“The only way to understand the Scriptures is…”

Love this quote from Oswald Chambers’ excellent book, Our Ultimate Refuge: Job and the Problem of Suffering (location 1547, Kindle ed.).

There is always a tendency to produce an absolute authority; we accept the authority of the church, or of the Bible, or of a creed, and often refuse to do any more thinking on the matter; and in so doing we ignore the essential nature of Christianity which is based on a personal relationship to Jesus Christ, and works on the basis of our responsibility. On the ground of the redemption I am saved and God puts His Holy Spirit into me, then He expects me to react on the basis of that relationship. I can evade it by dumping my responsibility on to a church, or a book or a creed, forgetting what Jesus said—“Search the scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life; and they are they which testify of me; and ye will not come to me, that ye might have life” (John 5:39–40). The only way to understand the Scriptures is not to accept them blindly, but to read them in the light of a personal relationship to Jesus Christ.