Part Five - The Holy Spirit Enables Me

After I left my job, a friend in our new town invited me to attend a Bible study she led. I didn’t want to show up unprepared, so I read Women in the Word by Jen Wilkin. In that book, she made a comparison between using GPS instead of learning a city’s roads, to using commentaries instead of wrestling with passages in the Bible. While we can use a GPS, sometimes it takes us on really inefficient routes, but we don’t know that unless we turn it off and explore for ourself. The same can be said about following a commentary instead of trusting the Holy Spirit to reveal truth as I study. I decided that I would put away my commentaries that fall and attempt this Bible study without them.

The books, or parts of books, included in our study that year were: 1 & 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations. It wasn’t easy, but I only used a commentary twice, and I learned that the Holy Spirit is incredible at revealing truth when you study with His help. Each week He revealed nuggets to me, and I began to better understand these books I had skim-read years before.

God grew in me a new appreciation for His Word. I began to study more, read more, and every truth about God that the Holy Spirit revealed strengthened my faith. I began to see how big, how strong, how amazing, how loving, and how powerful God really is! It was through this study that God revealed the work He had been doing since He destroyed my identity in that car accident.

Read Part 6 to see what He revealed.