Food for the Inner Woman

By Keri Folmar 

Sometimes it crawls slowly, but it’s more likely to fly.  Time can be watched.  It can be measured.  It can be used.  It can be seized.  But often it just slips away.

We women have so many things competing for our time.  Young children wake up early; work schedules leave us exhausted; teenagers have urgent needs; the housework is never done; email and Facebook are calling.  We have a constant barrage of input from the world coming at us.  But time with God is too precious to be relegated to another option in our day.

We were created in God’s image to know him and enjoy him forever.  Young, old, single, married, working or not, our greatest need is to commune with our Creator and Savior.  It’s what we were made for.  God through the prophet Jeremiah tells us not to boast in wisdom or riches but to “boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth.”  We can know and understand God better each day as our Lord graciously reveals himself in and through the Scriptures.

George Mueller was a busy man who founded five orphanages in the 19^th century, housing over 10,000 children.  He never asked anyone for a penny for the building or operations of his orphanages, and yet God provided for all of their needs.  When he was 76 years old, he wrote what he had learned over the previous 50 years:

I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord… I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the word of God, and to meditation on it…. What is the food of the inner man?  Not a prayer, but the word of God; and… not the simple reading of the word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts.

We are like George Mueller—busy people with many tasks to juggle.  The computer and cell phone constantly entice.  There are clothes to be washed, dishes to clean, and schedules to organize.  But we all have to eat to stay alive.  God’s Word is truly a feast that satisfies and makes us want more.  We should prioritize this “food of the inner [man]” until we cry out with the Psalmist: “Oh how I love your law!  It is my meditation all the day…. How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Psalm 119:97 and 103).

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Keri Folmar is the wife of John, pastor of the United Christian Church of Dubai, and the mother of three children.  She loves sharing the gospel and studying the Bible with other women and is the author of two inductive Bible studies for women:  Joy!  on Philippians and Faith on James. 

The CBMW National Conference is April 8, 2014 in Louisville, KY.  Speakers include John Piper, David Platt, Albert Mohler, and more.

Registration is just $30. Find more information here.