What A Beautiful Heart of God

The best Bible teacher I know, the most helpful "commentary", and the greatest motivator to getting into the Bible can be summed up into One.

The Holy Spirit.

He is our beginning, our help, and our wisdom. One of the most beautiful jobs of God's Spirit is illumination, in making His words clear and giving us understanding in our heart. So thankful for this reminder as I begin a new book this week and as many of us think ahead into the new year with Bible reading goals or plans. I love this promise for us in Ps.119: "The unfolding of your word gives light, it gives understanding to the simple".

Preaching to my own heart today too and thanking God that though the Bible is the deepest and most complex book in the world and challenges the most intellectual minds, it was written for the simple, for the everyday person, for US. And this verse in the Psalms reminds us that the most powerful thing we can do in Bible reading is not finding the best commentary or strategy but asking God to illuminate these words into our heart, to unfold His wisdom through our minds.

It's okay if our friend learns ten things from one verse, and we only learn one. God will illuminate what we need as we trust Him.

And you are not alone if you feel like the Bible can be hard to understand, or that you don't know what He wants to speak to you.

The Psalmist gave us a model of prayer for this in Ps. 119:73:

"Give me understanding to learn your commands".

How incredible that the Psalmist wrote the very words of God and yet still needed help in understanding them! And it wasn't just once. In Psalm 119, he asks 15 times for God to teach or help Him understand His words. How many times do I/we give up after asking only one time!

This coming year may any hope we have of growing in His words, reading the Bible more, or gaining more insight begin right where He intended it to be. Not with man-made strategies (as helpful as they might be) but in the power of illumination, of

coming to and asking Him to unfold truth into our heart.

And what a beautiful heart of God the Father. Always wanting us to come first to Him in all things.