As I get older I find the need to use reading glasses. I'm thankful for their invention and think about people from long ago or in developing countries that did not or do not have access to something I have several pairs of. My reading glasses allow me to see clearly what I am reading.
1 Corinthians 2:14 tells us this about God's truth,
The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
I was pondering the thought that perhaps the Holy Spirit is like my reading glasses when it comes to the Truth of God found in Scripture. He allows me to see the Truth clearly. Without my "Holy Spirit lens" I cannot see clearly and understand. But the analogy does not hold up. It implies that the Holy Spirit restores my ability to see clearly but the fact is, I needed more than glasses, I needed complete eye transplants! My eyes were spiritually blind, useless because they resided in a corpse. Glasses can only restore vision; they can't restore what was never there.
Ephesians 2 tells us this truth:
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
The Holy Spirit did and does give me eyes to see His Truth, all made possible because He raised me from spiritual death to Spiritual Life. I was stone cold dead like Lazarus in the tomb. God, by grace and according to His good pleasure, chose to give me the gift of faith, complete with new eyes that can now truly see, to go with my new heart of flesh that replaced my dead heart of stone so that like Peter I could confess about Jesus,
"You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. Mathew 16 How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! 1 John 3:1
