The Local Church

The Riches of His Word

Even though I had been a Christian since the age of nine, I never truly appreciated the Bible as much as I do today with the help of the ministry of Witness Lee. In the past, I thought the Bible was just filled with stories and “Thou shall have nots.” In elementary school, I read all the stories and even competed successfully in memorizing certain portions of the Word. However, as I grew older, I realized how much I did not understand what the Bible really means. Although I believed the Bible was the Word of God, it remained closed to me as if it spoke in a language I could not understand. I had so many puzzling questions such as, “Why do Matthew and Luke include the genealogy of Christ in their writings? Is there any more meaning behind them besides a list of Jesus' ancestors?” But the most intriguing question I had was, “If man fell into sin, how does God expect us to fulfill the higher laws Jesus Christ spoke about in Matthew 5?” It did not make sense to me at all, and nothing was there to help me to properly answer my troubling questions. All the answers I got amounted to, “Because God says so, that's why you should do it.” Because no one opened God's Word to me, it became a code of law which I took little interest in reading. I know Christians should read the Bible because it is God's speaking. However, I lost the motivation to do so because of my heightened consciousness of how short I was of Gods righteousness whenever I turned the page.

By the Lord's mercy, He opened the riches of His Word to me when I started reading the New Testament Recovery Version with footnotes by Witness Lee beginning my sophomore year in college. The footnotes were such a great help in renewing my interest in reading God's Word. In the first seventeen verses in Matthew chapter one, I saw an abstract of the Old Testament as I looked over every footnote about the names of the people listed in Christ's genealogy from Abraham to Mary and Joseph. Each footnote gave the history of the person and their relationship to Israel. Knowing and understanding these verses revolutionized my Christian life.

Jacqueline Lim | Back to List

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