Saturday, 7 January 2023
“Your testimonies are righteous forever; give me understanding that I may live.” (v. 144)
It is so important to truly understand what God is communicating with you through his word!
But you need to know that the understanding you need is not simply a theological understanding of what the Bible teaches. The kind of understanding you need is spiritual understanding.
The words and concepts of the Bible are plain and usually simple. But there is a spiritual level of understanding that has nothing to do with intellectual ability. Paul talks about it in 1 Corinthians 2:12-14. This kind of understanding comes from God, from the Holy Spirit. Paul says that a “natural person” (a person operating from just their own intellect) “is not able to understand” the things that the Spirit of God wants to teach him, “because they are spiritually discerned.”
A couple of verses later, Paul tells the Corinthian Christians that he could not speak to them on that deeper, spiritual level, because they were still “fleshly” and “infants in Christ.” They had never grown to that deeper level of receiving spiritual truth from the Holy Spirit.
You can know heaps of theology and yet still not know how to receive spiritual understanding from the Holy Spirit. Have you learned to receive understanding from him yet? Why don’t you pray to God today with the psalmist, “Give me understanding that I may live!”
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