Plead for the Insight You Need

From the age of 6 to the age of 28, I was in formal, institutional education: twelve years of public school, four years of Christian college, three years of seminary, three years in graduate studies at a secular university in Germany. Then, after 22 years of nonstop education, I went straight to teaching at a Christian college. From a professional standpoint, you could say I had arrived. I had the highest degree in my field of New Testament studies, and I had a position as a professor in higher education. My life was defined by study. That’s what I did for a living: I studied, I thought, I wrote, and I taught.

And one of the great things about the academic life was that there was a great deal of time for unpressured reflection, thinking, study, and writing. My summers were free. And when I had taught my courses once, the preparation time after that was much less. This, I thought, was the ideal situation for a lifetime of insight. And that’s what we’re talking about in this message: “Insight: Word and Spirit in Study.”

Over those six years teaching biblical studies at the college level, I was also involved in my local church, Olivet Baptist. And little by little, God began to do something unexpected between the ages of 28 and 34. If I heard a weak sermon, I would think on the way home, “We’ve got to do better than that.” And if I heard a strong sermon, I would think on the way home, “I would love to do that.”

Then came the decisive evening of October 14, 1979, five years into those teaching days, between ten and midnight. Here’s an excerpt from my journal.

I am closer tonight to actually deciding to resign at Bethel and take a pastorate than I have ever been. . . . The urge is almost overwhelming. It takes this form: I am enthralled by the reality of God and the power of his word to create authentic people. . . .

But I am not wholly deluded: I know, really know, I would despair as a pastor. I would despair that my people are not where I want them to be. I would despair at ruptured study and writing goals. I would despair at barren administrative details. . . . I would lose the simplicity of task and routine in the college. My life and time would be much less my own. I would lose the serenity of undisturbed hours of study. . . . I would lose the quiet of the study and trade it for hours in the car on the way to the hospital and to homes. I would lose the uniformity of responsibility and be swamped by dozens of different tasks, many of which would no doubt be distasteful unless and until my palate changed. I would lose the collegial stimulation of fellow theologians in return for a draining ministry to the hungry. I would lose an almost total occupation with theological subject matter and inherit the press for programs and functions.

But is this any way to make a choice! Great God, what is faith if not trusting you for the life-transforming work of your Spirit through the ministry of the word. And oh would I learn to pray! I am such a babe at prayer. But of late it has felt so crucial to me. But then, what demands there would be to lay hold on the resources of God, “to serve in the strength which God supplies.”

Would I really lose the occasion for growth in insight? Would sermon preparation really be an abandonment of discovery of God in the word? It is a ridiculous thought. . . . But it would all have to be real, living, life-changing insight. All my energies would be on finding reality in the text, for only what is real — deeply, movingly real — can be fed to the really hungry and the really needy. . . . Oh no! To leave the lecture hall for the pulpit would not be to leave burgeoning theological insight for some sterile managerial slot. The demands of the pulpit on me (I speak not for others) on me would be the demands of God on my mind and heart to penetrate like never before to the heart of the word and to abound in understanding.

My last word is this. I cannot decide now. But I know which side I want to win — the pastorate.

And it did. In 2013 I completed 33 years of pastoring the same church, Bethlehem Baptist. And brothers, I can say to this day, there are no regrets. I never looked back once and said, “That was a mistake.”

God delights to open the eyes of shepherds whose heart cry is to open the eyes of their people to the glories of Christ.

Pastoral Pressures

The point of reading that excerpt from one of the pivotal moments of my life is this: The fear of sacrificing insight by moving from the more leisurely pace of academic study to the pressured life of pastoral preaching was misplaced. And the main reason, just as I thought, is that I was made desperate again and again, as never before in my life. I was made to feel over my head again and again because of demands that were put up upon me. I was thrown back as never before upon the Holy Spirit and prayer in order to find food for the flock and guidance for inscrutable problems. And the upshot of that Spirit-dependent desperation and prayer was not a loss of insight. Oh no. That desperation proved time and time again to be an occasion for supernatural breakthroughs in understanding biblical texts, and the ways of God, and the application of reality to the people.

And I think the reason for that is that God loves his people. He loves for them to get good food, rich food. He knows how to put his shepherds in the vice of affliction and squeeze out of us authentic, prayer-soaked, desperation-flavored insight — the unsearchable riches of Christ for the joy of his people. Listen to Paul, whose life illustrates this so clearly:

[He] comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. . . . If we are afflicted [we shepherds], it is for [the] comfort and salvation [of the sheep]. (2 Corinthians 1:4, 6)

There is no direct correlation between a life of leisured reflection and rich insight. But there is a correlation between a pressured, desperate, Spirit-dependent, prayer-soaked, hard-working preparation to feed God’s people and insight. God delights to open the eyes of shepherds whose heart cry is to open the eyes of their people to the glories of Christ. Psalm 119:71: “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.” There are things your people need to see that you will only see in the pressures and the hardships of the pastoral life.

I don’t mean to glorify affliction or pressure. I believe in days off and the Sabbath principle. I believe in vacations. I believe in sabbaticals. They have their place in the process of perseverance and discovery and insight. What I’m saying is this: In those other seasons — those pressured, desperate seasons — you need not be bereft of insight. Indeed, I would venture to say, most of what I have seen in the Bible and delivered in my preaching for the good of others — most of it has come not in seasons of leisure but in hours of pressured, often desperate, preparation. Deadline after deadline after deadline — an odd term, since deadlines produce so much life-giving food for God’s people.

So, let’s spend the rest of our time pondering what insight is and why it’s so important for pastors. What are the obstacles to getting insight? Why is the supernatural activity of the Holy Spirit and our conscious dependence on him so crucial in gaining insight? And what is the role of study or thinking in gaining insight?

What Is Insight?

I’m using the word insight to cover the whole spectrum from awareness to observation to understanding to discernment to wisdom — in other words, an increasing grasp of reality and its proper application to life. We could describe it this way: Insight connects objective reality out there with the human mind or heart in here. Insight is the bridge from truth or reality to the soul. And you can see immediately how massively essential this is for life in general (we can’t live without it) and specifically for Christian life.

“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32 NASB95). Another word for that knowing is the gaining of insight. Insight into truth is essential for freedom from sin and destruction. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6) — that is, lack of insight into the reality of God. People die without insight. “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence” (2 Peter 1:3 NASB). Insight into God is the channel by which divine power for godliness comes to the soul.

Not surprisingly, then, the Bible over and over says,

– “Get wisdom; get insight; do not forget, and do not turn away from the words of my mouth” (Proverbs 4:5).

– “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” (Proverbs 4:7).

– “Leave your simple ways, and live, and walk in the way of insight” (Proverbs 9:6).

For pastors, what complicates and glorifies our job is that the insight that we are pursuing for the sake of our people is mainly insight into God. In Ephesians 1:17 Paul prays that God “may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him.” I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves too much here, but to feel the force of this, we need to remember: That’s impossible — the knowledge of God is impossible — unless Jesus Christ breaks in to your study. Matthew 11:27: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” The insight we need, the insight we are pursuing in all our study, is a supernatural gift. And yet we’re told again and again: Get it. Seek it. Find it. You and your people die without it.

This means that in all of our study, in all of our pursuit of insight, we are studying to be amazed. Listen to how Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1 goes on: “that you may know [have insight into] . . . what are the riches of [the glory of his] inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Ephesians 1:18–19). In our study, the pursuit of insight means grasping the glory of divine riches and the greatness of divine power. We study to be amazed, or we’re not studying the way we ought. Plead for this.

Two chapters later, Paul says, “When you read this [namely, the book of Ephesians], you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ . . . the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:4–8). Our job is to search out the unsearchable, to know what surpasses knowledge. A few verses later, that’s the way he prays: “May [you] have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know [have insight into] the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18–19). Our people — and many of them don’t know this — are hungry for us to gain this impossible insight (the love of Christ), and feed it to them for their souls. They need for us to do this impossible, supernatural work.

Yes, they have the Holy Spirit. Yes, the more mature of them can see these things, sometimes even better than we can. But if that were God’s only way, or primary way, of giving insight to his flock, he would not have appointed shepherds and teachers in the body of Christ (Ephesians 4:11) and said to them, “If you love me, feed my sheep” (see John 21:15–17). God has designed the church so that pastors — shepherd-teachers, heralds — get insight into his reality, and are blown away by it, and stand in the pulpit and exult over it for the good of those people. That’s the plan, until Jesus comes.

Gaining insight is the work of the pastor to know the unsearchable greatness of God. Psalm 145:3: “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.” Our job is jaw-dropping. That’s why we cry out with the psalmist, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18). In our study, we are not pursuing boring facts. It’s sin to be bored by the Bible. And it’s wrong to bore our people because we have not seen wondrous things out of his book.

And the goal of all this pursuit of insight and the preaching of insight is that our people might worship God with all their heart and love their neighbor as themselves. In Philippians 1:9 Paul prays “that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment [insight!].” Only with God-shaped, biblically formed insight will our people be able to love as they ought.

And so it is with worship, because Jesus said in John 4:23, “The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.” God is not seeking worship without insight. You can’t worship truly if you have no insight into the true God. If we don’t help our people have insight into the wonderful realities of the Bible, they won’t worship as they ought, and they won’t love as they ought.

So, I conclude: Insight matters infinitely. Pursuing it, finding it, being amazed by it, and preaching it belong to the essence of your ministry.

Obstacles to Insight

But there are obstacles to gaining insight, massive obstacles — obstacles that require both supernatural and natural action to overcome them. I’ll mention three kinds of obstacles: Satan, sin, and natural weaknesses in reading and thinking.

Satan is a liar and a deceiver by his very nature (John 8:44; Revelation 12:9). He does his best to prevent insight into glorious things in the word of God. He does it to unbelievers. And he does it less successfully to believers. 2 Corinthians 4:4: “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” He doesn’t really care if they hear the gospel if he can prevent them from seeing the supernaturally breathtaking light of the glory of Christ in the gospel.

Once you are born again, you may say with great joy and confidence, “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). He will keep you (Romans 8:30; Jude 1:24–25). But his way of keeping you is by helping you “put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11). When Paul said, at the end of his life, “I have fought the good fight” (2 Timothy 4:7), he meant, “I have successfully resisted satanic deception all the way. True insight and my love for it were not corrupted.”

Satan’s dealings with Job and Satan’s dealings with Peter are still going on in the pastoral life. Jesus said to Peter, “Behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you” (Luke 22:31–32). And he is praying for us (Romans 8:34). You’re going to make it. But not without a battle every day. We must quench the fiery darts every day with the shield of faith, or he will turn our insight into lies and our souls into ashes (Ephesians 6:16).

And then there is the obstacle of sin. Listen to this terrible litany of descriptions the Bible gives of the condition of the human heart that makes spiritual insight impossible for unbelievers and difficult for believers. Apart from Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, our hearts are:

– foolish and slow (Luke 24:25),

– darkened (Ephesians 4:18),

– dead (Ephesians 2:5),

– futile in their thinking (Ephesians 4:17),

– dull (Matthew 13:15),

– hardened (Romans 11:25),

– debased (Romans 1:28),

– impure (Matthew 5:8, Acts 15:9),

– hostile to God (Colossians 1:21),

– blind (2 Corinthians 4:4),

– adulterous and wicked (Matthew 12:39).

From which Paul infers: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). The natural human heart cannot penetrate to true, spiritual insight.

When we are born again, all of these barriers to insight are decisively overcome. We have a new heart, and God is writing on it, by the pen of the Holy Spirit and the ink of his word, glorious insight (2 Corinthians 3:3). But O brothers, do not underestimate or overestimate the blinding effects of ongoing, indwelling sin in your life (Romans 7:17, 20). “Blessed are the pure heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). Every impurity — the anger, the greed, the lust — will diminish your insight into the unsearchable riches of Christ. “He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way. . . . The [secret counsel] of the Lord is for those who fear him” (Psalm 25:9, 14). “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart” (Psalm 24:3–4). If you want to spread a table of insight for the nourishment of your people, keep your heart and mind clean.

I’ll briefly mention the third kind of obstacle here because what they are will become clear in a moment when we focus on how to overcome them — namely, the natural weaknesses in reading and thinking.

Overcoming Satan and Sin

But before we turn there, let’s draw out a few things that have been implicit and I think obvious concerning how to overcome the obstacles of Satan and sin. In order to experience the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit conquering Satan and sin so that we can get insight into the unsearchable riches of Christ, we need to fill our minds with God’s word, especially his promises, and we need to embrace them as precious and trustworthy, and we need to cry out in prayer for the fullness of the Holy Spirit’s power in our study.

“Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). “Take . . . the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17). “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable . . . for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). God defeats the devil and overcomes sin by his word.

But the second thing is this: We must trust the word — embrace the promises as precious and trustworthy. What is the straight path to insight? “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6). God loves for his promises to be trusted. His eyes run through the whole world to find pastors who are trusting him to help them find glorious things for their people. But we must believe him when he says, “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you” (Psalm 32:8).

And third, the path to insight is the path of prayer. “If you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God” (Proverbs 2:3–5). “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him” (James 1:5).

Start your study with earnest prayer for God’s guidance and illumination and purity. Ask for the fullness of the Holy Spirit. “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). And as you move through the hours of your study, pause every few minutes just for a second and send up another desperate plea for light, for breakthroughs. “Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18).

The richest, deepest, most authoritative insights come from reading and thinking about the Bible.

Overcoming Natural Weaknesses

Let’s turn finally to the natural acts of reading and thinking. This is what we usually think of when we talk about study: reading and thinking. I said earlier that the natural weaknesses in reading and thinking are obstacles to spiritual insight. This is because God has connected the supernatural revelation of spiritual insight with the natural acts of reading and thinking. To the degree that you try to get spiritual insight disconnected from reading the Bible and thinking about what you read, to that degree your preaching will lose depth and authority. Our one infallible authority is the Bible. We may get insight by looking at God’s world, but its authority will come from an agreement with Scripture. The richest, deepest, most authoritative insights come from reading and thinking about the Bible.

First Samuel 3:21 says, “The Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.” Himself! How do you meet God in study? How do you know God? The Lord reveals himself by the word of the Lord. So, reading is a most expectant, spiritual, sacred act.

Paul says to the Ephesians, “When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ” (Ephesians 3:4). That’s an amazing statement. By reading, you can have insight into the mystery of Christ! Jesus expected that reading God’s word would lead people to true and wonderful insight concerning himself. Six times (that we know of) he said to the Jewish leaders, “Have you not read?” “Have you never read?” (Matthew 12:3, 5; 19:4; 21:16, 42; 22:31). Meaning: “My Father gave you a book. Reading it is for true insight into ultimate reality. What’s wrong with you?”

What is reading? The kind of reading that week after week, year after year, decade after decade provides fresh, life-giving insight to your flock — reading that becomes thinking. There is passive reading and there is active reading. Passive reading is when you pass your eyes over the words on the page and expect something to happen to you. It’s basically the way we take in entertainment. We watch or we listen, and we hope that something happens to us — a good feeling, a new fact.

But active reading is very different. Active reading is thinking. Paul says to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:7, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” There’s the beautiful combination of the natural and the supernatural in the act of study. You think. God gives understanding. Don’t expect God to give understanding if you’re not thinking. And don’t expect that thinking is all you need without the divine in-breaking of the Spirit to give understanding. So many people pull these apart. Don’t. He underlines how crucial thinking is in 1 Corinthians 14:20: “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature” (NASB95). “I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue” (1 Corinthians 14:19).

What is thinking? It is asking questions and trying to answer them with the truth at our disposal. It made a huge impact on me in seminary when Dr. Fuller (quoting John Dewey) said, “Nobody thinks until he has a problem.” And problems are simply unanswered questions. To go deeper and deeper into the reality revealed in biblical texts, we need to train ourselves to have problems — to be troubled. Train yourself in humbly having problems. That is, ask yourself questions about the text.

This is not an insult to the clarity of Holy Scripture. The problem is with us, not the Bible. Asking questions is an acknowledgment of how dense we are — how we see through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12), how dull and slow our hearts are (Luke 24:25), how little we know of life. We should not ask questions like Zechariah impugning the veracity of the angel (Luke 1:18–20). We ask questions like Mary: “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered her (Luke 1:34–37). We ask questions because we love God and want to know what he means. We ask questions because we want to be amazed. We ask questions because we want to feed our people what is true. We ask because we want them to worship in spirit and truth. We ask because we want them to love with discernment.

Rudyard Kipling said,

I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

When I finished teaching at Bethel in 1980, my students gave me a going-away present, a T-shirt, and on the back it said, “Asking questions is the key to understanding.” I felt like I had succeeded.

In John 16:30 the disciples say to Jesus, “Now we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question you.” That’s odd. (Do you see what I’m doing?) Why wouldn’t they say, “Now we know you know all things, and don’t need to ask anybody anything”? Why did they say, “We know that you know all things and do not need anyone to ask youany questions”? Because asking questions is not just how you learn. It’s how you help someone learn. So if you want to help yourself, learn to ask yourself questions. Your mind is active, thinking. And Jesus didn’t need to learn anything, and so he didn’t need anybody to help him by asking him any questions. But if you need to learn something, you need to ask yourself questions all the time. And you try to answer them before you ask a commentary or a teacher.

Seeing with a Pencil

Let me close with just a practical suggestion. The key that turns question-asking into insight and sermons is a half a sheet of paper and a pencil. You fold a piece of paper in half, and you put it on your desk, and you start reading your text. And as soon as you bump into a word or a phrase or a connection that puzzles you, put that question on the sheet. If you can think of possible, plausible answers, jot them down. As you’re jotting them down, more questions are going to come to your mind, and you put those down and some possible answers. And then you keep reading until this page is full of questions and possible answers and thoughts that come to your mind.

They say that Einstein could hold an idea in his mind for a week, and every day look at it like a diamond from dozens of different angles, holding them all in his mind at once and integrating each new idea into the other. Well, guess what: Not one of you is Einstein. I’m certainly not. We’re not going to be able to do that. That’s why you’ve got to have a piece of paper. Ideas tumble to your mind, and you’ve got to do something with them. You can’t hold them in your head longer than a minute or two until something else is crowding them out.

And so thinking becomes writing. I promise you, there are eyes in your pencil. When you write a question or attempt an answer, insight comes. Francis Bacon wrote an essay, “[Of Studies](http://www.esp.org/books/bacon/essays/contents/essay50.pdf).” He said, “Reading makes a full man; conference [conversation] a ready man; and writing an exact man.” Here’s my paraphrase: “Reading and talking without writing leaves you muddleheaded.”

So, focus on your text for as many hours as it takes, and as you focus, ask question after question, jotting them down with possible answers and new questions and more ideas, praying without ceasing that God will give you light. And there will emerge from those scribbles on that sheet (or multiple sheets) a way to put all the pieces together with glorious things that you have seen and how to apply them to your people.

Study is a glorious process. It is supernatural, and it is natural. “The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord” (Proverbs 21:31). It is carried out in the pressures and desperation of pastoral life. And again and again, he fulfills his promise: “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).

I close with an exhortation that sustained me for years, from the Lord Jesus:

Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his master has set over his household, to give them their food [of insight] at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. (Matthew 24:45–46)

Don’t grow weary. In due season we will reap, if we do not give up (Galatians 6:9).