To serve God, we must know his heart, and we cannot truly know his heart unless we surrender to him without reservation (Mt 6:24). We certainly cannot dictate terms—we can only offer ourselves as living sacrifices and follow where he leads us, which raises the question of how he leads us. This too is a matter of surrender: we can be mastered by the Word but we cannot be its master. We must instead be transformed by the renewal of our minds by the agency of the Word as wielded by the Spirit who resurrected Jesus from the dead (Rm 12:1-2; Hb 4:12).
This requires surrendering to the Word without any preconditions and trusting the Spirit to gradually make sense of what we read (Is 50:10-11). Scripture will slowly unfold according to its own internal logic, and the proof will be that everything will eventually come together. We must "play the long game," which in practice means not treating scripture like a fortune cookie or Ouija board but like language learned a by child.
In the meantime, we have pastors and commentaries to guide us, but these are often of little help as pastors tend to deal in general platitudes and commentaries usually pass over strange passages without meaningful comment—passages that are often the "check sum" that validates the meaning of the passage. Fortunately, the basic gist of any extended argument is usually discernible anyway if we bear in mind that scripture is highly repetitious; each argument is elaborated in a series of variations whose structure rhymes.
For example, 1 Peter opens with a sweeping declaration of our exalted status in Christ and our corresponding obligation to live accordingly. Peter drives home the point of dying to Self and living for Christ with an interwoven series of striking images: (a) Christ's expiation of Sin and his subjugation of the Unclean Spirits, (b) the Spirit hovering above the waters of Creation and the Ark floating on the waters of the Flood (c) Baptism (i.e. ritual immersion signifying a circumcision of the heart), and the Death, Resurrection, and Glorification of Christ whose earthly body we now comprise as a holy priesthood (1 Pt 3:4-5).
As we better understand the world from the perspective of Jesus and embed the Word in our minds, we increasingly discern and desire that which God ordains as Good (Rm 12:1-2). We thus gradually progress from blind trust to trust based on knowledge and understanding, which is half of our course of sanctification in this life—the other half being an increase in empathy through suffering.
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