God Will Give You Understanding
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By John Piper About Sanctification & Growth
You can’t read your Bible alone.
No, this isn’t a criticism of private devotional times. Rather, we are not able to read our Bibles without help from the very one we are trying to see and hear from in our Bible reading. God himself gives us understanding when we read our Bibles, and without his help, we can do nothing.
But when we say this, it must not be taken to mean that we open our Bibles, sit back, close our eyes, and wait for God talk to us. As with everything in the Christian life, we must “work hard” at understanding the Bible, though it is “not [us], but the grace of God” (1 Corinthians 15:10). It is precisely in the very natural, hard work of reading and laboring to understand meaning where God illumines our minds to understand with spiritual eyes — not merely natural understanding (1 Corinthians 2:14–15) — the word of God.
