PURPOSE: To help listeners see how they need both God's Word and God's Spirit to live a vital spiritual life.

Years ago a young man in a Sunday school class in Dallas had memorized long passages of the Scripture. He was quite impressive. The young man was arrested for breaking and entering a store. He assaulted the owner and stole the money in the cash register. Would you conclude from this that memorizing the Bible doesn't do you any good?

I. Knowing the Ten Commandments and other passages of the Bible, by themselves, will not transform us.

Putting the Ten Commandments on the wall or on our desk will not make us righteous.

Memorizing the Bible will not necessarily do much in life.

II. We need to Holy Spirit to apply the teaching of the Scriptures to our lives.

It's as though He sat beside you and said, "That applies to the way you respond to your son, doesn't it? Let me empower you to handle life differently."

Sometimes we have a hard time hearing what the Spirit says through his Word because we have a lot of wax in our ears.

How do social, religious and cultural forces make it hard for us to hear how this applies to us?

If you have read through the Bible once, do you need to do that again?

Sometimes the Spirit may show us how the principle applies, but we don't want to apply it. Why?

III. The Holy Spirit can empower us to do what he asks us to do.

We need to want to listen.

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear" (Luke 8:8).