May 16, 2017
This is the fifth podcast in a special series on reading the Bible. These podcasts include helpful excerpts from books by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee that provide insight about reading the Bible.
Last time, we began to look at how to read the Bible. God has given us two precious gifts—the Word and the Spirit; actually, these two things are one. Thus, we need to read the Bible not by any particular method, but by prayer, exercising our human spirit to touch the divine Spirit in the Word. As we come to the Word in prayer, we should love the Lord who is the Word and who spoke the Word. Then we can use our mind to grasp the facts, meanings, interpretations, and significances of the Word. As we do so, we should be ready to heed the Spirit’s speaking and obey the truths in the Bible. Ideally, we ought to read in this way a fixed amount of God’s Word each day.
In this podcast, we’ll go on to consider ourselves—the readers of God’s Word.
We may not realize that we ourselves affect what we perceive when we read the Word. To understand what the Bible is really saying, our inner being—our thoughts and especially our spirit—must be right. Listen to these observations by Watchman Nee on the subject of the reader of the Word.
In The Breaking of the Outer Man and the Release of the Spirit, he spoke concerning the reader’s thoughts:
“There are at least two things that we should do when we come to the Bible. First, our thoughts must be identified with the thoughts of the Bible. Second, our spirit must be identified with the spirit of the Bible. We have to think like the writers of the Bible. Men like Paul and John had certain thoughts behind them when they wrote the various portions of the Word. We have to get into the same thoughts. We have to begin from where they began, and develop our thoughts along the same line they developed. We have to reason the same way they reasoned, and consider the same teachings they considered. In other words, our thoughts are like a cog, and their thoughts are also like a cog. The two cogs have to interlock with one another. Our thoughts have to enter Paul’s and John’s thoughts. As our thoughts enter the Bible’s thoughts and our mentality becomes one with the mentality behind God’s inspiration, we will understand what the Bible says.”
Concerning the reader’s spirit, he added:
“It is important in our study of the Word to have our thoughts enter into the thoughts of the writers of the Bible and to have our thoughts enter into the thoughts of the Holy Spirit. However, this is only the initial step. Without this step, we cannot study the Bible at all. But even when we have made this step, we may not be reading the Bible correctly. The Bible is not made up just of thought. The most important thing about the Bible is that God’s Spirit is released through this book. Peter, John, Matthew, Mark, and every writer of the Bible had the same experience: As they were writing the Bible under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they wrote according to a certain train of thought, but at the same time, their spirits were released along with the release of the Holy Spirit. The world can never understand that behind the words of the Scriptures there is the Spirit. When the Spirit is released, the prophets come alive, as it were, and speak to us once again. If we hear a prophet speaking today, we have to realize that his speaking contains not only words and thoughts but something else. This something is mysterious, even though within us we are clear that this ‘something’ is the Spirit. The Bible contains not only thoughts but the release of the Spirit. Therefore, the basic and most crucial requirement of all in reading the Bible is to be able to release one’s spirit to touch the spirit of the Bible. We have to strike the spirit of the Bible with our own spirit before we can understand the Bible.”
We should have two separate periods of time for reading the Bible. One time should be in the morning, during which we should meditate on the Word, praising and praying as we read. The goal of this period of reading is to receive spiritual food and to strengthen our spirit. The other time of reading the Word can be at any time of day and is for understanding and learning more about God’s Word. It’s best to have two Bibles, one for each time. The Bible for the first time should have no notes so we can be freshly inspired by the Word and gain new insight, but the second Bible can be annotated with our markings and notes as we study the Bible in a detailed way.
God’s people in the past have benefited from having these two kinds of times in the Word. In 1841, George Müller described his experience of meditating on the Word:
“I began therefore to meditate on the New Testament from the beginning, early in the morning. The first thing I did, after having asked in a few words the Lord’s blessing upon his precious word, was, to begin to meditate on the word of God, searching as it were into every verse, to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public ministry of the word, not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon, but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The result I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that, though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer. When thus I have been for a while making confession, or intercession, or supplication, or have given thanks, I go on to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go on, into prayer for myself or others, as the word may lead to it, but still continually keeping before me that food for my own soul is the object of my meditation. The result of this is, that there is always a good deal of confession, thanksgiving, supplication, or intercession mingled with my meditation, and that my inner man almost invariably is even sensibly nourished and strengthened, and that by breakfast time, with rare exceptions, I am in a peaceful if not happy state of heart…
“And yet now, since God has taught me this point, it is as plain to me as anything, that the first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is, to obtain food for his inner man. As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time except we take food, and as this is one of the first things we do in the morning, so it should be with the inner man. We should take food for that, as every one must allow. Now what is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the word of God; and here again, not the simple reading of the word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts…”
Be sure to listen to the next episode in this special series on reading the Bible, when we’ll talk more about studying the Bible.