In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.

About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And this we will do if God permits (Hebrews 5:7–6:3).

A Desire to Love the Scriptures

I want to give you just a little map of where we’re going for this devotional. I want to talk about the problem of love, I want to give you the path to love — namely, sentences and story — and then I want you to see that this wasn’t my idea. I want to give you the author of the Book of Hebrews to show you that’s where I mainly got this idea.

The reason that you are here at this conference I would imagine at least in part, is because you really want to love the Bible, but you don’t love the Bible as much as you want to love the Bible. I mean, how can I not when talking about the Bible, how can I not go to Psalm 119, right? It’s this love poem written by someone who’s absolutely infatuated with and exuberant over the words of God. Let me give you a sampling. This is how we all want to feel, if we admit it:

• I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word (Psalm 119:16).
• My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times (Psalm 119:20).
• Your testimonies are my delight (Psalm 119:24).
• Incline my heart to your testimonies (Psalm 119:36).
• I long for your precepts (Psalm 119:40).
• I find my delight in your commandments, which I love (Psalm 119:47).
• I will lift up my hands toward your commandments, which I love (Psalm 119:48).
• I will meditate on your statutes (Psalm 119:48).
• Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day (Psalm 119:97).
• How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! (Psalm 119:103)
• I love your commandments above gold, above fine gold (Psalm 119:127).
• Your testimonies are wonderful (Psalm 119:129).
• I open my mouth and pant, because I long for your commandments (Psalm 119:131).

Now that’s fine for the psalmist, but it’s not like you have people in your everyday experience that talk like that, right? Do you run into people often that talk that way about any book, much less the Bible? And if they did, if you really admitted it, you’d feel kind of awkward and weird in their presence if they just started talking that way about a book. I know that because I talk that way about the Bible and people look at me weird, or maybe you have met someone like that, but you didn’t think that same kind of passion, that same kind of affection was possible for you to be a lover of words.

Not a Textbook

That kind of behavior seems more suited for people like literature majors, right? Novelists and poets, they’re the kind of people who are lovers of words. Well, I want to submit something to you. I think that that’s maybe not mainly your fault. I think it’s because maybe you have been misinformed how to actually read the Bible. I wonder if part of the problem is that you approach the Bible in a way that you should not approach the Bible.

You do this because you were raised, or maybe better, you were programmed, right? You grew up in grade school and high school and college. You went to classes and you went to other people. They gave you a book. They told you to take this book and to mine it for little bits and pieces of information, right? They told you to get little facts and factoids because later a piece of paper was going to be presented in front of you on a desk and you were going to have to take a test and you were going to have to spit out those words and those little bits of information on that test in order to pass the test.

Sometimes I think what we do is we treat the Christian life that way. We treat it merely as a test and the Bible is our textbook, and we’re supposed to go to it for little bits and pieces of information so that we can do really well on the test because someday we’re going to be graded by the great test giver and we want to do well on that test. Now I have a question for you: Did you get excited about textbooks? Did you like to read your textbook? So would it be surprising to you that if you treat the Bible like a textbook, that you wouldn’t talk the way the Psalmist talks about this book and you wouldn’t be excited to read this book?

Our Love for Stories

Here’s another problem. I wonder if another aspect of the problem is how you don’t approach the Bible in a way that you should approach the Bible. Because you’re at Desiring God, I’m guessing that many of you grew up in the church and many of you went to Sunday school. Do you remember Flannelgraph? Do you remember, maybe as a small child, or maybe even now as an older person, what do you almost always see in a little Sunday school class with little kids? You see faces filled with wonder as the teacher — who usually in my experience is some old lady who was a really good storyteller — tells amazing, sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat stories. The Bible came alive and was fascinating and exciting because it’s filled with characters, miracles, battles, love stories, families, murders, wars, kings, queens, giants, sea monsters, gods, and God.

You were immersed in it all and it astonished you, and then dang it, you grew up. And somehow you believed that being a grownup meant that you left the stories behind because stories are for kids. Imagination, astonishment, wonder, and marveling is kid’s play, right? We’re grownups. We’re thinkers, analyzers, problem solvers, fact finders, and list makers.

Yes? No, that’s not really true, is it? Because many of you would admit you love to grab a good novel. You were there when The Deathly Hallows was released at midnight to get it at Barnes and Noble, or sorry, I meant Desiring God. You were there to buy the latest CS Lewis fiction book and story, and you love to sit down with a good novel and be swept away into another world and another time in another place and be immersed in the story and escape into that whole other world. Or maybe you don’t like to read, but for all the same reasons you love to go to movies. You love to go into a movie theater and have the lights go down and be transported to another place and another time.

In fact, we love our movies so much that plain old movies weren’t good enough. We had to make them 3D so we could get more immersed in the experience, And then 3D wasn’t good enough, so now we have 4D so that smells and water gets sprayed in your face and you feel like you’re right there in the story. We love stories.

Approaching the Bible as a Story

I have a question for you: What if that is how God means for you to approach reading the Bible? You see, understanding the form of God’s revelation to us is a big part of understanding how to read that revelation, and then I believe, consequently, to love this book and feel about this book like the Psalmist feels about this book. I’m a fairly simple guy. I have simple but great news for you this morning. The Bible is the most real, most true, most exciting of all stories. It is one big gigantic story, telling us about the rule and reign of God. And to tell that big story is the purpose for why this book was written, and to read it as a big story is your purpose in studying it.

Eugene Peterson — you might know him as the writer of the paraphrase The Message — says it this way:

The form in which language comes to us is as important as its content. If we mistake its form, we will almost certainly wrongly respond to its content. The text for Christian living, the Bible, our holy scriptures turns out to be a large comprehensive story and this is really good for us because the Christian life is lived and conducted in story conditions. The Bible is basically and overall a narrative, an immense, sprawling, capacious story.

And he says something I want to call attention to, that the Bible, all of it, is livable. It is the text for living out our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world, in which we find ourselves at home and whole. It’s a story. It’s a great story.

The Place of Sentences

Now, I tell you all that, but I don’t want you to hear me saying that looking at the text in a detailed way, like we have done for the last day and a half, is unnecessary. We like to say at Calvary, “It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.” It’s not either a big-story, meta-narrative approach to reading your Bible, or a proposition-by-proposition, flow-of-the-argument, detailed-exegesis approach to reading your Bible. It’s both/and. You need both of those things.

Now I have learned some things from my experience at Celebration Community Church for a couple of years in Florida, and at Calvary Community Church for seven years. I have had the luxury for 10 years of being paid not to have a job. That’s what pastors get to do. You may hear us complaining sometimes about the difficulties of ministry, but at the end of the day, we have the greatest job in the world. People give us money to read the Bible. That’s awesome.

All of your jobs that you have, if you’re not a minister, are very important. They’re callings placed upon you by God. They’re important in this world. But I have the best job in the whole wide world. I spend my time digging, like you’ve seen Pastor John doing, into the details of the text. So what I know, because I’m a really simple guy, is that anybody can do this, anybody can do this. Eugene Peterson, I’ve been spending some time with him recently, and one of his books that he wrote when he was 73 years old is something I appreciate. The older I get, the more I appreciate old people. Can I say that senior citizens, the more senior of us in the group? It’s because of their wisdom and their knowledge from a life lived. So it’s good to sit at the feet of a 73-year-old. Again, here’s how he relates sentences and story. He says:

The story gives form to the sentences and the sentences provide content to the story. Following Jesus requires that they hold together thoroughly integrated. Without the story form, the sentences in the Bible, the Bible verses, function merely as an encyclopedia of information from which we select whatever we need at the moment . . .

He’s not saying that’s wrong. It’s not necessarily wrong to memorize portions of Scripture. It was important to me this morning as I was walking over from the Hyatt to this place, to say over and over Psalm 62:8, which says, “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.”

I’m hearing, “Matthew, trust in him for this morning and the devotional, trust in him to hear what Pastor John has to say this morning.” And I was pouring out my heart. So it’s not wrong to necessarily take little pieces, but I don’t want to separate that out, in an encyclopedic way, from the larger narrative of the story. That’s what Eugene is trying to get us to see. He continues:

Without the precisely crafted sentences, the story gets edited and revised by seductive suggestions from some and by bullying urgencies from others, none of whom seems to have much interest in following Jesus. But these sentences and this story were to make us followers of Jesus. That’s why this text was given to us in the first place, and if either the large story or the detailed sentences are ever used for anything else, however admirable or enticing, then why bother?

Why We Should Love Grammar

That’s what I hope you’ve seen Pastor John model for you as he takes us through the sentences and he messes up that screen with all different kinds of colors for us and draws circles and underlines and arrows and all of the rest. That’s just what I want for you too. I want you to dive into the sentences. One of the things I’ve told our people back at Calvary is that some of the hardest work that I do all week is putting up my feet on my desk, closing my eyes, and imagining the text that I’m studying for that week and seeing it. If I had one of those guys to make one of the fancy videos like we watched in the first session, I would’ve loved to have made one of those videos because that’s what goes on in my head.

I try to see the text in my mind, to see the noun and the verb and the direct object and how they were put in order that way. And the only way I know how to do that usually is to close my eyes and to try and imagine that. What I want you to get to see is that detailed work isn’t to merely rest on those detailed sentences and to stay there. But as you imagine that and you spend time in that, it starts to create a picture in the landscape of your mind for what is being communicated to you so you understand the larger story and you find yourself inside of that story, and you didn’t get there without the sentences.

You needed the nouns and the verbs, the direct objects, the indirect objects, the prepositions, and the way that they were constructed to imagine all of that so it could be painted into this vivid picture of this grand story that you could get immersed in. I love grammar. You should love grammar. Peterson says it. Let me give you Peterson again:

Exegesis is loving God enough, loving the one who speaks the words.

These are God’s words. It’s because I love him that I love the words. It’s loving him enough to stop and listen to what he says. He continues:

It follows that we bring the leisure and the attentiveness of lovers to this text.

Isn’t that what you heard in Psalm 119? He was a lover of these words, cherishing every comma, every semicolon, relishing the oddness of this preposition, delighting in the surprising placement of this noun. Lovers don’t take a quick look, get a message or meaning, and then run off and talk endlessly with their friends. You don’t do that. You linger over it. Why? Because you love it and you love the one who spoke it to you. Sentences are important. The story gives form to the sentences and the sentences provide content to the story.

The Significance of Story

Now let me just talk a little bit about the story, the large, immense world of the Bible. I just want to give you a visual of what I mean by that and how I want you to look at this book. Sometimes you have to get into stories to understand how great stories are. A lot of the greatest stories give us this image of a doorway or a portal into another world, right?

Again, if you’ve read Harry Potter, maybe you remember, I think it was in the Goblet of Fire. Harry Potter is standing over the Pensieve and he’s looking into the Pensieve, and all of a sudden as he’s looking into it, he gets sucked into it and he falls down into seemingly this other world. And all of a sudden there he is in Dumbledore’s imagination, remembering this memory in this completely other world that’s constructed inside of the Pensieve. No one can even see him, but he can see everybody else and there he is inside of that other immense world.

Or maybe just go all the way back to Alice in Wonderland, when she falls down the rabbit hole. Or you can think of The Lord of the Rings. That’s a good one to mention at the Desiring God National Conference. Do you remember when Frodo was standing in front of that big bird bath looking thing and there was the water right there, and Galadriel was standing right on the other side of the bird bath, and there he was looking into the water, and what happened? He gets sucked in and he sees what the future might be like if Sauron takes over. He gets sucked into this immense world.

Or consider maybe one of your favorites: The Chronicles of Narnia. Do you remember the wardrobe? It was stepping through a doorway. It was this simple act of moving through a doorway, and what happened? They were in this completely different other world that had all these different characters and amazing things going on. And then at the end of every one of those little stories, inside of the larger story, what would happen? They’d fall back through the wardrobe into this world. Now, what was Lewis trying to get you to see in that? He was trying to get you to see that there are kinds of stories that change you.

See the longings in our hearts for really great stories, or to go to a movie, a lot of times wrongly it can be because we want to escape the life that we’re living. We want out of it. That’s why movies are so popular, because people want to escape the world around them into a completely other world. But that’s not the way that Lewis was constructing that world in Narnia, the whole point of going into the immensity of this world was so that in the experience and in the learning, you were changed and transformed so that you were different when you came back into this one, and now you understood it better and differently and you could see things more clearly.

I’m just submitting to you that the Bible is the doorway. You open its pages and you step into this other world, and you see the amenity of it and you wonder and you marvel and you’re astonished and you hear God speaking. And as you spend time in this world, you’re transformed and you’re formed by the story, so that when you come back out of the book and you head into your day, your afternoon, your morning, your evening, or when you spend time with your family and your friends, or when you go to your job, it’s not that you escaped; it’s that you learned and you were transformed and you were formed by the story. I mean, that’s why it’s important to view it that way. That’s how you’re supposed to approach this book — with excitement and zeal.

Moving Beyond Our Dullness

This was not my idea. I want to point you to the book of Hebrews. Open your Bibles to the book of Hebrews. I don’t want to have happen to you what happened in that text that I quoted to you at the beginning, which was Hebrews 5:7–6:3. You heard how he was talking, right?

He gives you this little paragraph, this picture, and he takes you back immediately. You’re supposed to, I think, see yourself transported back to Gethsemane, and he describes what’s going on with Jesus in that moment. And he says, “About this we have much to say, but it’s hard to explain because you’ve become dull of hearing” (Hebrews 5:11). Did you catch that? He says, “You’ve become dull of hearing.”

So at one point they weren’t dull of hearing. At one point they were sharp listeners, and even in this little paragraph, this is a great preacher’s text. He says, “About this we have much to say, but it’s hard to explain.” Why is it hard to explain? Because it’s unexplainable? No, because you are not a good listener. He says, “You ought to be teachers at this time, but you still need someone else to teach you again, basic principles of the oracles, the word of God” (Hebrews 5:12). Why? Because you haven’t become mature. You’re not mature, you’re not pressing in. You’re stuck on the elementary doctrines of Christ.

Now you should hear a rebuke in that. Don’t stay. We don’t want to lay again a foundation of what? There are six amazing things, really important doctrinal elements of the Christian faith of the gospel. We don’t want to lay those again, that’s a foundation. Now we want to build on that, but he’s saying, “I’m not able to build on it because you don’t even understand the basics. You’ve lost track of the basics again and you’re not mature and you’re not ready to press in.”

Now one way you could take that as a strong rebuke and feel guilty. You could think, “I know I haven’t studied the Bible. I don’t know how to read the Bible. I don’t know how to study the Bible.” But today how I want it to land on you is as an encouragement. I think that’s a big part right there in the middle of the letter. It’s almost like he stops and goes, “Here’s the problem.” Why? Because he wants so much more for them. He wants them to see so much more of Jesus. And that’s what I want for you.

I don’t want you to be stuck on the elementary doctrines of Christ for 10, 20, or 30 years of your Christian living. I want you to see the immensity of who Jesus is. I want you to be astonished at Jesus. I want you to wonder and marvel at Jesus Christ. And he’s proving the point. What does the author of Hebrews do? Have any of you ever been to a planetarium? Have you ever been to a planetarium where you step into this big space and it’s black? And then what happens in a planetarium? They start casting up images on the planetarium and you’re like right in the middle of it, right? Here’s the Milky Way. And they start pulling planets out and showing them to you. That’s what the author of Hebrews is doing if you read the whole thing through.

See, you can’t properly read the Bible without reading the whole Bible. You need to read big chunks of the Bible. You’ve seen this from Pastor John. You see him keep jumping to other texts to give you bits of the story, to explain the other parts of the story. You have to know the whole story. And that’s what the writer to the Hebrews is doing. He needs a room this big because he wants to draw things in sharp relief. He’s going to take you into the story of the whole Bible, and he’s going to cast up these various characters and these various things on the screen of your mind, and he’s going to say about every one of them, “Jesus is better.” Jesus is superior to anyone and everything. He’s better. Kevin DeYoung calls him “the great superlative.” Jesus is the great superlative.

Jesus Is Better

Hebrews 1:1 says, “Long ago at many times and in many ways . . .” If that’s not story language, what is? It calls to mind, “Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.” He continues, “God spoke to our fathers by the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1). And see if you’re a reader of the whole story, what he means for you to do is consider all of the prophets. You should think, “Yeah, I remember the prophets. I remember what they said. I remember who they were. They were speaking God’s words to us, teaching us, and instructing us. They were giving us the sense of those Scriptures. I remember the prophets.” He continues:

But in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels . . .

Okay, what did he just do? There was another image he put up. So now you have to read your Bibles so that you know what comes into your head, what stories should be there when you hear him talk about angels? Do you have stories in your mind about angels in the Old Testament? What are angels? I’ve said this often. I’ve banned Precious Moments angels from our home, or those little Willow Tree angels that you can get and they’ve got the little wire things with the little wings on the back of them. I actually took the needle-nosed pliers and de-winged them. I pulled them right off because that is not an angel.

Every time angels show up in the Bible, people wet themselves, right? I mean they are fearsome. I mean angels show up and 185,000 are slain. Angels show up and people are greatly afraid. They’re fearsome kinds of angels. So he puts that image in your head and you have all these pictures in your mind of angels and how they operate. I mean they’re pretty powerful. Angels are pretty amazing. It’s impressive stuff. Then he says:

To which of the angels did God ever say, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you”? Or again, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son”? And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says, “Let all God’s angels worship him” (Hebrews 1:5–6).

Images for a Sanctified Imagination

He continues, and God is addressing Jesus as God:

Of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.” And, “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment, like a robe you will roll them up, like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will have no end” (Hebrews 1:8–12).

Do you see those sentences? Do you see the images that are meant to be put in your mind about Jesus, the Son? And then he just pleads with them. Because that’s true, because he has become as much superior to angels as the name that he, the Son, has inherited is more excellent than theirs, therefore, we must pay close attention (Hebrews 2:1). The mature eats solid food because they have powers of discernment that have been trained by constant practice. Pay close attention to what you’ve heard so you don’t drift away from it.

Sightings of the Divine Son

Let me take you down to Hebrews 2:10. I just want to give you some images. That’s all I want to do this morning. He says:

It was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation (Jesus, according to Hebrews 5:9, who was made perfect and became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him) perfect through suffering. For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he (Jesus) is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying . . . (Hebrews 2:10–11)

Now it’s back into the planetarium and he takes them way out into the future, and he says, “Listen, there’s this Jesus there who is the source of your eternal salvation, and you’re going to be there with him, and he is going to say before God, ‘I will tell of your name, oh God, to my brothers and sisters,’ and, ‘In the midst of the congregation, I will sing your praise.’” What did he just tell you? He just told you that what you have to look forward to is that this amazing, marvelous, stunning Jesus is going to take you into the greatest worship service in the history of humanity. And he’s going to be the worship leader, and he’s going to stand in the congregation with you. He’s going to be right here and he’s going to say to God, “Brothers and sisters, stand, let’s sing praises to our God.” Oh man, that’s awesome. How can you not get excited about it? That’s what you have to look forward to. That’s your Jesus.

And again, he’s standing with you, pointing to God. He says, “I will put my trust in him” (Hebrews 2:13). And again, looking to the Father, he says, “Behold, I and all the children that you have given me” (Hebrews 2:13). The the writer says:

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil . . . (Hebrews 2:14)

He doesn’t feel destroyed right now to us. That word means “to inhibit” and “to constrain” and “to render inoperative.” And through death, Jesus is rendering him inoperative, the one who has the power of death, “so that he might deliver all those who through the fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:15). This is what Jesus has done for you. He continues:

For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham (Hebrews 2:16).

And that promise is for you. You know that from Paul in Romans. You are the ones who have been grafted into the tree. You are the offspring, you are the true Israel. That promise is for you. What did he just say there about Jesus as he puts this Jesus up in front of you? He just said, “Jesus is your helper.” He continues:

Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted (Hebrews 2:17–18).

The Constellations of Hebrews

See, I’m not John, so I don’t get to say I’m going to go an extra 10 minutes. So what I’d like to do is I would love to spend however long it would take to just keep standing here in this big planetarium of Hebrews and go through every single chapter and take you through every story that he lifts up in front of you and show you how Jesus is better inside of this massive and immense world of the Bible.

I could take you to Moses. And you could remember all the stories about Moses and then see that Jesus was better than Moses. I could take you to Joshua, a Yeshua who couldn’t give them a complete rest. But there’s this better Jesus who’s going to give you a better rest and usher you into the rest of God. I could take you to and explain this weird dude, Melchizedek, who had no mother and no father and didn’t have any end. And what does that mean and what is all that about? And Jesus is in the order of Melchizedek.

And I could show you the Old Covenant and describe then how Jesus is better than that, and I could show you how he says over and over again, “Once for all.” He’s better than the sacrificial system because once for all he purchased our redemption by his blood. He is superior to that entire system.

I could show you that he is better than all the treasures of the world (Hebrews 11:26), and show you that that’s meant to encourage you and to strengthen you so that you don’t grow weary or fainthearted, that you lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees (Hebrews 12:3–13). I could show you that he’s given you a kingdom that cannot be shaken (Hebrews 12:28). I could show you in chapter that he is the one who is going to give you a better and lasting city (Hebrews 13:14).

A Beloved Means to a More Beloved End

I want to steal again from John. Do you remember how John, in the very first session, told us that we’re not supposed to look at pleasure itself in order to be able to enjoy it. And then he gave us some various pictures. And one of those was that he talked about sound and music, and how you’re supposed to just listen to music. That was the one that I was like, “Oh man, he’s making my point.” I listen to and enjoy music, and after having listened to the music, what am I supposed to do? If I’m thinking rightly, I’m supposed to thank God for the ears that allowed me to listen and enjoy the music. So what I want, and what this conference is about, is that I want you to love the Bible. I want you to love the Bible. I want you to talk about the Bible the way the Psalmist talks about the Bible.

But see, ultimately, I don’t want you to love the Bible. Who I want you to love is Jesus, and I want you to step through the door into this immense world that is Jesus and love him and marvel at him and stand in wonder and amazement of who he is and all he is. I want you to move beyond elementary principles and a little foundation into this massive world of who Jesus is, and to practice and use your mind and your imagination and all of your powers of discernment to get there.

And then what’s going to happen? When you get there, you’re going to look back and just say, “I’m so thankful for the door. I’m so thankful for this. I can’t get there without this. I can’t know him without this. I can’t see Jesus without the Bible.” At least not right now, right? There’s no other way to see him, but through words — words by the power of the Holy Spirit. Prayerfully read this book, and you’ll see Jesus. He’ll do it.