The Word of God awakens and strenghtens faith
Ro 10.17 - Jn 16.13-14
If the Spirit brought us to faith in the absence of the proclamation of Christ in his Word, our faith would not be in Christ, and he would not be honored.
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Through hearing the Word, God supplies the Holy Spirit
Ga 3.5
The Spirit of God produces both a subconscious influence bringing us to faith, and a conscious experience of power and personal fellowship that come through that very faith. This explains two things:
1) This is why the Bible can speak of the Spirit blowing where he wills and having merciful effects in our lives before we were able to choose them (Jn 3.6-8; 6.36, 44, 65). In other words, by his unconscious influence he works in us to enable us to hear and welcome the Word.
2) This is also why the Bible speaks of the Spirit coming through our hearing the Word of God. In other words, conscious fellowship with the Spirit is given when we hear the Word of God with faith.
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The Word of God creates and sustains life
Jn 10.10 - 1 Pet 1:23-25 - Jn 6.63 - Jn 20.31 - Mt 4.4
The life that comes from the Word of God is a life of joy, because the Word brings us from the darkness of impending sorrow to the light of the glory of Christ.
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The Word of God gives hope
Ro 15.4 - 1 Th 1.3 - Tit 2.13 - Ep 1.12 - Col 1.27
We have very small experience of life compared to God's wisdom. There are a thousand ways that God has designed to give us hope. Most of them we have not yet tasted or even conceived. Yet how often we murmur that the few proven we get hope are missing! We do not realize that there are ways to get hope that we have never thought of. [...] Indeed, we may lack hope because we think we need something we do not need. It may take the Word of God to show us what we really need, and then to give us the power to get it. In the end what we really need is Christ. He is the sum of all our hopes.
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The Word of God leads us to freedom
Jn 8.32 - Jn 17.17
The freedom [Jesus] has in mind [in John 8.32] is freedom from the enslaving, destructive effet of sin. [...] Sanctify means to make holy, or free from sin.
The freedom is essential in the fight for joy for two reasons. One is that the guilt of sin would bring down the wrath of God on us if the truth of the gospel did not set us free from condemnation trough the blood and righteousness of Christ.
The other reason [...] is that sin so defiles and corrupts our lives that we cannot see or savor what is best. Therefore, the corruption of sin is a great joy-killer.
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The Word of God is the key to answered prayer
Jn 15.7 - 1 Jn 5.14
Letting the words of Jesus abide in us means letting Jesus abide in us, to us. It means that we welcome Jesus into our lives and make room for him to live, not as a silent guest with no opinions or commands, but as an authoritative guest whose words and priorities and promises more to us than anything does.
[...] if you want God to respond to your interests, you must be devoted to his interests. God is God. He does not run the world by hiring the consulting firm called Mankind. He let us share in the running of the world through prayer to the degree that we live in fellowship with him and are gladly shaped by his heart and goals and purposes. [...] Prayer is not for gratifying our natural desires. It is for gratifying our desires when those desires have been so purified and so saturated with Christ and his Word that they coincide with his plans. This happens more and more as the Word of Christ abides in us.
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The Word of God is source of wisdom
Col 2.3 - Col 3.16
Wisdom is the insight and sense of how to live in a way that accomplishes the goals for which we were made: the glory of God and the good of man. And since glorifying God involves delighting in God, and the good of man involves sharing our joy in God, therefore wisdom is the only path to deep and lasting joy.
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The Word of God gives us crucial warnings
Ps 19.10-11
We are blind to many things and do not know the future, as God does. We need to be warned often that the step we are about to take is folly. Oh, how many joy-killing choices we are spared when we heed the warnings of the Bible! Mercifully God has given us a book that not only points us to the right path but sounds warnings when we are about to take the wrong one.
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The Word of God enables us to defeat the devil
Hb 2.14 - Rev 2.10 - Rev 12.11 - 1 Jn 2.14 - Ep 6.16 - 1 Pet 5.9
The devil is conquered wherever his design to devour faith is defeated. This defeat is by the cross of Christ and the Word of God. [...] The Word of God is the power that overcomes the devil. So it was with Jesus in the wilderness. To every temptation thrown at him by the devil, he quoted Scripture. If Jesus was himself the Word of God, and could command demons so that they obey him, and yet depended on Scripture to deflect the temptations of the devil, so should we.
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The Word of God is, therefore, the source of great and lasting joy
Ps 1.2-3 - Ps 119.97, 103, 127, 162 - Job 23.12 - Jer 15.16
The lovers of God's Word praise the preciousness of the Bible and the pleasure it brings. They say that it surpasses the most valuable earthly things, gold and silver; and they say its taste on the tongue of the mind and heart is sweeter than honey, and that its richness is like the finest food.
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Excerpt from John PIPER's When I Don't Desire God, How to Fight for Joy
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