Tag: understanding

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How Sin Cripples Our Ability to Understand Truth

Only God can restore our ability to understand spiritual truth

ability to understand

In the previous posts we began looking at why prayer is important for learning truth about God, his Scriptures, and all the great questions of life. Here is the fifth surprising reason to pray for understanding.

5. Sin Cripples Our Ability to Understand Truth.

What sin has done to the human mind could be compared to brain damage. Sin affects our ability to think, as a stroke affects the brain.

Ephesians 4:17–19 says, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.”

Notice the crippling and cascading effects of sin on every level of one’s ability to think, understand, and truly know truth.

We need God to overcome this cognitive impairment, and so we need to pray for his help in overcoming the mind-tangling effects of wrong beliefs and sin-engrained, mental strongholds that oppose the truth.

There is one final reason why prayer is an essential guide into truth, and we will explore that next week.

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The Natural Mind Cannot Understand Spiritual Truths

To understand spiritual truths we need more than diligent study

Understand Spiritual Truths

In the previous posts we began looking at why prayer is important for learning truth about God, his Scriptures, and all the great questions of life. Here is the third surprising reason to pray for understanding.

3. The natural mind cannot understand spiritual truths.

After several years of ministry with his 12 disciples at his side, Jesus posed a question to them: “Who do people say I am?”

The disciples answered that people thought he was John the Baptist restored to life, or Elijah or Jeremiah or another of the prophets of old.

Then Jesus focused the question on the 12: “But who do you say that I am?”

“Simon Peter replied, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’”

From our perspective, knowing the full story of Jesus, that might seem to have been an obvious answer. But Jesus did not think so. “And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.’”

Notice that Jesus did not credit Peter with prescience for figuring this out. He said the Father had “revealed” the truth to him. (Matthew 16:13–17, ESV)

1 Corinthians 2

That word revealed is important. The apostle Paul explains why we need God to reveal spiritual truths to us: “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).

Unaided by the Holy Spirit, you cannot adequately understand spiritual truths about God, his ways, his salvation, and his righteousness—understand them, that is, in the sense that you believe them and respond accordingly.

Therefore you should ask him for such understanding. “You do not have because you do not ask” (James 4:2).

Next week we look at the fourth reason why prayer is an essential guide into truth.

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How to Become Confident in Your Faith

In the parable of the soils, Jesus said the defining characteristic of the soil that is like the path, into which the seed cannot penetrate and take root, is that the person hears the word and does not understand it. We must understand the Word. We must understand the truth.

In this message we establish why increasing knowledge and understanding is not optional if we want to be immovable in the faith.

By Craig Brian Larson, delivered January 31, 2021, at Lake Shore Church