[We received] the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words…Those who live in the Spirit are able to carefully evaluate all things, and they are subject to the scrutiny of no one but God. 1 Corinthians 2:12-15

I’ve needed to drop dairy from my diet for the past 18 months and along with eggs which I’m allergic to, and it’s meant a big change in how I eat. On the plus side, I feel a lot better, on the down side, eating outside the home is a bit of a challenge. But I found a way to do it. I just go to the vegan menu / dishes at gatherings. And so I’ve met a lot of vegans in the process (even though I am not a vegan).

One of the things I have to admire about the vegans I meet is their passion. They want to get away from processed food and eat the raw and real, the organic, non-GMO, etc.. And just like in the natural so many people are sort of wanting to get away from the unprocessed and have the raw and the organic… I see the same thing happening spiritually in the Body of Christ. 

And that’s one of the reasons we’ve been looking at the Holy Spirit these past few weeks in our meditations. More and more I’m seeing a spiritual hunger that for spiritual food that is real and unprocessed. They want to read the Bible with raw, organic lenses that aren’t processed or filtered with someone else’s interpretation or experience.

The people of God are hungry… not for the processed, the filtered, the added-to, the watered-down version of the Christian faith. They want the organic, they want the non-GMO truth, they want to view the Word of God, not with the lenses of human doctrine but they want to just read it as it is.

And this hunger is popping up all over—which I why I suspect the Holy Spirit is behind it. And when we approach reading the Bible that way it’s like a new book. It’s like the same scripture passages become so new and so satisfying. Things that we may have read for years suddenly come alive and suddenly we grasp the truth on a whole new plane. The Spirit is giving us a new hunger for God’s word, and interpreting it to our experiences in hands-on ways.

There is a massive amount of Bible teaching out there and there are a lot of good teachers, and there are OK teachers, teachers who are a bit off on their own doctrinal tangent, teachers that ignore passages of the Word that are at odds with their traditional biblical view—and many of them don’t even realize they’re doing it. They are just so caught up in their own particular lens as they come to the Word that they don’t even notice when they do this. And that’s not even getting into the teachers that twist the Word to say whatever builds up their hobby-horse doctrines.

But without the lens the Holy Spirit gives us, there are a lot of clever teachers around that can come and they can sound really good, but as Proverbs tells us, “one argument sounds really good until you hear the other side”. With the Spirit driving the interpretation, we can listen to some really persuasive clever arguments and then go and look up the word of God and say, “Is this for me? Is this what it really says? Spirit, please direct my understanding.”