The Bible is a most amazing book. It is packed with an incredible amount of spiritual wisdom that can revolutionize your life as you allow the Holy Spirit to illuminate the God-inspired words found on its pages. Sadly, many Christians read the Scriptures and don’t get much out of what they are reading for two main reasons.
First, many Christians fail to realize that we must allow the Holy Spirit to be our guide as we travel through the pages of the Bible. For you see, without the Holy Spirit acting as our illuminator, we will never be able to grasp the deep meaning of Scripture, since these nuggets of insights must be spiritually discerned. And reading the Bible with the lens of our human intellect will never be able to discern the deep meaning of the Scriptures.
And second, many Christians approach the Bible with the wrong aim. D. A. Carson said it well: “The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it.”1 Too often believers read the Bible as if it were just a book, instead of realizing that the Word of God is a treasure trove of transformational truth that God has designed to not only transform your way of thinking but your relationship with Jesus. And that is why we need to read the Scriptures with the aim of not just accumulating information about Jesus, but to allow us to be mastered and made a bondservant of Christ by the truths contained in its pages.
Bible reading should be one of the greatest joys we can experience in life, since God designed His Word, to not only help us discover the truths of how special we are to Him, but to also help us fall more in love with Jesus, so we can worship Him and live our lives with the aim of glorifying Him through our daily walk. And when we read Scripture with the desire to let it transform every part of our lives by allowing obedience to its commands and precepts to be the greatest joy, privilege, and hunger of our souls, get ready to experience life to its fullest.
So where to we go from here? Well, we need to read the Bible with the Holy Spirit as our guide, teacher, and illuminator, and fully grasp how when we totally surrender to the teachings of Jesus, we don’t lose our freedoms through this surrendering to Christ, but gain something far more liberating – the knowledge that we can experience eternal treasures and abundant, never ending joy! Again, D. A. Carson said it so well: “The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.”2
1 The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it. – SermonQuotes
2 The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it. – Grace Quotes