My own experience is that the Bible is dull when I am dull. When I am really alive, and set in upon the text with a tidal pressure of living affinities, it opens, it multiplies discoveries, and reveals depths even faster than I can note them. The worldly spirit shuts the Bible; the Spirit of God makes it a fire, flaming out all meanings and glorious truths.
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P. 39.Horace Bushnell
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The main condition is that the spiritual ear should be open to overhear and patiently take in, and the will ready to obey that testimony which, I believe, God bears in every human heart, however dull, to those great truths which the Bible reveals. This, and not logic, is the way to grow in religious knowledge, to know that the truths of religion are not shadows, but deep realities.
John Campbell Shairp
There have been a number of instances in the Bible where the Spirit of God has acted in a birth. For instance, in the story of Abraham and Sarah, Sarah was too old and Abraham was also old. But the Bible says God quickened the womb of Sarah so that she could bear a son. In the same way, the Holy Spirit worked with Mary. It was not done in the sense of producing a child from the union of God with man, but in the sense of God participating in the event. Jesus was born of a father and a mother, just as anyone else is, but in his case the Spirit of God was working also.
Sun Myung Moon
We may read many truths in the Bible, but we cannot know them savingly, till God by his Spirit shines upon our soul.
Thomas Watson
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.
C. S. Lewis
Let everyone test himself. With regard to what he has experienced, let him be true to himself, but let no one forget that blessedness of the spirit and suffering of the spirit are not something external of which one can honestly and truly say: The circumstances of my life did not provide me the opportunity to experience this. In the world of the spirit, there is neither sport nor spook; there luck and chance do not make one person a king, another a beggar, one person as beautiful as an Oriental queen, another more wretched than Lazarus. In the world of the spirit, the only one who is shut out is the one who shuts himself out; in the world of the spirit, all are invited and therefore what is said about it can be said safely and undauntedly; if it pertains to one single individual it pertains to all. Why, then, this curiosity about what God has given every human being the opportunity to experience, indeed, has been made so available that it even may be said: He must have understood it.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
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