The best sermon you’ll ever hear preached will not come from the preacher but from what the Lord is saying to you through him. The preacher’s sermon may take a while, but the word the Lord speaks may come in seconds and be a very small portion of the overall sermon.
Unless you tell him, the preacher will never know what the Lord has said to you. Neither should he because it was very personal. What might have been peripheral to the preacher may be central to you. The Spirit of God conveys the most memorable messages.
Using this as an analogy, the sermon everyone is hearing is the “logos” and the word God that is speaking to you is a “rhema”. If you hadn’t listened to the sermon, you may not have received the “rhema”, because the general word contains the specific word.
A soldier’s responsibility is to know Standing Orders, which change infrequently. But it’s very important that he reads Routine Orders, which change daily, and in wartime even more frequently.
We can know the Bible from cover to cover, from Genesis to Revelation, but knowing which particular verse is relevant to the situation, circumstance or condition is what counts in the moment.
Amos 8:11 & 12 revealed that God would send “a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.
“And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north, even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it.”
The known word of God, i.e. what He had spoken in the past, would have been available to the people; but what they were seeking so hungrily was the word that God was speaking to them in what we call Real Time: their daily bread. Not what God had said in the past but rather what He was now saying in the present.
“Give me this day my daily bread” taught Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, in what we know as The Lord’s Prayer. The words “daily bread” would have brought to the minds of his listeners the “daily bread” known as manna, which the children of Israel gathered six mornings a week during their forty in the wilderness. Manna alone had kept them all alive.
A daily “rhema” does much the same for Christians, who love reading the Bible but need a ‘word from the Word’ while crossing through the ‘wilderness’ of the world before ‘entering into’ the promises of God in Christ. Sadly, there is a ‘famine of the word of God’ today — one that drives “rhema”-famished Christians to search for fresh words from the Lord in church after church. The 400-year prophetic ‘famine’ that took place between Malachi and Matthew may have been the fulfillment of Amos’ prophecy.
So, ‘bury yourself’ in the logos every morning until the Lord ‘raises you up’ with a rhema! My formula is: Logos plus pneuma equals rhema! In other words, do not neglect the logos while in search of a rhema; and do refrain from seeking personal prophecies as rhema substitutes! (Especially those after-meeting carpark prophecies that tell you what you want to hear.) God is still speaking in Real Time and it’s far better to be a well-fed listener than a hungry chaser!