What God Can Do in Daily Devotions
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By John Piper
About Sanctification & Growth
Part of the series Message Excerpt
Audio Transcript
You just got up early, before anybody else is moving around — except you can hear your wife stirring. Teenager’s probably not up, but school is coming, so he might be dragging himself out. And you’re reading your Bible in your favorite quiet, secluded place. You’re reading about God, and about his ways.
And then, quietly, perhaps unexpectedly, God supernaturally shifts your mind-set, and you are no longer merely reading about him. You are quietly aware he is here. The living, risen Christ is in this room, and he is speaking to you through that page. And your soul shifts from thinking about him to speaking to him. Now you are turning the word into statements to him, to the effect that “this is who you are.”
And then, supernaturally, another mind-set shifts, and you find yourself not simply speaking to him what you are learning about him from the text, but you find yourself saying, “I love you. I love you. I love your patience. I love your mercy. I love your power. I love your wisdom. I love the way you shut down proud people and look tenderly on the broken. Which makes me realize, Jesus, how sorry I am for last night’s sin.”
And the word, as you move on, is awakening and informing your ongoing communion with the living God through Christ. And in that communion, you are seeing his glory, how many facets of this diamond there are, and you are tasting his goodness, and you are being drawn to trust his promise, and the anxieties of the day are beginning to fall away with an inexpressible peace.
And you get up — you may have been there fifteen minutes, you may have been there half an hour, you may have been there an hour. You get up with the promises of God giving you a supernatural peace that passes all understanding, and you go find your wife, and you put her cheeks between your hands, and you look right into her eyes, and you say, “You are a precious gift of God to me. Just felt like saying it.”
And then, you go up to your kid’s bedroom, and you knock on the door. “Yeah?” And you open the door, and you say, “I just need to say how sorry I am for last night’s outburst. It was wrong, and I need you to forgive me before I go to work.”
And you eat breakfast, and you go out to the garage, and you get a shovel. You put it in the trunk. You head off to work, because yesterday, you remember a guy grousing at work about how he’s going to have to plant a tall tree tonight in his yard, and it’s going to take a really deep hole, and he hates to dig. And after work, you go help him dig, and maybe, supernaturally, he says, “What’s the reason for the hope that is in you?” And you tell him what you read in the Book in the morning, and maybe, by grace, supernaturally, he glorifies God on the day of visitation (1 Peter 2:12).
That’s the aim of reading the Bible supernaturally.
