Charles Spurgeon on How to Read the BibleSýnishorn

It is not the letter that saves the soul; the letter kills in many senses, and never can it give life. If you harp on the letter alone, you may be tempted to use it as a weapon against the truth, as the Pharisees did of old, and your knowledge of the letter may breed pride in you to your destruction. It is the spirit, the real inner meaning that is sucked into the soul, by which we are blessed and sanctified. We become saturated with the Word of God, like Gideon’s fleece, which was wet with the dew of heaven. This can only come to pass by our receiving it into our minds and hearts, accepting it as God’s truth, and so far understanding it as to delight in it. We must understand it, then, or else we have not read it aright.

Certainly, the benefit of reading must come to the soul by the way of the understanding. When the high priest went into the holy place, he always lit the golden candlestick before he kindled the incense upon the brazen altar, as if to show that the mind must have illumination before the affections can properly rise towards their divine object. There must be knowledge of God before there can be love to God. There must be a knowledge of divine things, as they are revealed, before there can be an enjoyment of them. We must try to make out, as far as our finite mind can grasp it, what God means by this and what He means by that; otherwise, we may kiss the book and have no love to its contents, we may reverence the letter and yet really have no devotion toward the Lord who speaks to us in these words. Beloved, you will never get comfort to your soul out of what you do not understand, nor find guidance for your life out of what you do not comprehend, nor can any practical bearing upon your character come out of what you do not understand.

Now, if we are thus to understand what we read or otherwise we read in vain, this shows us that when we come to the study of Holy Scripture, we should try to have our mind well awake to it. We are not always fit, it seems to me, to read the Bible. At times it would be well for us to stop before we open the volume and “take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5). You have just come in from careful thought and anxiety about your worldly business, and you cannot immediately take that Book and enter into its heavenly mysteries. As you ask a blessing over your meat before you fall to, so it would be a good rule for you to ask a blessing on the Word before you partake of its heavenly food. Pray the Lord to strengthen your eyes before you dare to look into the eternal light of Scripture. As the priests washed their feet at the laver before they went to their holy work, so it were well to wash the soul’s eyes with which you look upon God’s Word, to wash even the fingers—the mental fingers with which you will turn from page to page—that with a holy book you may deal after a holy fashion.

Say to your soul: “Come, soul, wake up: you are not now about to read the newspaper; you are not now perusing the pages of a human poet to be dazzled by his flashing poetry; you are coming very near to God, who sits in the Word like a crowned monarch in his halls. Wake up, my glory; wake up, all that is within me. Though just now I may not be praising and glorifying God, I am about to consider that which should lead me so to do, and therefore it is an act of devotion. So be on the stir, my soul. Be on the stir, and bow not sleepily before the awful throne of the Eternal.”