Daily Devotional
God Helps Us Understand

September 27, 2021

Ponder This

I love the passage in Luke 24 in which the Lord Jesus, after His resurrection, was walking with two disciples, who were forlorn and dismayed, on the road to Emmaus. And then in Luke 24:45, the Bible says, “And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures.” My mind has camped on that verse many a time. I thought, O God, do that for me. He opened their understanding so they could understand the Scriptures.

The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 2:14, “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” What does that mean, “the natural man”? It means the soulish man, the psychological man. The man apart from the Spirit of God can’t understand the Bible. He may be able to give you the names of the kings of Israel. He may make an A on a history test on the Bible. He may even be able to articulate the doctrines of the Bible in his own way. But he will never know the real message of the Bible until the Holy Spirit of God turns the light on in his soul. The natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God. That’s the reason that when we come to this book, we must lay in the dust our intellectual pride and say, “Lord God, speak to me.”

• What are some things you’ve learned from and about the Bible that have been revealed by God and not by man?
• What does this indicate about the things you should ask of God as you come to His Word each day?

Practice This

Take time to pray and ask God to reveal to you the things of His Word that only come through His Holy Spirit and not through the wisdom of men.