Now that we have the right mental perspective on the Bible, we must turn our hearts and spirits toward God as well. We must have the right attitude position before God. We must learn to PRAY in order to be ready to understand the Bible. We need to P-pray, R-reflect, A-apply, and Y-yield.
We must first pray in order to ready our spirit to receive God’s truth. Jesus explained “the Spirit of truth…will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). It is when we are in tune with the Holy Spirit, through prayer, that we will gain understanding. It is for this reason that when the apostle Paul wanted someone to have spiritual understanding, he prayed for them. He said “For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding” (Colossians 1:9). Again, “a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God…because they are spiritually appraised…But he who is spiritual appraises all things” (1 Corinthians 2:14-15). Whenever you prepare to read the Bible, ask God to give you clear understanding. Do not due this as a ritual or some sort of magic formula, but seek to be intimate with God and once you are you will be amazed at how much clearer the Bible will be.
Secondly, we must reflect on God’s word. It says in Joshua, “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success” (Joshua 1:8). David said, “O how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Psalm 119:97). If we truly want the Bible to have an impact on our lives, we must reflect on it, that is we must think about it. When you read the Bible in the morning, think about what you read. Immediately afterwards ask what it means and how it applies to your life. Think about it during the day and how you can fulfill it. It is when we make this constant effort to make the Bible at the center of our mind is when we will start to live the way God wants us to.
Once we begin to reflect, we are poised to be capable of applying the Scriptures to our lives. Applying the Scriptures is just taking the meaning of it and connecting it to your beliefs and lifestyle and adjusting your life according to them. Making the connection between the Bible and your life is very important. Jesus points out that the person who can make this connection is good. He says, “the one on whom seed was sown on the good soil, this is the man who hears the word and understands it; who indeed bears fruit and brings forth, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty” (Matthew 13:23). When we do not understand this connection, we become off base in our beliefs and our lifestyle. Jesus said, “is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures” (Mark 12:24). We must begin to draw the connection between the Bible and our lives. If we do not do this, then reading the Bible and understanding it is useless.
Once we see the connection, we must take action and yield to God’s Word. The hardest step you will face in understanding the Bible is to surrender to it. James says to “prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves” (James 1:22). In fact spiritual wisdom produces the following results: “pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy” (James 3:17). Paul fully expected the results of this wisdom and understanding to be that we would “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in Light” (Colossians 1:10-12).
All this means that when you come across a passage that tells you to believe something that is counter to what you believed in the past, you must believe the Bible over your own opinions. When your feelings, intellect, human reasoning, common sense, or advise from friends are contradicted by the Bible, chose the Bible. If you have been practicing a certain lifestyle that you felt was fine and the Bible says otherwise, then change. Unless we take this step, we will never walk fully in God’s blessing. If we choose to try to doctor the interpretation to fit our beliefs and lifestyles then we start with a misunderstanding and will be left in darkness. It is on this issue that John said, “the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God” (John 3:19-21). John 1:1-18 makes it clear that this light is Jesus and Jesus is the Word of God. Will you run to the light, that is the understanding of the truth of God’s word, or from it?
