“But, Kenneth,” you may say, “I’ve met people who know the Bible from cover to cover and still can’t get healed!”

No doubt you do. But if you’ll look back at God’s prescription, you’ll find it doesn’t say anything about “knowing” the Bible. It says attend to the Word.

When you attend to something, you give your attention to it. You make it top priority, setting aside other things so you can focus on it. When a nurse is attending to a patient, she looks after him constantly. She doesn’t just leave him lying alone in his hospital room while she goes shopping. If someone asks her about her patient, she doesn’t feel it’s sufficient to say, “Oh, yes. I know him.”

In the same way, if you’re attending to the Word, you won’t leave it lying unopened on the coffee table all day. You won’t spend your day focusing your attention on other things.

On the contrary, you’ll do what Proverbs 4 says to do. You’ll continually incline your ear to God’s Word.

Inclining your ear includes more than just putting your physical ears in a position to hear the Word being preached (although that, in itself, is very important). It also means opening the ears of your understanding by meditating on and pondering that Word. To truly hear, you must listen with the ears of your spirit to what the Holy Spirit is saying to you through the written Word. Mark 4:23-24 puts it this way: “If any man has ears to hear, let him be listening, and let him perceive and comprehend…. Be careful what you are hearing. The measure [of thought and study] you give [to the truth you hear] will be the measure of [virtue and knowledge] that comes back to you—and more [besides] will be given to you who hear” (The Amplified Bible).

The hearing referred to in these verses is not a passive activity. It requires actively engaging with God’s Word, believing and obeying it.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries