All that we need to understand the power of the gospel.
Christians often wish that God would speak the way that he used to speak to his people—audibly, through burning bushes, dreams, and doves descending from the sky. That way, it would seem so much easier to discern what he is saying. Today, most Christians agree, the main way God speaks to his people is through the Bible. For too many, though, what he says there is a complete mystery, impossible to understand.
It doesn't have to be.
Many people read the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us: our improvement, our life, our victory, our faith, our holiness, our godliness. We treat it like a disconnected series of timeless principles that will give us our best life now, if we simply apply them. We read it, in other words, as if it were a heaven-sent self-help manual, a divinely delivered to-do list. But by reading the Bible this way, we—like the two companions on the road to Emmaus—totally miss the point. As Luke 24 shows, it's possible to read the Bible, study the Bible—even memorize large portions of the Bible—and miss the main point of the Bible. In fact, unless we go to the Bible to see Jesus and his work for us, even devout Bible reading can become fuel for our own self-improvement plans, a source for the help we need to conquer today's challenges and take control of our lives.
God's goal in speaking to us in the Bible is profound, but not complicated. In fact, we can say that all of God's Word comes to us in two words. And if we are going to understand the Bible rightly, we have to be able to distinguish properly between these two words. Keep reading
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