State of the Heart

Our ability to receive instruction from God’s Word (Job 22:22) depends largely on what the state of our heart is like when we come to the Bible. How does 1 Corinthians 2:14 explain this?

To have spiritual discernment means to have spiritual insight and understanding. It makes sense, then, that a spiritually open-minded person will have very different takeaways when reading the Bible than a spiritually closed-minded person. Someone who thinks the Bible is foolish won’t look for truth in its pages.

God’s Word works in us when we believe. When you open your Bible and believe that God has something to say to you through the words on the pages, He will indeed speak to you and work in your life. But so much depends on your faith and your expectations. The good news is that if your faith is small, God can help it to grow (Mark 9:24), even if it’s tiny like a mustard seed (Luke 17:6).

One of the great purposes of the Bible is to speak truth into our lives about the condition of our relationship with God and how to strengthen it. If your heart is open to the Holy Spirit and if you approach the Word with humility, you will always come away changed, even though you might not immediately recognize it day by day. Such change and growth are often incremental. But if we cling to our apathy and sin and are not willing to change, Bible reading can avail us little good. The Holy Spirit prompts us to move closer to Jesus Christ. Do we want to step closer? If so, we become “wise unto salvation” (2 Tim. 3:15), and we’ll see things we never even imagined.

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Additional Reading: Selected Quotes from Ellen G. White

The life of Christ that gives life to the world is in His word. It was by His word that Jesus healed disease and cast out demons; by His word He stilled the sea, and raised the dead; and the people bore witness that His word was with power. He spoke the word of God, as He had spoken through all the prophets and teachers of the Old Testament. The whole Bible is a manifestation of Christ, and the Saviour desired to fix the faith of His followers on the word. When His visible presence should be withdrawn, the word must be their source of power. Like their Master, they were to live “by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Matthew 4:4.
As our physical life is sustained by food, so our spiritual life is sustained by the word of God. And every soul is to receive life from God’s word for himself. As we must eat for ourselves in order to receive nourishment, so we must receive the word for ourselves. We are not to obtain it merely through the medium of another’s mind. We should carefully study the Bible, asking God for the aid of the Holy Spirit, that we may understand His word. We should take one verse, and concentrate the mind on the task of ascertaining the thought which God has put in that verse for us. We should dwell upon the thought until it becomes our own, and we know “what saith the Lord.”
In His promises and warnings, Jesus means me. God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that I by believing in Him, might not perish, but have everlasting life. The experiences related in God’s word are to be my experiences. Prayer and promise, precept and warning, are mine. “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.” Galatians 2:20. As faith thus receives and assimilates the principles of truth, they become a part of the being and the motive power of the life. The word of God, received into the soul, molds the thoughts, and enters into the development of character.
By looking constantly to Jesus with the eye of faith, we shall be strengthened. God will make the most precious revelations to His hungering, thirsting people. They will find that Christ is a personal Saviour. As they feed upon His word, they find that it is spirit and life. The word destroys the natural, earthly nature, and imparts a new life in Christ Jesus. The Holy Spirit comes to the soul as a Comforter. By the transforming agency of His grace, the image of God is reproduced in the disciple; he becomes a new creature. Love takes the place of hatred, and the heart receives the divine similitude. This is what it means to live “by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” This is eating the Bread that comes down from heaven.—The Desire of Ages, pp. 390, 391.