Life Application Study Bible Devotional
Daily Wisdom from the Life of Jesus by Tyndale , Livingstone, and David R. Veerman
The picturesque language of the first Psalm describes the potential impact of God’s Word in people’s lives. Meditating and delighting in God’s Word produces trees of desirable and unusual character. These trees take their stand by a river that gives them life.
You might call it a river of life, and you might also call what flows in that river “living water.” These trees are described as “bearing fruit each season,” which can mean, among other things, that whatever the season of life, the trees produce fruit appropriate for that season.
These trees are also ever- green, since their leaves “never wither”—the seasons may come and go, and the fruit ripens and is harvested, but these trees persevere. They change and grow, yet remain the same. And these trees prosper.
The “trees” of Psalm 1 know what to do with God’s Word. They live beside it, and it lives in them. They “delight” in what they discover from God’s Word because they allow it to change the way they live.
The results of their continual meditation are practical applications that lead to direction, change, truth, correction, and an increasing sense of God’s involvement in their lives.
We become those trees when we let Scripture speak into our lives that way—when we commit to becoming people who know what it means to both hear and do God’s Word (James 1:19-25)—when we anticipate delight in God’s Word.
The Birth of the LASB
The Life Application Study Bible (LASB) began during a coffee break. Someone asked a ques- tion, “If you could give students a Bible with built-in tools that would help them overcome unfamiliarity with Scripture and give them confidence to respond in obedience, what would you include in that Bible?”
Those of us sitting around the table that day were committed to communicating God’s Word in ways that would give young people the best chance to experience its life-changing power.
The point of the Life Application Study Bible wasn’t to add to the Bible. Rather it was to provide people with tools that would help them experience the Bible.
We didn’t think the Bible needed help in being God’s Word; we did think that people could use help in dealing with practical obstacles between themselves and God’s Word. Judging from the responses to the LASB we’ve received over the years, God has used it in that way in countless lives.
The Life Application Study Bible Devotional was developed as one answer to the question: How can we encourage the readers of God’s Word to delight in his Word? Application sounds like work—and often is. But it’s the work we were designed to do.
Rather than the frantic and hopeless work of trying to save ourselves, Bible application is the joyful work of gratitude for the priceless gift of salvation we have freely received through Christ (Ephesians 2:8-10)!
A metaphor similar to the psalm writer’s picture of fruitful trees was used by Jesus to de- scribe us. He spoke of vines and branches (John 15).
Other places in the Bible point to the life God wants us to experience and uses the idea of roots (Ephesians 3:17-19; Colossians 2:6-7).
The trees in Psalm 1 aren’t running around the countryside getting good stuff done for God; rather they are healthy trees producing succulent fruit in season.
What trees ultimately “do” is what God does in and through them. Good fruit is evidence of a tree or branch yielded to the purpose for which it was created.
Attentive time spent in God’s Word will bring about good fruit. The Life Application Study Bible Devotional is a tool to help you spend that time.
