhaps that is a good exercise for us for a while, to really relish and take in the words and mean them and wing them heavenward.
When this letter was written, there was very little of the New Testament in existence; it was being formed. Not even the Gospels were circulating yet, except as an audible message. So the word of Christ meant specifically to them the gospel. Of course, as time went by the Bible was completed and the gospels came in. Then they knew that Christ was the Word, who was in the beginning with God, and that all things in the Scripture are his word. So this phrase, the ‘word of Christ’ came to mean all the word of God.